Widen the Circle: Interview the Clients of your Next Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dev Team

Socializing is well known for boosting the benefits of both physical and mental health. From extending life expectancy to lowering the risk of dementia, taking the time to lengthen and extend the conversation can really lead to bigger benefits.

Let’s take this insight and drop it into the ecommerce landscape. And now let’s zoom in to the dealings of finding a business partner. Let’s say that you’re a top-class company in need of a fully-serviced Salesforce Commerce Cloud makeover applied to your website. So you begin speaking to a few clients and, later into the conversation, they elaborate on the impressive list of former clients of theirs.

This is all well and good; collaborating with first-rate clients ought to be celebrated and shared, but… well, you’re not going to see the big picture by only being exposed to the surface level of their work.

Plenty of companies are willing to wax lyrical but rarely are they inclined to introduce you to their big-name clients. This is because, in the stone cold world of reality, work is much uglier in practice, when you zoom in and take a closer look at things. Issues emerge — because that’s what happens with even the simplest of tasks — and there are always bumps along the road to progress. (A rollercoaster perhaps for those projects with serious swings in fortune.)

Of course, no potential client will be willingly open about the lower points of their work. Yet a good company, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud strategy and development team in our case, will have a few former clients with which the overall experience was great. And it is these that a client can introduce you to, in order for you to widen the area of interviews from clients to the clients of clients. This is going to build a broader and better picture of the tech team and help you to undertake a better evaluation.

If you reach this stage and they are unable or unwilling to source a former client who you can speak with, then consider this — in the parlance of soccer — a clumsy foul and worthy of a yellow card, whether it was intentional or not. It is not automatically grounds for a red card because there may be good reasons for this. Perhaps they have non-disclosure agreements with past clients, or are a very young tech team looking to burst on the scene and lack a big name client. If they can’t provide you with a contact, let them explain to you why they can’t.

But if they have been doing the rounds for a good few years, then they should certainly have a strong list of successful clientes they are able to pass over to you so that you can talk with them.

A true skeptic may want to set a high bar: only recognize the past success of a potential tech team when you are able to go directly to the source, their former clientes, and hear it from themselves.PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.