Many firms who are currently using or considering purchasing Salesforce will have an internal discussion on how to manage the environment moving forward. Do you allocate existing internal resources or hire a full-time dedicated person to manage your Salesforce instance? Or do you potentially look to out-source this role & build a consultancy partnership with a Salesforce subject matter expert? There are pros and cons to both, however in today’s post we want to highlight some of the major advantages that come with going the Consultancy route. We’ve broken down the key advantages into 3 different categories: the time & speed at which you are able to design and deploy customizations, the quality of work you are deploying, and ensuring you are maximizing your return on your Salesforce investment.
Time & Speed
-Existing Commitments: Your internal team may be more bogged down than ever with current projects, especially in 2021, as companies are hesitant to add additional headcount. Will your firm have the bandwidth to pull team members off existing projects to dedicate their time to Salesforce? Using a Consultant eliminates this – always solely dedicated to the Salesforce environment.
-Learning Curve – With any new product or platform, there is a learning curve – not just with using the product but with implementing and customizing it as well. Using your internal staff to implement the Salesforce platform can add multiple hours, days or even weeks and months to the project timeline. Not to mention, you’re assuming the tools and procedures they’re implementing are correct. Salesforce Consultants spend all day, every day working in the system and typically have been for years. A Consultant gives your team the ability to hit the ground running.
-Planning Time – Your team will need to take time to get organized and map out a detailed implementation plan. That may be easy if you have a Project Management Officer (PMO) or if your team is experienced in managing CRM implementations. If not, it will likely take them some time to ramp up and come up with an appropriate implementation plan. Experienced Salesforce consultants will have standard implementation plan blueprints they can customize to fit your unique requirements.
-Setup and Configuration Time – Your team can, and will, learn how to setup and configure Salesforce. However, we recommend letting them learn when the stakes aren’t so high and the pressure’s not so great. Salesforce consultants have configured many organizations. They know exactly what steps need to be done to add your custom fields, modify your user settings, and configure security settings so that each user sees just what you want them to see. This is done at a fraction of the time. Also, Consultants can help empower your team to eventually take over once the implementation is live.
QUALITY
-Best Practices – When leveraging an experienced Salesforce Consultant for your implementation, you are sure to get industry best practices for using, testing, and customizing the platform. These best practices are learned from years of experience, completing similar implementations and can put your company on the right path to fully optimize the system and what it has to offer. Let your Salesforce consulting team provide you with tips, tricks and nuances without your team having to learn through trial & error.
-Constant support – If you partner with the right Salesforce Consultants, they won’t just disappear after your implementation. Although future training, support and issue resolution may not be covered in your initial implementation contract, a true Salesforce Consulting partner will be there to help. In addition to providing constant support of your Salesforce system, your consultants should always be notifying you of future releases and changes to your Salesforce org so you can stay ahead of the new features.
ROI
When paying for a tool like Salesforce, your exec team is going to want to see some tangible returns on that investment. In a yearly study by Bluewolf called The State of Salesforce 2017, 77% of people surveyed think their company could be doing more with their Salesforce investments. Don’t become one of these companies, let your Salesforce consulting team guarantee you are using the platform to its fullest potential. Salesforce self-implementations tend to focus on just getting the system up and running. The bells and whistles that Salesforce offers then become a “nice to have”, not a “need to have” and can be completely forgotten. With a Salesforce Consultant you will get both.
-User Adoption – To accurately understand whether or not your Salesforce users have been adopting the new platform, you will want to measure their usage, data quality, and business performance. Are they logging in and contributing to the system? Is the data they’re entering correct and complete? Is Salesforce being effective at improving business performance? Proper training and understanding of the Salesforce platform can lead to increased user adoption and positively affect all three metrics. Your Consultant can help drive that adoption you seek.
As you can see, there are several benefits to using a Salesforce Consultant to maximize what Salesforce has to offer. For a free 30 minute consultation on how our team can help deliver these benefits to your Org, contact us today!