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The decision on the table is how much of the work you hand over, and for how long. Hand over too little and your team spends a year learning what an agency already knows. Hand over too much and you end up with a platform nobody inside can steer. Both mistakes are expensive to reverse once the contract is signed.
Discovery: mapping what you actually need
A Salesforce agency starts by mapping what your business needs from the platform, before anyone opens a configuration screen. That means sitting with sales, service, marketing or commerce teams, following a real customer journey and writing down where it breaks. The output is a game plan: priorities, sequence and the goals you will measure after launch.
Discovery is also where assumptions get challenged. A good agency says so when a requirement points the wrong way, because that is cheaper to fix in a workshop than in a release. Before this phase starts, it helps to know how to choose a Salesforce consultant you trust to do that.
Design: choosing the products and the architecture
The design phase decides which Salesforce products you need and how they fit together. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud (Agentforce Commerce) each solve a different problem. The agency's job is to pick the smallest set that does the job and to design the data model that connects them.
Honest design sometimes means recommending less. We do not sell MuleSoft when a client does not need it, and we do not propose a large engagement when a simpler route will do. Where you do need middleware, the choices get more technical, and our piece on choosing a Salesforce integration partner goes into them.
Build: configuration, integration and data migration
Most of the build is configuration: objects, fields, automation, permissions and page layouts. The rest is integration with the systems you already run, custom code where configuration stops, and moving your data across. Data migration is where plans slip most often, because old data is rarely as clean as the source system suggests.
Where a programme needs a lot of custom code, engineering practice becomes the deciding factor. Our piece on choosing a Salesforce development company covers what to check there.
Launch: training and adoption
A platform people do not use has no value, however well it is built. The agency trains your users, prepares the cutover and supports the first weeks, when questions pile up. Adoption shows in simple numbers: how many users log in each week, and whether the old spreadsheets have gone.
Training works best when it follows real work. A sales representative learns faster from their own pipeline than from a demo account. Service agents learn faster from the cases they handle every day.
