The Real Cost of Skipping Discovery
Discovery isn’t paperwork. It’s the first moment of true partnership…no matter the size of your business.
Whether you’re a fast-scaling startup or a global enterprise, the same principle applies: a well-run discovery session sets the direction for everything that follows. For smaller teams, it doesn’t need to be exhaustive; just focused, intentional, and grounded in how people actually work. For larger organisations, it’s the connective step that ensures every department moves in the same direction.
Most Salesforce projects don’t fail because the technology is wrong. They fail because the project was never grounded in reality. Businesses invest in powerful platforms expecting transformation, but end up with systems that feel alien to the people meant to use them.
That disconnect almost always begins with a single misstep: treating discovery as a box to tick instead of the foundation of partnership. The cost isn’t just financial—it’s cultural and strategic.
Discovery: The First Act of Partnership
Many assume discovery is about collecting technical requirements. In truth, it’s the first time a delivery team learns how the business really operates, not just how leaders think it does.
This is when you find out that the sales team keeps its most important renewals in a private Excel sheet, hidden from the CRM. Or that finance only considers deals “closed” when the payment clears, skewing every revenue forecast.
These aren’t edge cases; they’re the reality of how work happens. A good discovery replaces assumptions with alignment. It maps the actual workflows that drive the business and creates a shared understanding that guides every future sprint.
The Slow Unraveling of a Skipped Discovery
When discovery is skipped, failure doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps in quietly.
Halfway through the build, new feature requests appear mid-sprint. Teams argue over basic terminology. The workflows in Salesforce don’t match the day-to-day patterns of employees.
At launch, the system looks technically sound (the dashboards exist, the automations run, etc.), but users don’t recognise their work in it. Adoption drops. Sales reps rebuild old spreadsheets “just until they get used to it.” Managers start double-checking reports because the numbers don’t “look right.”
Before long, IT becomes a translation layer between intent and execution. By the time leadership notices, trust has eroded. The platform didn’t fail. The project did…because it wasn’t built on how the business truly runs.
What Effective Discovery Looks Like
You can feel the energy in the room when a discovery session is working. The atmosphere buzzes with collaboration.
People from departments that rarely interact are suddenly sketching ideas on the same whiteboard. Someone might stand up mid-meeting to walk through a live workflow on their laptop to ensure everyone understands the details. The walls become covered in post-it notes, each one capturing a pain point, an idea, or a small but important win.
A strong discovery phase produces tangible outputs, not just theories. You leave the session with clear deliverables that anchor the entire project. These include a detailed requirements log that ties every feature back to a specific business outcome.
You get a visual map showing how data and responsibility move between different teams. Everyone agrees on a prioritized list of "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves." The team also gets early prototypes or screen mockups that give them a real sense of what is coming next.
When people see their own fingerprints on these early documents, they take ownership of the final result.
Discovery That Scales
Smaller businesses often worry discovery sounds heavy or expensive. It doesn’t have to be. A focused half-day workshop, or less in some cases, can reveal the blockers that slow progress – disconnected data, manual duplication, and unclear ownership.
For larger enterprises, discovery can run deeper: multi-day workshops across departments, workflow mapping, stakeholder interviews. Whatever its form, the purpose is constant, to expose what’s really slowing teams down and align everyone on how Salesforce can solve it.
When that alignment happens, guesswork disappears. Confidence replaces it.
How We Approach It at capeMBX
We used to describe our work technically: “We optimise Salesforce to drive ROI.” That was accurate but incomplete.
ROI matters, of course, but what clients really want is confidence; confidence that their solution performs, confidence that their people are supported, and confidence that no one’s left guessing what happens next. So now we describe our work differently: “We partner with clients to build Salesforce systems that perform and make teams feel supported, confident, and in control.”
In discovery, that means we ask about meeting rhythms before automation. We map handoffs between people, not just systems. We uncover “shadow processes”—the unspoken steps that keep things moving. Discovery, for us, isn’t a deliverable; it’s a discipline.
Confidence Starts Before Configuration
No matter the size of your business, discovery sets the tone for success.
For a small or midsize company, it doesn’t need to be a marathon of documentation. A single, well-structured session can uncover the hidden blockers that drain time and morale. But skipping it altogether can be devastating, because even small misalignments early on grow into much bigger problems later.
For larger organisations, discovery becomes the connective tissue that holds complexity together. It ensures every team is heard, every dependency is mapped, and every goal is aligned before the first configuration begins.
No matter the scale, the core principle remains consistent: prioritise understanding before implementation. Discovery turns assumptions into understanding and coordination into confidence.
When teams take discovery seriously, they invite the voices that matter, dedicate the time it deserves, and treat it not as administration, but as alignment.
That’s the moment a system begins to reflect reality; when people start to believe it was built for them, not imposed on them.
Discovery isn’t just the start of a project. It’s the start of a partnership.
