Notes from a Client Visit: Why the Basics Still Win

Last week I spent a few days with the South African sales team of Esse Skincare. The reason for the visit was to showcase the realignment of their Salesforce system, work I've been doing over recent months alongside their Director of Sales, and to gather feedback before we go live.

I came away with four reflections. None of them are revolutionary. But the longer I do this work, the more convinced I am that the unrevolutionary things are the ones worth repeating.

In-person still matters

Almost all of my work happens online. It's efficient, it's flexible, and for a consultant working across countries it's often the only practical option. I'm not complaining about it.

But there is something a video call cannot reproduce, and that is the energy of a genuinely engaged team in the same room. You feel it. Ideas move faster. People interrupt each other in the good way. Someone makes a point and three others lean in. After a long stretch of working almost entirely through a screen, a few days of that was a real joy, and a useful reminder that the relationship is part of the work, not a distraction from it.

It is always about the user

We were fortunate going into this. Before the project kicked off, we had gathered solid input from the team, so we weren't designing in the dark. But there is a difference between input collected through a survey or a kickoff call and what happens when you put six highly engaged users in a room and let them react to something real.

They bounced ideas off each other. They spotted things none of us had. They disagreed productively. And the incremental changes that came out of that session, small adjustments we'll make before go-live, will do more for the long-term usability and value of the system than any amount of clever configuration done in isolation.

This is the part of the job I care about most. A Salesforce system is not the architecture diagram or the technical design document. It is the experience of the person who has to use it on a Tuesday afternoon, between two other tasks. If that person's experience is good, the system works. If it isn't, nothing else you have built really matters.

Listening early pays off later

The most significant part of this realignment goes back to a meeting in March. When we sat down at the start of the engagement, we listened, and what we heard shifted the centre of gravity of the whole project.

The major change has been to focus the system on the therapists working in the spas, rather than on the spas as locations. It sounds like a small distinction. It isn't.

A spa is a building. A therapist is a person, someone who builds skill, moves between locations over the course of a career, and develops a relationship with the products they trust and recommend. By designing the system around those people rather than around the venues, the goal is to build closer, longer relationships throughout a therapist's career. That tends to increase genuine brand loyalty, and over time it can grow the footprint of places where the products are used, because people carry their preferences with them.

That insight didn't come from technology. It came from listening properly at the start, before a single field was configured. The technology's job was simply to not get in the way of it.

In the age of AI, the simple things still win

It is impossible to work in this industry right now without AI being part of every conversation. I am genuinely interested in it, and I think it will matter a great deal. But this visit was a healthy reminder that the basics have not been repealed.

Allowing a user to capture the right information, at the right time, with as few clicks as possible, that is not a glamorous problem. It will not trend. But it is the foundation everything else sits on. Until those fundamentals are locked in and genuinely adopted by the people doing the work, the AI conversation can wait.

Get the basics right first. They are what the clever things will eventually stand on.

Now to go-live

So that is where we are. A few small refinements, then go-live, then the part that never really ends: monitor, adjust, improve.

It is a genuine privilege to work with clients who care this much about getting it right for their people. Last week reinforced something I already believed, that good systems are built with users, not just for them, and that the simple disciplines are usually the ones that decide whether a project succeeds.

Now for the fun part.