What If You Have a Shoddy Foundation?
How often do companies actually have a strong foundation? Focusing on the Salesforce platform, the average Salesforce org has 14 out-of-date packages. In the typical Salesforce org, over a third of the Apex code contains security issues. It gets worse! Who has destructive access to Salesforce data? In the average org, 44 users have that level of access. That's just the tip of the iceberg.* Some of these Salesforce instances are owned by the biggest names in their industry with many Salesforce Architects on staff. Don't go blaming the Architects. Most of the time, they're the only folks ringing the alarm bells. But, without quantitative diagnostics and a clear remediation plan - and with innumerable responsibilities demanding their attention - the foundation continues to crumble. If the situation is this dire at major enterprises, what do you think the foundation looks like for Salesforce instances in the midmarket space?
How many
people have
destructive
access
to your data?
At Tenger Ways, we think of ourselves as the "anti-consulting firm" because we truly focus on doing what's best for the customer. Before we started Tenger, I had many experiences with consulting firms, both as the customer and the provider. Almost always, the firm focused on getting more money out of the client…even if they claimed otherwise. Yet, here I am, claiming otherwise. So, yes, we want to win more business and earn more money, but we want to do it by providing real value to our clients, even if that means we've worked ourselves out of a job. We view ourselves as the "anti-consulting firm" because we stay true to our values.
I started writing this blog because we're introducing a new offering, Tenger Fitness, which is all about helping our customers "achieve what you want to do next." And, achieving what's next typically means building on what's already there. That's what made me think about Tenger Ways and our values, which is the foundation of our company. Those values inform everything we do - the frameworks we've created, the methodologies within those frameworks, and, most importantly, the way we delight our team members and our customers.
Vectors of Analysis
Security
User Experience & Efficiency
Platform Architecture
Technical Debt
Development Effectiveness
Risks, Issues, & Optimizations
We work with many companies who want to implement Salesforce CPQ or add Gainsight for customer success or update the billing workflows in NetSuite or integrate identity management with UKG. The list is endless, but it almost always assumes that the new capabilities can be built on what's already there. The client assumes that they have a strong foundation. But, how often is that actually the case?
We're rolling out Tenger Fitness starting with the Salesforce platform. It's typically a two-week effort that helps an organization truly understand if they have a strong foundation. To achieve this, we've partnered with worldclass intelligence and diagnostic platforms, including Hubbl Diagnostics and Elements.cloud. And, most importantly, we've brought on worldclass talent led by Sandi Nuss Zellner.
Tenger Fitness is way more than a health check. It's an inexpensive, in-depth analysis of an enterprise platform. It benchmarks a customer's instance of that platform with similar instances. It measures the maturity of the customer's instance. It identifies security flaws, obstacles to adoption and efficiency, development effectiveness, and other risks, issues, and opportunities for optimization. It gives real insights that are meaningful, practical, and specific - and not something that our clients can easily discover on their own even if they have a platform specialist on staff.
Sandi is a five-time Salesforce MVP with 20 certifications and over 1,400 Trailhead Badges. Moreover, the standards for a Salesforce Well-Architected Framework are a key component of Tenger Fitness, and Sandi is a Salesforce Well-Architected Framework Ambassador. In short, she knows what a good Salesforce foundation looks like. She's helped us build a methodology that answers key questions in a standardized, practical, and repeatable way. The end result is that every customer will have deep intelligence into their Salesforce environment combined with meaningful, tactical, granular recommendations that identify near-term and "low-hanging fruit" improvements and presents them in a prioritized roadmap.
Tenger Ways' values start and end with bringing joy back into the workplace. We endeavor to delight our team members and our customers. We expect every Tenger Fitness to be enjoyable for our team members because the underlying methodology is easy to follow, engaging, and makes a real difference. We expect every Tenger Fitness to be enjoyable for our customers because it gives them clarity. It provides them with an actionable path forward so that they know exactly where they have a healthy foundation and where things are a bit shoddy, where they need to invest, and what challenges require their attention first.
Want to learn more?
Tenger Fitness provides real, actionable value - quickly and inexpensively. We’d love to explore how it can benefit you!