Your company is evaluating who should administrate and manage your Salesforce CRM system. There are many applicable questions that will be posed throughout the decision making process. A few questions are:
You could select a member of your sales ops team, or an office manager to figure it out.
When utilizing an existing team member, you may create the appearance of saving money while ultimately the savings is not a guarantee. One immediate concern should be the fact that the new duties will reduce the employee’s time to focus on what was, presumably, already a full time position and you will now need to back fill the employee’s old duties. In today’s market, many of the items that an employee handles on a daily basis are specialized or require some level of training to reach maximum proficiency. The training and possibly even the cost of a new hire that is required for a replacement for these duties should be considered in addition to the training or lost time costs for your employee to achieve a level of the simplest proficiency on the platform. Another concern to keep in mind is the potential cost of retraining a replacement and bringing them up to speed in cases of turnover or attrition of the employee you have selected to administrate your organization. The costs to consider in this case should include any lost project time, support outage, and the period of time in which it takes your new employee to ‘get up to speed’ and be fully functional in this role.
Additional costs may be incurred when your internal employee reaches the limits of their expertise or runs into an issue that their limited exposure and experience does not give them the capability to resolve. Depending on the savvy of your chosen employee and their drive to learn the platform, they will likely not have the necessary knowledge to perform even the simplest integrations or to help optimize the organization to get the most use out of the platform for your users. They will have limited, if any, access to extensions of the platform without hiring outside assistance.
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You could hire a Certified Salesforce Administrator.
This is obviously the best choice, right? Having a resource at your fingertips all day, every day is the answer to your prayers! You can ask questions whenever you want and it’s almost like having a personal assistant that specializes in using the platform…
While this may be your initial reaction it is not always the right choice for your company. While this may be appropriate for very large organizations with 100+ users, you will typically find that this individual will, at times, need the company to utilize at least one other solution described in this article. Many organizations that do not have a sufficient number of users will find that they are under utilizing their Salesforce Administrator and will attempt to find additional uses for the administrator that may not hold the same value for the company. Some organizations find that a Certified Salesforce Administrator is not sufficient to meet their needs and they will instead, or in addition to, hire a Certified Salesforce Developer. This, of course, comes with a higher incurred cost.
Ultimately, hiring a full-time employee may be the right choice for your company, if you can find the right person to fit your needs for an affordable rate. You will want to hire someone who has a good personal skill set and good resources to address any issues that may be outside of his/her skill set. Even if they can work slightly beyond their existing skill set, be prepared to pay a little bit extra for outside assistance when you push the limits of their skills a bit too far. In most cases, you will still need to hire help for any level of integration or custom development.
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Hire a contractor to help out and provide service when you need it.
While this approach can result in a big win, it also has the most risk involved. Bringing in an independent requires as much work as finding a new person to hire, including checking references, reviewing work history, addressing performance concerns, and even establishing the realistic level of their qualifications. Given their part-time status, you inherit an ongoing risk of attrition or turnover and even need to be away of their overall workload to ensure that you will be able to receive prompt service when you find your self in need. Bringing in a new contractor when you have lost access to one for either of these reasons carries with it a time period of going back through the ‘hiring’ process, re-familiarization of the new resource, and could create the problem of the two contractors having differing levels of capability.
The reason this can be a big win is actually the same reason it carries the highest risk. Hiring an independent contractor is a gamble, even when you do all of your homework on the person being hired. There is no uniformity in the quality of services or skill levels that you can expect to receive.
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Salesforce Support staff will work with you remotely.
While I am a big advocate of Premier Support with or without the Admin service, I feel it is very important for companies to understand the capabilities and limitations of Premier Support with Admin. I will be writing a blog entry in the near future that explains the best ways to utilize Premier Support and the level of support that you should expect so, for the sake of keeping this post on track, I will focus strictly on the capabilities of the Admin portion of the service entitlement.
It is important to keep in mind that the Admin service provided as a portion of Premier Support does not provide you with a designated resource that will work with you each time or even provide you with a designated contact to call for assistance unless you are a larger company. The admin will take your requests and complete them, at times requiring you to complete a few required documents or perform portions of your request that fall outside of the support boundaries. When working with the Admin, you should expect to fill the role of project manager and will rarely receive any type of consultative input from the admin resource. To put it frankly, the Administrator is an order taker with limited resources. As long as the services you are requesting fall within the support boundaries, they will perform the request as closely to your specification as possible, while rarely proposing alternatives unless your request is impossible to complete or is contradictory to published best practices.
While I recommend that you obtain this support from Salesforce regardless off your company size, this is not a replacement for a true System Administrator and should be considered to be more of a resource to assist with simple day to day tasks and changes. This is also a resource that you can provide to any third party you may hire in order to reduce the amount of time that is utilized on the smaller, less technical portions of a project. You will never get any level of integration or custom development through use of Premier Support with Admin.
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Contract a company like ForceBrain.com per engagement or sign up for a Certified Team Plan for a monthly amount of hours with designated resources.
While I am unable to quote the costs or experience levels of other Salesforce consulting partners, I can utilize the rates which we (ForceBrain.com) charge and the experience of our team to provide you a cost benefit comparison and give you some insight into a new service offering that ForceBrain.com is making available.
When working with a Certified Consulting Partner such as ForceBrain.com, you should expect them to be capable of providing assistance with all aspects of your Salesforce goals. ForceBrain.com actually maintains a 100% guarantee for your satisfaction and, as such, in combination with the highly qualified and experienced team members, I am able to present the use of a Consulting Partner as the highest value to the customer within this article.
The most common approach to hiring a consulting partner is to create a fixed set of goals and request a quote or estimate from the consultant for the completion of the list. This is the standard for all kinds of contractor work, whether we are discussing plumbers, carpenters, or even salesforce.com developers. We perform many projects under this model but, in order to complete the work quickly and efficiently, your costs tend to be higher due to the impact of current workload and deadlines against the ability to start additional work during the time period and the necessity to maintain a team on an individual contract during the project.
With the growing popularity of Agile and Scrum Development, we have seen an increase in the number of long term engagements that do not start off with clear cut goals and deadlines, which led to our newly available ‘Team Plan’. While we had some ‘Remote Administrator’ long term agreements available previously, we found that the inclusion of development resources was necessary to ensure full utilization by our customers and meet the needs of these long term projects. This allows us to offer a couple of additional incentives to our customers; 1) We are able to help develop a forward thinking plan of ongoing development to help ensure customer success. 2) Spreading the work out in a predetermined number of hours each month allows us to plan utilization of resources and we are able to pass the savings on to our customers in amounts up to 50% off of our standard hourly rate.
There are many different approaches that a company can take to administrate their Salesforce CRM environment but, there is never a single correct answer to every question. Many organizations will want to utilize more than one of the options mentioned above, while others may even proceed without any administration capabilities. The best recommendation that I can make to any company is to be educated and knowledgeable about your options and the results that should be expected based on your selection.
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