How to Find Your Next Financial Services Cloud Opportunity According to These Salesforce Experts
Ten years ago, Salesforce entered the financial services space, investing a significant amount of time talking to customers to understand how they utilize technology to manage their customer relationships. It soon became apparent traditional CRMs are designed to support the business-to-business models rather than a business-to-consumer, which is vastly a default in financial services.
To help customers manage those intricate relationships, Salesforce created a single solution, Financial Services Cloud, to cater to all the different verticals in the industry. Starting with Wealth Management, the solution was then scaled into Retail Banking, Business and Commercial Banking, and Insurance.
Since the launch and with multiple product releases later, Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is generating huge interest in the customer ecosystem — and with that, demand for consulting partner services and complementary product extensions.
To help you start tapping into the immense opportunity available within this space, I asked two Salesforce experts to share their views on the key success ingredients needed to develop successful financial service consulting offerings, including building skills to spotting customer opportunities.
Meet Our Experts
Before joining Salesforce, Yogs worked at MetLife Europe for 10+ years, managing a team responsible for the provision of Business Intelligence & Management solutions across three business lines — Wealth Management, Employee Benefits, Individual Protection.
Garth worked as a solution architect in the UK health insurance industry for nearly 10 years before coming to Salesforce.
What should Salesforce partners consider in order to build a successful FSC practice?
Yogs Gajjar: The starting point is having resources with a good knowledge of FSC product capabilities.
Secondly, building a portfolio of successful FSC customer implementations, or having created your own assets to complement FSC. Customers need to know that consultants they partner with are credible and can act as a trusted advisor to help solve their business challenges.
And lastly, being open, transparent, and working collaboratively with customer and Salesforce teams. We stand a better chance of success with the customer if we work as a team!
Garth James: Technical and analytical skills are a must! Of course, these tend to form a foundation of typical consulting partner practice, but I feel it’s important to call it out so that we can get it off the table: you need to know how to do Salesforce stuff!
On the technical side:
- Profiles, permission sets, and roles. Everyone in the Salesforce world knows about these, but familiarity breeds contempt. So make sure your teams are always up to date on release changes!
- Security (Surprise!). Know SSO, and SAML and OAuth.
- Get to know the Shield products — especially the Event Monitoring and all its various idiosyncrasies.
- Environment management: Financial institutions have lumbering and complex estates that won’t keep up with Salesforce sandbox approaches. Don’t fall into the trap of using unnecessarily large sandboxes — you can get a lot of test data into 200MB!
On the analytical side:
- Strong analysis and tactful leadership skills are a must! Business analysts need to lead the customer to understand their business cases and how their requirements fulfil the business case. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE this effort! Your expertise is required to help the client actually identify a true minimum viable product and to keep the work on track so that stakeholders don’t accidentally dilute their business case.
How can Salesforce partners start identifying if FSC is the right fit for customers?
GJ: This actually goes back to the analytical skills discussed in the first question: very simply, do the functional capabilities of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud match the requirements? I’d expect they should because it’s obviously been designed for them, but, as with all things, can the product meet the requirements? Some specific things to think about:
- Does the FSC Data Model fit? Remember, storing things in the Salesforce data model enables all of the value enabling low-code options like Lightning Flow and Validation Rules. If that data is surfaced in Salesforce but stored elsewhere, we’re into custom code and integration territory.
- Ultimately, it’s about the return on investment. We can custom build a lot of functionality, but FSC was built to kick-start those capabilities quickly and efficiently, meaning we should be able to see a faster return on the investment, even if the initial cost may be higher. Being able to navigate business costs and time to value can really make FSC compelling.
YG: If your customer is in the financial services sector, then I would start with FSC by default. Once you’ve done your discovery with the customer, you then start to assess exactly what they need and if FSC still qualifies as the best solution. Remember, even if your customers may be asking for just Sales or Service Cloud now, it’s important to help them understand what is the right solution for the long term.
“I think my customer would benefit from FSC implementation — what should I do next?”
YG: CUSTOMER SUCCESS! Start showing your customer the benefits of FSC and provide examples of customers who are already using FSC and how they overcame the challenges they were facing. Educate them on the features of FSC, demo the product, and show them how it works. Validate that FSC is a good fit via a detailed discovery and ensure that FSC is mapped into your delivery methodology.
GJ: Analysis, Analysis, Analysis! Not a big-up-front analysis with 6,000-line Excel requirement catalogues — meaningful business process analysis tested against both the business case and an out of the box FSC org to see what the gaps may be.
Whilst we’re talking about contracts — start as you mean to continue! Once you’re running a project, do not fall into the trap of selling fixed outcome agile. I realise the contracting is hard, but I think it is better to sell a short fixed time and scope engagement that just focuses on the analysis deliverables with the intent of tendering for the ‘implementation’ of the analysis phase, than to be drawn into a massive deliverable.
Want to start finding those new and exciting Financial Services Cloud opportunities?
I hope some of the points shared by our experts have given you food for thought on building out your practice. Whether you are a partner that is new to the financial services space or a seasoned veteran, you should join our upcoming sessions to hear more about creating even greater value for your customers with Financial Service Cloud.
