Partnering to Help More Clients
A little less than two years ago, Kenway was involved in a conversation with one of our clients regarding a large-scale CRM (Customer Relationship Management) implementation; in this case, Salesforce was the tool chosen to be implemented. Kenway was asked if we had specific experience with the Salesforce product and if we could point to any specific project experience. Although Kenway has extensive CRM expertise, our Salesforce.com, SFDC, platform knowledge (i.e. Sales Cloud, Force.com platform, Lightning Components, AppExchange integrations, etc.) is less extensive. If Kenway had expert-level Salesforce acumen, we would have been able to take that conversation to the next level and helped our client even more.
For those unfamiliar, Salesforce is a leading Customer Relationship Management cloud based software service. Salesforce offers their clients a plethora of sales, service and marketing applications to leverage in their attempts to connect with their customers in innovative ways. In addition to the many cloud platforms that come out of the box in Salesforce, the platform has its own application exchange where you can find a myriad third-party apps to integrate into your instance, or find implementation experts to help bridge gaps.
Kenway decided that by becoming an expert/partner in all things Salesforce, the breadth of clients and prospects Kenway could potentially help would grow exponentially. In alignment with Kenway’s vision (i.e. Kenway 20/20), we believed that a partnership with Salesforce would allow our consultants to learn new skills, resulting in Kenway having the opportunity to help more companies as they go through enterprise-wide implementations of various Salesforce.com clouds. The partnership would allow for more intentional conversations around various CRM/ERP solutions/cloud offerings, while simultaneously providing Kenway with another tool to refer to current clients when they are experiencing problems in that arena. This knowledge would allow Kenway to offer prospects and clients a combination of strategic vision, deep technical skills and expertise specific to a customer’s business as it relates to the Salesforce platform.
After proving out the use case for Kenway to become involved in a Salesforce partnership and working through our internal Partner Governance process, Kenway Consultants began building the skills necessary to satisfy the SFDC Partner Requirements. Kenway leveraged current state CRM expertise and applied that to the newly learned SFDC specific skills in efforts to pass certification exams. This hard work and preparation resulted in Administrative, Sales Cloud and Platform Developer Certifications, and a newly instantiated partnership with an industry leader in the CRM space.
Inspired by the hyperloop concept, our client is developing truly 21st century technology to bring fast, safe, low cost and clean transportation to the world. Our client’s integrated infrastructure and vehicle products address many urgent transportation needs and will also create entirely new opportunities for clean transportation innovation. In order to more efficiently bring these innovations to the world, our client was seeking help to better understand the options and recommendations for implementing a Salesforce instance in the cloud. Leveraging Kenway’s Cloud Planning Services offering and newly minted Salesforce expertise, we were able to facilitate a road mapping exercise to align their vision with Salesforce Sales Cloud capabilities. Kenway’s delivery and execution has since resulted in helping our client to migrate their SFDC instance from Classic to Lightning and to optimize and automate newly defined business processes. Kenway continues to work with this client to see that their current and futures state requirements are met from a Salesforce perspective. To talk CRM or learn more about how Salesforce can optimize your business, reach out to us at info@kenwayconsulting.com.