Crowdsourced Business Analyst Questions for Your Next Discovery

Asking good questions is a critical skill of any Salesforce Professional. In order to efficiently and effectively configure Salesforce for your client, you need to first understand their business and their needs.

As a fun exercise, I recently asked the Talent Stacker membership – As a Business Analyst – what are your top 5 go to questions or tools when navigating a discovery session with a client or end user?

So many great questions came up – so I collated them and added them here for future community reference.

Helpful Business Analyst Questions for Your Next Discovery Session

Tell me about your goals (customer, sales, service, financial, operational, growth).
What is your timeline for achieving these goals and how do you currently measure them?
Walk me through daily work/business processes.
What is the current AS-IS state – process or a work around that is being followed – supplemented by some documentation or observation techniques?
What is the TO-BE state being envisioned in terms of functional and non-functional requirements and how would you measure the performance of the solution in terms of value?
What tools/integrations do you currently utilize?
What are the problem/pain points that you are trying to solve?
What causes your team the most frustration when it comes to business operations?
What have you tried to solve this problem in the past?
What things would you make sure not to change?
What is your current team structure?
Tell me about the people and departments involved in your salesforce org.
What are the current ways you communicate with your team and clients/customers and are you open to updating that system?
Whose interests might interfere with yours in the organization?
Who else might be impacted by this change?
What are the main duties of each end user?
Who is the end user?
How is the company currently gathering data?
How clean is your current data and when errors occur who is effected?
What do you think might contribute to lack of data accuracy?
What is your current road map and timeline?
What are the Key Performance Indicators that are to be measured?
How do you measure your success?
What are the time constraints, budget, and resources for this project?
Who will be the primary contact person as we move through the project and what resources will be provided to support them?

Bonus Helpful Tools/Techniques to Run Your Discovery Session

Start by asking if there’s anything ‘top of mind’ to address that first, freeing up headspace to focus on the rest of the session.
Use a tool like Google Tasks to quickly jot down and keep track of any action items that come up throughout.
Starting with at least some sort of discovery template – no need to reinvent the wheel.
Recording the meeting to review later.
Avoid yes/no questions!

Thank you to the following Talent Stackers for submitting your great suggestions to this list: Elica Partida, Kib Bik, Sabrina Santana, Sujana Sunkara, Christy Johnson, Tara Marie, Jenna Lundeen, Ramkumar A, Rosa Ochoa, Leonard Wilson, Jr., Annaliese Bowen, Jeff Huong, Sushin Gigy, Sushma Sunkara, Marjorie Alexander, Sean Walker, Tiana Hawkins, Shannon O’Donnell, Julie Russell, Bonnie Pope, Mandy Skutch

Looking for more resources on being a great Business Analyst?? Check out the New Business Analyst Course at Get Force Certified today!