From Front to Back: Ensure Senior Devs not Only Charm but also Build

A universal maxim that stretches across time and cultures is that appearances can be deceiving. In one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Lady Macbeth counsels the Scottish General: “Bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under ’t.”

Now let’s use a milder metaphor, and tame the boiling blood of vengeance: walk into the downtown area of almost any megalopolis and those century-old structures of neoclassical architecture capture your attention. The detail and artistry is inspiring, and the style is impeccable. Ah… it’s only when you open the door and walk inside do you see the aged pipes, worn out walls and flawed flooring.

And this ties to a common technique among sales teams to capture attention and seal deals. And when you’re finding the ideal dev and strategy partner to build your Salesforce Commerce Cloud site, it is a technique that you want to be aware of.

During the meet and greet period, many companies use their best developers during the sales process in a bid to charm you and your team. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable, and is an ideal opportunity to get to know them — so long as they are part of the development operations. Because in too many situations like this, when agreements are reached and the work begins, their top developers disappear onto other projects and they get lesser experienced, cheaper developers to carry out your project.

This strategy certainly transcends software development and is endemic across the entire business landscape and beyond. It is probably most well known in law firms who will use senior partners to charm potential clients, only for them to then hire recent graduates to carry much of the actual work.

Yet it’s not an inevitability and is definitely something that you can clarify. One way to minimize this risk is to speak with them, and get them to clarify to you which team members are going to be working on your Salesforce installation.

You can go beyond this and get greater reassurance by having them provide you with firm commitments as to the individuals who will be involved as well as the time commitments, and fix them into the contract. This will enable you to nail down the exact roles of all the senior developers.

This way you’ll be able to keep those Macbethesque clients at bay, and build transparent agreements between you and your Salesforce partners.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) agencies. Contact us to see how we can work together.