From 5 to 200: Scaling a Salesforce Practice at a Global SI

Situation

Cognizant’s EMEA Salesforce practice had five people. The mandate was to build a delivery machine capable of competing for and executing the largest enterprise Salesforce programs in Europe — programs that would later include L’Occitane, TotalEnergies, and other flagship engagements. Cognizant was already a Salesforce Summit Partner at the global level; the EMEA practice needed to build the delivery depth to justify that credential locally.

The market context made the timeline non-negotiable. Enterprise clients were accelerating Salesforce adoption and the market for experienced Salesforce talent was tightening. A practice that grew slowly would lose deals it couldn’t staff. A practice that grew fast without quality controls would lose the accounts it did win.

Challenge

Scaling a consulting practice is not a hiring problem. Organizations that treat it as one — recruit aggressively, onboard quickly, deploy immediately — produce exactly what the market consistently delivers: technically credentialed consultants who know how to configure Salesforce features but cannot architect solutions, diagnose org health issues, or lead client stakeholders through complex decisions.

The architecture of a consulting practice is the infrastructure that separates competent deployment from strategic advisory. It requires technical competency frameworks that define what “good” looks like at every level — from associate consultant through to architect. It requires a career path that retains people by giving them a visible route to growth. It requires a talent pipeline that generates deployment-ready consultants faster than the market can supply senior hires. And it requires delivery methodology that produces consistent outcomes regardless of which team member is on a given engagement.

Without this architecture in place before scaling, growth creates chaos rather than capability. Five people who know how they want to work becomes two hundred people who each work differently.

Action

Technical Competency Framework

The foundational work was defining what “good” meant at each level of the practice. This required reverse-engineering from client expectations: what did an enterprise client need from a junior consultant, a senior consultant, an architect, a program manager? What skills were non-negotiable, and what could be developed on-the-job? The competency framework established these definitions explicitly, creating the evaluation criteria for hiring, the development criteria for existing staff, and the promotion criteria that made career progression legible.

The framework also defined what capabilities the practice needed at scale — not just individual competencies, but the distribution of skills across a 200-person team. Which specializations needed depth, which needed breadth, how the mix of seniority levels should be structured to support both large program delivery and smaller rapid engagements.

Graduate-to-Consultant Pipeline

Senior Salesforce talent is expensive and scarce. A practice that competes only for experienced hires is permanently constrained by market supply. The Graduate-to-Consultant pipeline was designed as a structural solution: a curriculum that took graduates with strong analytical and communication skills — not necessarily Salesforce experience — and produced deployment-ready consultants through structured training, mentored delivery, and progressive client exposure.

The curriculum was architected around the competency framework: graduates knew exactly what they needed to demonstrate to progress, and the training was organized to build those competencies systematically rather than through unstructured on-the-job exposure. The pipeline produced consultants with a consistent foundation that experienced hires from fragmented backgrounds often lacked.

RFP Leadership and Account Expansion

At the senior level, practice scaling required winning the right accounts. Leading technical solutioning for enterprise RFPs — translating client requirements into architecturally sound proposals that the practice could actually deliver — was the mechanism for bringing in the programs that the growing practice needed to develop its delivery depth. The 18% year-on-year account expansion came from winning programs where the proposal was credible because the practice could demonstrate both architectural thinking and delivery capacity.

Result

The practice scaled from 5 to 200 consultants over four years, with a competency framework that maintained delivery quality as the headcount grew. The Graduate-to-Consultant pipeline created a sustainable talent supply that was not dependent on the senior hire market — the practice could grow because it could produce its own talent, not just acquire it.

The 18% year-on-year account expansion reflected a practice that was winning enterprise programs, not just staffing them. The Summit Partner credential that Cognizant held globally was reflected in EMEA delivery capacity.

This engagement represents something distinct from client case studies: it demonstrates how Salesforce practices are built from the inside. The competency frameworks, delivery standards, bid management processes, and quality gates I designed at Cognizant are the same machinery that every major SI uses — and the same machinery that breaks down when programs fail. The independent architecture assessments I conduct today draw directly on this knowledge: I know where SI delivery models create structural risk because I built one. And as Agentforce creates a new wave of implementation demand, the practices that scaled to 200 for Sales and Service Cloud implementations will face the same challenge again — building competency in a new capability domain, fast, without sacrificing the quality controls that protect client outcomes. The scaling architecture doesn’t change. The domain does.

Context: This is an internal practice-building engagement at a system integrator, not a client implementation. The proof points demonstrate capability to build and scale Salesforce delivery organizations — relevant when evaluating someone’s understanding of how SI delivery actually works.