Everything is faster than it used to be. The pace of business, the pace of digital and the pace of change are just a few of many examples of things that have had a tremendous impact on the way organizations operate.
This situation presents something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that introducing the right technology can help organizations deliver on the necessary speed and position their teams well to continue to transform and innovate. On the other hand, any technology that can do this well will require ongoing nurturing and maintenance to meet these goals long term as both your business and the technology continue to grow and evolve.
Fortunately, this is not a Catch-22 situation. Your organization can achieve both elements successfully with the right investments in ongoing support and management. Let’s take a look at how this plays out with Salesforce.
Making Your Salesforce Program a Catalyst for Growth Through Proper Management
Salesforce is a big investment that will serve as a critical catalyst for growth across all aspects of your business by offering unparalleled agility, increased efficiency and overall business continuity — if it’s managed correctly. This management includes everything from efforts to maintain and grow user adoption to ongoing governance, monitoring and innovations to ensure your program continues to meet changing business needs.
Specifically, some of the top goals organizations aim to meet through Salesforce program management include:
- Scalable, long-term support to manage ongoing updates in a rapidly changing environment
- Access to expert strategic resources to help take advantage of new Salesforce features as releases happen and build a well-structured, best practice program
- Proactive monitoring to get ahead of issues and maintain a high level of agility (versus reactive fixes that lead to increased down time)
Along the way, these goals typically aren’t the only considerations. Organizations must also think about costs (those of managing Salesforce as well as any specialized resources) and productivity (including accessing specialized resources when needed and balancing strategic initiatives with maintenance needs).
When Does Salesforce Managed Services Make Sense for Your Organization?
Salesforce managed services can help your organization achieve critical growth goals like those outlined above while balancing the need for efficiency around costs and productivity.
Managed services can help to accomplish balance by providing:
- Access to highly experienced resources with specialized skills (including Salesforce Developers, Solution Architects, Technical Architects, Marketing Experts, CPQ Experts, etc.) for ongoing innovation without incurring the cost of employing those resources full time. This access is especially important as Salesforce continues to get broader and more complex with each new acquisition.
- Proactive monitoring and efficient fixes from a seasoned technical team so your internal resources can prioritize strategic efforts rather than tactical maintenance. This resource offers scalable Salesforce support that also provides business continuity as your own team changes over time.
- A dedicated team that can continually refine any backlogs to align Salesforce with your business’ growth strategy. This team can tackle even the most complex items along with those your team simply doesn’t have the bandwidth or resources to complete.
- Hands on sessions with trusted advisors who know Salesforce and your business. These advisors can provide direction regarding Salesforce best practices and insight on new releases based on how they relate to your specific goals to answer questions like: How would implementing CPQ work within your organization? What about Marketing Cloud? What does that timeline look like? What are the resources required to implement these initiatives?
Importantly, engaging a partner for ongoing managed services allows you to accomplish all of these goals in a way that improves resource planning and budget forecasting through predictable monthly costs. Further, the ability to scale these resources up or down over time provides significantly more flexibility compared to bringing on the same resources as full-time employees — a process which is also more expensive due to recruiting, inevitable turnover and overall employee costs (not to mention the in-demand nature of many of these specialized skills).
The Value of a Partner: An Extension of Your Business
The business case for a managed services partner is compelling — but is another partner really necessary? In short, yes: there’s a significant amount of value that the right partner can provide.
The value of a partner starts with the understanding that it is not and either/ or situation. By using a partner for Salesforce Managed Services, you are getting the value and expertise of the partner themselves as well as the typical Salesforce resources. That’s because established partners are not just adept at implementing Salesforce, but are tightly connected to Salesforce product development and have a methodology that accelerates their client’s innovation using Salesforce. Partners will go above and beyond basic support to scale your investment, support your resources and drive continuous innovation. Think reactive technical help to fix issues versus proactive help to address issues before they even happen.
Salesforce Support offers technical help largely for admins managing day to day needs in the form of resources like 24/7 developer support, interactive guidance through Accelerators, Cloud Specialists and Success Managers and informational resources like Circles of Success, communities and webinars. Looking beyond this, a partner like AllCloud supplements administration with strategic guidance for long-term program growth that is customized based on a deep knowledge of your unique program goals.
A managed services partner provides more hands-on support as well as in-depth strategic guidance to act as a true extension of your team. Typically, these services include (but are certainly not limited to!):
- Code-based Salesforce customizations
- Ongoing administration of the Salesforce solution
- Data import and management activities
- Instructor-led user training on default and custom-built functionality
- Support for customized configurations
- Dedicated point of contact for continuity
- Access to higher level of subject matter experts (including technical architects) who can lead conversations about Salesforce roadmapping and business reviews to optimize current processes and build a true best practice program — all based on a deep knowledge of your organization and unique business needs
- Proactive outreach and support through efforts like regularly scheduled check-ins, backlog refinement and performance checks to ensure your goals are met
Is Salesforce Managed Services Right for Your Organization?
Engaging a Salesforce partner for managed services can deliver enormous value for your organization by ensuring your Salesforce program continues to align to best practices and grow alongside your organization, all while improving agility, efficiency and business continuity through access to a robust team of Salesforce experts.
Interested in learning more? AllCloud’s managed services team includes a full stack of experienced, specialized resources to support your Salesforce program and help grow your business. Contact us today to discover how we can partner with your organization to help achieve your goals.