Buying Salesforce consulting — what 'senior delivery' actually looks like

The Salesforce consulting market has a credibility problem. Every shop says they put senior consultants on your project. A meaningful fraction don't actually do that — the senior consultant sells the work, and the build is run by people two or three years out of school, with light oversight from someone managing six other projects.

This isn't always a problem. Junior consultants can do good work, and a well-managed shop can deliver that way. But you should know what you're buying, and you should be able to tell the difference.

Here's how.

What "senior" should mean

A senior Salesforce consultant has done your project before — not the same project, but its shape. Multiple implementations. Multiple data migrations. Multiple integrations to whatever you're integrating with. Enough scars that they can sketch the failure modes from memory before you encounter them.

Concretely, that usually means:

Six to ten-plus years on the platform. Less than that and the breadth isn't there yet.
Multiple certifications, plus active work. Certifications without recent work are theater. Recent work without certifications is fine.
A specialty. Generalists are fine for breadth. Specialists are essential when the work goes deep — Apex, integrations, Experience Cloud, data migrations.

Questions that surface the truth

In the sales call, ask:

Who specifically will be on this project, day to day? If the answer is "we'll assign that," you're buying the agency's roster, not a person.
What's their background — can I see their LinkedIn or their Trailhead profile? Real consultants have public credentials. Pseudonymous ones are a flag.
How much of their time is on this engagement? "Twenty percent" of a senior is often less useful than "eighty percent" of a mid-level.
What's the escalation path when something breaks? If the senior is the escalation path and they're already at twenty percent, the math doesn't work.
Can I talk to a past client? Anyone who's done good work has clients who'll vouch for them. Anyone who can't produce one is signaling.

Red flags

A few things that are, in my experience, reliably bad:

Resource pyramids. "Senior architect, senior consultant, two analysts, two developers" usually means the architect is on six projects and you'll talk to the analysts.
Fixed-fee with vague scope. Looks like a deal until you discover the scope was deliberately vague to absorb change orders. The right shape is fixed-fee with explicit, narrow scope, plus T&M for the rest.
No paid discovery. "We'll scope it for free" usually means the scope is whatever the shop wants to sell you. A short, paid discovery aligns incentives.
Reluctance to put the consultant's name in the SOW. This should be standard. If they push back, ask why.

What good looks like

The shops and individuals who do this well share a few traits:

The consultant on the sales call is on the build.
The proposal is specific. Not "we will configure Sales Cloud to your needs" — but "we will build the lead routing flow described in section 2.3, with the assignment rules in appendix A, and acceptance criteria X, Y, Z."
The deliverables include documentation. If documentation is an extra line item, you're buying half the work.
The engagement ends. There's an explicit handoff plan. Good consultants want to be replaceable; bad ones want to be permanent.

Why I'm writing this

Because the gap between "senior consultant" on the slide and "senior consultant" on the project is one of the most expensive misalignments in B2B services. People pay agency rates and get junior delivery, and then conclude that consultants don't work. They do — when the model is honest.