A Series A startup I worked with had a problem that felt straightforward: they needed a better way to manage customer onboarding workflows. Their customers were signing contracts through DocuSign, then getting added to their platform through a manual process that took a day or two. It was slow. It created bad first impressions. It was holding back growth. The…
There’s a moment in almost every startup’s growth that feels inevitable: somebody on the founding team takes a product demo of Salesforce, sees the colorful pipeline visualization, watches a sales rep close a deal in the system, and announces: “We need this.” Usually it’s the VP of Sales or a founder who just hired their first three reps. Usually it…
There’s a moment in every startup’s growth that feels like it snaps overnight. You go from twelve people who all know what the other eleven are doing to thirty people, and suddenly nobody knows what’s happening. You’re still shipping. Revenue is still growing. But somewhere between the daily stand-ups and the Slack threads, the collective knowledge that used to live…
Every few years, a shift comes along in the Salesforce ecosystem that makes you rewrite how you think about implementation. Lightning did it. Flow Builder did it. Data Cloud did it. And now Agentforce is doing it again — except this time, the shift isn’t really about a new interface or a new automation tool. It’s about handing a piece…
A few years back, I sat in a requirements session with the administrative staff of a mid-sized private school, and about forty minutes in, the office manager pulled up her screen to show me how she tracked tuition payment plans. It was a spreadsheet with eleven tabs. One tab per grade level, colored cells for who’d paid, a separate tab…
Disclaimer: Client scenarios described in this article are illustrative composites drawn from common patterns seen across socio-economic and business analysis work, not references to any specific identifiable client or engagement. Over the past couple of years, our team has fielded a version of the same request more times than I can count: an organization — sometimes a government agency, sometimes…
I’ll say upfront that I’m not a policy analyst by training. My background is business analysis — fifteen years of translating messy organizational reality into requirements, options, and recommendations that stakeholders can actually act on, much of it inside Salesforce implementations. But over the years I’ve worked alongside enough policy teams, in both corporate and public-sector-adjacent contexts, to notice something…
I’ve sat in a lot of CPQ kickoff meetings, and there’s a particular kind of confidence in the room during the first one that I’ve learned not to trust. Everyone’s aligned. Sales wants faster quotes. Finance wants pricing accuracy. Leadership wants a shorter deal cycle. The project charter reads like a case study before a single product rule has been…
Every few months I get pulled into a conversation that starts the same way. A company has outgrown whatever they were using to handle customer issues — maybe it was a shared inbox, maybe it was a homegrown ticketing tool one of their engineers built over a long weekend three years ago — and someone in leadership has decided it’s…
There’s a moment in almost every Salesforce project I’ve worked on where everyone relaxes a little too early. Go-live happens, the dashboards look clean, leadership sends the “great job, team” email, and the project is quietly filed under “done.” I’ve learned to distrust that moment. In my experience, the real test of a Salesforce implementation doesn’t happen in the war…