The city that never sleeps is now sleeping. And for a native New Yorker like me, that’s quite a change. But, I have been fortunate enough to work with a variety of different businesses to continue maintaining and innovating their Salesforce programs and have learned several important lessons while doing so during this time.
Unprecedented Challenges Emerge for Businesses of All Kinds
Unprecedented challenges — many of which we never could have imagined — have emerged for businesses of all kinds over the past several weeks. From abruptly transitioning to a fully remote workforce to managing goals against a significantly slowed down economy, the going is not easy right now and many organizations have been forced to make tough decisions.
All of that said, we are more equipped now than we ever have been to handle these challenges. The technology that powers most businesses today is highly flexible and built to enable things like remote work, strong collaboration and overall business continuity. It’s terrifying to think where we’d be today without these modern solutions in place.
For example, AllCloud is a cloud-native business and all of our operations were purpose-built to respond to ever-changing client needs no matter where our clients or our employees are located. We’re also proud to provide this type of cutting-edge technology for our clients to help them not only continue to operate, but also to grow and innovate even in the face of adversity.
Easing Today’s Challenges Through Business Continuity, Agility and Efficiency
In our pre-COVID, always-on world, organizations relied heavily on SaaS technologies of all kinds to provide high levels of:
- Business continuity to enable a mobile workforce and reduce downtime
- Agility to respond to rapidly changing market conditions and pivot the business as needed
- Efficiency around both costs and productivity
In today’s new normal, business continuity, agility and efficiency have proven even more important. Critically, having the right technology in place is only half the battle to achieving these goals. Equally as important is having the right processes and management in place. All of this is especially true for a business-critical, highly customizable solution like Salesforce.
How Salesforce Managed Services Can Help Improve Business Continuity, Agility and Efficiency in Good and Bad Times
One of the best ways to build and maintain a best practice Salesforce program that achieves key business goals and guarantees business continuity, agility and efficiency under any circumstances is to engage a managed services partner.
With or without the threat of a pandemic, it is always a warning sign if only one person from your company knows how to do something — especially if it’s in a business-critical system like Salesforce. And under current circumstances, we’re learning just how important this business continuity is to the health of companies.
In fact, if there’s any good to come from the current circumstances, it should be to trigger much needed discussions around strengthening business continuity, agility and efficiency.
Right now, your leadership team has enough to worry about when it comes to keeping your business afloat and your employees and their families safe from harm. Engaging managed services for Salesforce can free your team to focus on what matters — your business and employees — and shift the responsibility of keeping the technology running to a trusted partner. This type of relationship can also provide the level of focus and expertise needed to achieve operational excellence, particularly as new needs continue to emerge during this time.
Specifically, Salesforce managed services can help:
Strengthen business continuity by gaining access to a robust team
Under any circumstances, business knowledge should not be known by one specialist only; it must be shared with team members through documentation and training. In other words, a company should not have a single point of failure. This continuity becomes especially critical in today’s environment.
Managed services provide this continuity by introducing a full Salesforce team, including a project manager, business analyst, developer, solution architect and technical architect. In turn, this team not only distributes knowledge and protects against employee turnover, but it also provides a structured and cost-efficient way to address ongoing Salesforce needs.
In a time of uncertainty, managed services reduce risk by allowing organizations to focus on their core business. During both certain and uncertain times, managed services provide access to a wealth of knowledge and diverse skill sets to continue improving programs.
To achieve these goals, managed services teams can run efforts like:
- Basic or advanced Salesforce administration
- Development and integration efforts
- Release management
- System monitoring
Increase agility by easing pain points in preparation for a post-COVID world
Many organizations have a decent backlog of updates to improve and grow their Salesforce footprint. Now that business is a bit slower for most organizations, it’s a good time to address these backlog items by implementing new processes or optimizing current ones in preparation for when things pick back up again.
Over the past few weeks, some of the most common efforts I’ve seen led by Salesforce experts through managed services partnerships include:
- Optimizing sales processes through automations, reports, dashboards and trainings
- Introducing data migration and data cleansing best practices
- Leading Lightning migrations
- Running Salesforce security health checks
- Deploying Salesforce critical updates
- Incorporating new functionalities from recent Salesforce releases
Improve efficiency by relying on experts who can build and maintain a structured, best practice program
Finally, engaging a managed services partner can help ensure efficiency in terms of how the Salesforce program runs and what resources it requires.
In terms of how the program runs, managed services partners lead Salesforce programs for business of all kinds, which gives them deep insight into what works and what doesn’t. Their teams are composed of experts who not only know the ins and outs of the technology itself, but also understand the most efficient way to build and maintain best practice programs without hitting common roadblocks along the way.
In terms of resources, engaging a managed services team is typically more cost efficient than hiring the several in-house resources that would be needed to develop and execute on required initiatives.
Right now is a prime opportunity to take advantage of both these efficiency gains to (a) ensure your Salesforce environment is optimized when business picks back up and (b) continue to maintain a best practice environment even if resources are tight.
Keeping Your Business Running and Preparing for the Future
A new normal has settled in, and businesses must adapt. Engaging a Salesforce managed services partner during this time can strengthen business continuity, agility and efficiency by giving your organization access to a group of experts. Beyond the current situation, it can also help maximize your return on investment in the long term.
Ready to get started? AllCloud is here to help. Talk to us today to learn how we can make your Salesforce operations business continuity-ready, flexible and right-sized to handle any unique needs.