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5 Reasons You Might Need a Salesforce Consulting Partner

I remember the first time I was introduced to Salesforce. I was working at a small startup company and we were about to embark on building out an inside sales team to disrupt the distribution models in the animal health space. I was tasked with leading the selection process for our CRM and Salesforce was the obvious choice; it was cloud first, it had all this great functionality, and it was so EASILY and INFINITELY customizable that a child could do it —— at least that is what it sounded like in the sales and marketing pitch. The truth — Salesforce is a HUGE system with many baked in features and functionality to suit a broad range of common business use cases. The part they don’t tell you is that underlying those features is a very specific data model and interdependencies between features, and a host of best practices that you likely aren’t aware of if you or your company does not have experience with the system. So the real story is, that yes, Salesforce is infinitely customizable by any admin, but the result of it is that they give you plenty of rope to hang yourself.

Most of my customers fall into two categories:

  1. They want to build something different than what they have. They use Salesforce, they have a need or a problem, and they want someone to build out a solution to that need or problem. Everything else is fine. Easy. Straightforward. Great.

  2. The second and surprisingly most common category is the company or person who inherited a mess and needs to figure out how to fix it. This is so common because it’s so easy to find yourself in this position. What may seem like an arbitrary design decision in your first year using Salesforce can balloon into data quality issues, adoption problems, and other pitfalls that drain the useful of Salesforce to the organization.

The fact is that while you don’t always need an experienced admin or consultant working on your system, every business and customer of Salesforce should at least be checking in someone who understands the platform, the functionality, and HOW companies can successfully use the tool to meet their business objectives. Engaging with a strategic consulting partner earlier rather than later can help you stay on a strategic, well thought out development path where your time and energy spent on Salesforce is based on implementing new helpful features that benefit your business, and not fixing bugs, or even worse spending money on a tool that nobody is able to use.

While every business is going to have their own use cases for Salesforce, their own processes, and their own pain points, below are 5 key reasons that you may want to find a quality Salesforce consulting partner.

  1. You don’t know what you don’t know: As I mentioned above, Salesforce is a really, really big system. Whether you have inherited a system at a new job, or are using some functionality but not others, it’s a full time job to keep up with the constant evolution and new features of the platform. With three releases of year and release notes averaging about 300 pages, that’s a lot to read for someone who is trying to run their business. A Salesforce consulting partner naturally keeps up with the bleeding edge of Salesforce’s technology offerings and roadmap to help you make the best decisions.

  2. You are (or have) a self taught admin: Being a Salesforce admin is an amazing feeling. I used to call it “God Access” because I could walk out of a sales management meeting with a plan or tactic, and then overnight I could build a solution and roll it out to the team the next day. BUT, there were also those times where the dreamy solution I cooked up didn’t work and in fact cost me 3X the extra time to fix the mess I made and build a new solution. A Salesforce consulting partner can help to mentor and guide your internal staff through solution architecture decisions and ideation.

  3. You are changing fast as a business: The start-up/growth stage conundrum. Speed is king. Agility is key. Experiments are frequent. Salesforce is actually the perfect tool for a company that is in flux because it’s probably the only platform that can adapt as fast as your business. However, this is also a critical phase to be building on good “bones” of your system and installing frameworks that will scale with your company without causing manual and admin overhead. If done right, you can track and measure your business activities and use the data to constantly innovate and improve your core processes.

  4. You have a specific need or problem to solve: Sometimes you just have a project that is too big for your internal team, or outside of your core skillset. A Salesforce consultant can help you through the discovery, design, build, test deploy cycle to build the right thing, and build it right the first time.

  5. You have no specific “Product Owner” for Salesforce: Let’s say your company has Salesforce, but there’s nobody really taking care of it. Chances are you aren’t getting much value from it either. To truly realize the value of your investment in Salesforce it’s important that you know how to leverage the many great tools that it includes to help run all aspects of your business, whether that’s back office processes, lead follow up, marketing, customer support — you name it. If nobody is “owning” your Salesforce instance, I can pretty much guarantee its underutilized.

At Optevo, I am striving to provide my clients with services that fit their need, budget and vision. In my mind, each business has it’s own unique situation that requires a different level of service. Whether it’s a brand new implementation, administrator mentorship, custom solutions, or full on managed services where we can help run your org soup to nuts, we strive to help you connect your business goals to technological solutions that can really make a difference.

Derek Chapman