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The decision on the table is how much weight to give a partner's tier when you draw up a shortlist. A tier is a score for a whole company across all its clients. One team will deliver your programme, on one set of clouds and under your own deadlines. That is where the risk sits.
Summit is the top tier of the Salesforce partner programme
Salesforce ranks its consulting partners in tiers: Base, Ridge, Crest and Summit, with Summit at the top. Salesforce sets the criteria and reviews partners against them, so a partner holds its tier as long as it keeps meeting them. The criteria have combined signals such as customer success, certified expertise and business growth, and Salesforce adjusts the exact scoring over time.
That makes the tier a useful filter and a limited one. It confirms that Salesforce sees the partner as established and active. It says nothing specific about your industry or scope, which is why it is only one line in how to choose a Salesforce consultant.
The tier measures the company, not your team
A Summit score adds up results across every cloud and every client a partner serves. A partner can reach the top tier on the strength of one product line and still be thin on the cloud you need. Certifications count toward the tier as well, and certified people can sit on other projects while a newer team works on yours.
This is where the tier stops being evidence. What you want to know is who will be on your project, whether they stay from start to finish, and whether they have delivered your cloud at your scale before. Those answers sit in the proposal and the interviews. Ask for names. The badge on the website cannot give them.
What Summit status gives you as a client
The practical benefit of a Summit Partner is proximity to Salesforce. At FORWARD, that means two seats on the Salesforce Partner Advisory Board, alongside Deloitte and Capgemini, and a place among roughly fifteen global members of the B2C Commerce Consulting Partner Advisory Board. We have weekly calls with Salesforce product management in the US and give input on product development.
For a client, that proximity turns into a direct line. Missing functionality, blocking bugs and roadmap feedback reach the people at Salesforce who can act on them. Through the normal account manager route, a client request rarely reaches product management at all. Our standing in the Salesforce community shows in the first Belgian Golden Hoodie award, a Salesforce honour given to one or two people worldwide each year.
