We pitch against other Salesforce firms almost every week. Some we lose to fairly, some we lose for reasons that have nothing to do with quality, and some we watch clients sign with and regret a year later. Here is the filter we would use if we were on the buying side.
A quick caveat before we start. We are a Salesforce consulting firm. You are probably reading this because you are considering hiring one, possibly us. We have tried to write this as if we were on your side of the table. Some of what follows is mildly against our own interests.
With that out of the way, here is how we would evaluate a Salesforce consulting firm if we had to hire one tomorrow.
Every firm's pitch deck sounds the same
If you have sat through four or five capability decks, you have noticed. Every firm has senior engineers. Every firm has hundreds of certifications. Every firm has a proprietary delivery methodology that is a circle with arrows. Every firm has logos.
None of it predicts whether your project will go well. We have seen highly credentialed firms ship things that had to be rewritten. We have seen boutique shops quietly crush enterprise implementations. The pitch deck is not where the signal is.
Five questions that actually predict quality
1. Show me an org you built three years ago.
Not one you launched last quarter. An org that has been in production long enough for the consequences of the architecture to show. Ask the client whether the org is easy to evolve, whether the admin team can maintain it, and whether any major piece has needed to be rebuilt.
New code always looks good. Three-year-old code that still reads clean, deploys cleanly, and is loved by the admins who inherited it is the only reliable signal of engineering quality.
2. Who is actually doing the work?
This is the single most important question and the one most often answered vaguely. The sales team will say "we will staff your engagement with a senior team." Push harder.
- Names on the statement of work.
- Resumes or LinkedIn profiles for each.
- Onshore vs. offshore breakdown, with hours.
- Commitment that those people stay on the project through go-live.
Firms that sell senior and staff junior on the back end have been doing it for twenty years. It is the most common reason a project goes sideways. Sometimes offshore delivery is the right call. It just needs to be explicit.
3. What is your minimum engagement?
This is a stealth signal. Firms with a large minimum (say, $500k+) have built a business around complex engagements. Firms with no minimum have to take any work that walks in the door. Neither is bad, but your project should match the shape of the firm's book.
If you have a $200k project and you are talking to a firm whose average engagement is $2M, you will be staffed accordingly. If you have a $2M project and you are talking to a firm whose biggest past engagement was half that, the risk lives somewhere else.
4. Who stays after go-live?
Most firms disappear at go-live. The really good ones have a clear handoff plan: documentation, runbooks, admin training, a post-launch support tail, and a named person your team can call for ninety days.
Ask for the actual documentation from a past project. Not a template. The real thing. You will learn a lot in thirty seconds.
5. What is your testing philosophy?
You are looking for an opinion. "We write Apex tests to hit coverage" is the wrong answer. "We write tests that document the business rule and fail loudly when the rule changes" is the right one.
A firm that treats tests as a compliance checkbox will hand you an org that is fragile underneath. A firm that thinks about tests as part of the design will hand you something you can evolve.
Signals to weight less than you probably do
Certification counts. Useful but overrated. A firm with 400 certs is not necessarily better than one with 40. The distribution matters more than the total. You want the architects certified, not the interns.
AppExchange listings. A managed package on the AppExchange is a product skill, not a services skill. Plenty of great consulting firms have no listed products. Plenty of firms with pretty listings do not deliver well.
Partner tier.Salesforce's partner tiers are a function of revenue, CSAT surveys, and certification volume. They correlate loosely with quality but not reliably. A Summit partner is not automatically better than a Ridge partner for your specific project.
Logos on the homepage. The firm may have done a small body of work for a big logo. The logo tells you they have navigated procurement, not that they ran the flagship program.
Signals worth weighting heavily
Code samples. Ask to see real Apex or LWC code from a past project. Most firms will not share it (legitimate reason). The ones who can show something, even anonymized, are usually proud of what they ship. That is a signal.
References that sound specific.A reference that says "they were great to work with, very professional" is not a reference. A reference that says "they refused to let us ship the integration the way we originally designed it, and looking back they were right" is a reference.
How they scope. Firms that discount scoping are selling a template. Firms that take scoping seriously, ask hard questions, and occasionally tell you your ask is wrong are the ones who will not surprise you with a change order in month four.
How they disagree. In discovery, do they push back on anything? A firm that agrees with every request in the sales cycle will agree with every request in delivery, which sounds good and is not.
The smell test that works
After the pitch, ask yourself whether you learned something. Not whether you were impressed, but whether your understanding of your own problem got sharper. The best pitches leave you thinking the firm understood something about your org that you had not quite articulated yet.
That is not magic. It is the firm taking the meeting seriously and doing real homework before walking in. The firms that do that in the sales cycle tend to keep doing it in delivery.
One last thing
Trust is the thing that actually matters, and it is hard to judge from a pitch. The cheapest way to stress test a firm is to scope a small, contained piece of work first. A discovery engagement, a focused audit, a bounded sprint. You will learn more in two weeks of working together than you will in ten rounds of capability decks.
If the small engagement goes well, the bigger one probably will too. If it goes poorly, you saved yourself from a much worse version of the same problem.
That is what we would do. If it helps you pick someone other than us, that is a fair trade.