I was talking about a situation with a colleague recently and used the phrase “Pay me now or pay me later”, which was made famous by a commercial for Fram oil filters quite a few years ago. (Side note: anyone under 40 probably won’t remember the commercial, but you can find it on YouTube!).
Disregarding the exact context of the conversation with my colleague, in a broader sense, the phrase represents our approach at Soliant to many situations. Whether it’s making sure adequate system backup procedures are in place or project processes are followed, it makes sense to spend a little more upfront to avoid a breakdown later.
One situation where we often see these smoldering engines on the side of the road is with Salesforce (SFDC) implementations where another consulting firm persuaded a client that a “quick start” approach would fit their business just fine.
Here’s the scenario. The consultant sends a generic questionnaire to the client at the beginning of an engagement and uses the results to implement SFDC, sometimes without even meeting the end users, who are expected to “adapt” to the new system, workflows and procedures with no problems. The results are not pretty and sometimes referred to as an “adoption” issue i.e. the users do not “adopt” SFDC as their system of choice and will continue to try and work around it. Soliant’s “pay me now” approach involves practices such as spending adequate time with the users upfront to understand their system needs, defining objectives for the implementation, and developing an adoption strategy to make sure a client’s investment in SFDC is money well spent. These up-front investments in time and resources prevent engine failure down the road (unhappy users and unmet objectives). Pay me now or pay me later in action!
