In our last post we covered a few of the basics required to staff a new Salesforce implementation. Those basics require properly structuring internally, looking for the right roles, and preparing for the search.
In this post, we’re going to cover three fictional examples of companies with an initial implementation team. Any resemblance to actual companies is purely coincidental.
Zenergy – 1-30 People
A little back story
Zenergy started just two years ago. They’re an early growth stage company selling an enterprise SaaS product. The eight person team was a three person team not that long ago and their founders are leading a lot of the sales. This quarter they decided to shift their CRM from a set of spreadsheets to Salesforce. Their budget is tight, but the CEO is stressed out about losing potential clients.
What staffing do they need?
First thing they need is an internal hire who can do some of the basic administration work – usernames and passwords. With a growing Sales team, they will eventually need to hire a Product Owner/Administrator to be full-time but that’s likely not until they have 20+ daily Salesforce users.
Until then, utilizing a part-time contractor to deploy Salesforce then hiring a smart Office Manager / Jr. Operations person to self-learn the SFDC basics using Trailhead is a good move. Any development customization they’re doing should be handled by individual contractors.
No matter what this company chooses, they’re going to need a Salesforce champion in house so I would recommend a Junior Operations person learning some basic Admin skills until they grow a bit more and can warrant a full-time Administrator.
Zenifeetz – 50-200 People
A little back story
Zenifeetz is a growing technology firm that has hit it’s stride. They build productivity software that is making big waves in the project management world. They’ve got 150 people on the team (although will be quickly expanding), plenty of revenue, a growth round of funding raised, and plans to grow into new markets.
Their Sales Team, Marketing Team, and Customer Service team have all been using different CRM systems, none of which talk to each other. To scale their business, they need processes in place and need to understand customer journey KPIs. They’re bringing all of the CRM systems under one roof with a centralized and dedicated Salesforce team.
What staffing do they need?
If they haven’t already it’s time to get serious about Sales Operations. It’s more than just a CRM, this is the data that runs their business. They need to hire a Director of Sales Operations to provide executive oversight and stakeholder management and a Product Owner to run the teams internally.
These two will have the strategic vision to provide input over the big picture, but also the technical skills to get things done now while the team is still being built out.
Within Sales Operations they will have four divisions which will be built out eventually over the next three years – Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Development. The three main cloud divisions manage new projects with their respective liaisons and the Development team will do the heavy lifting building them. They can have ownership over the business processes integral to those groups.
With the exception of Development, the other divisions will be run by Business Analysts or Administrators to keep costs down.
Z-Global Widget Industries – Lots and Lots of People
A little back story
Z-Global Widget Industries is one of the oldest and largest companies in America. It now has multiple divisions, each with their own set of product lines that are globally distributed. Three different CRM systems are used across seven major divisions.
The executive team wants one system to standardize reporting, improve cross selling, and upgrade customer service. They have partnered with a large Salesforce approved implementation partner and have budgeted enough to build an impressive Center of Excellence.
What staffing do they need?
Some of the best large company deployments end up splitting their Sales Operations into two teams: technical and functional. In a large company with established engineering and development processes, it makes sense for the heavy duty Salesforce lifting to be done in the existing technical or engineering architecture. They would be responsible for integrating relationships with existing software and would need advanced technical skills. This team would include one Technical Architect, three Developers, and one senior Admin.
Their counterpoint is more closely aligned with the business processes and would be lead by a Salesforce Product Owner. The SPO’s team would include a Senior Administrator for each business unit, three or four Junior Administrators, and two or three Business Analysts. The SPO would be responsible for coordinating between Engineering and Sales Operations.
With a much larger organization, Solution and Technical Architects are going to be more vital as well as some team-members focused on security exclusively. Big picture strategic perspective will need to be managed with executive buy-in, as decisions made by the Center of Excellence will have repercussions across the company.
What should I learn?
Building a Salesforce team requires a lot of nuance and quite a bit of forward thinking. These three examples couldn’t in any way cover all the possibilities for implementations across the ecosystem. (SHAMELESS PLUG) Use a team like TwentyPine to help you through this process and we’ll make sure you get where you need to go, with the right people.
Let us know and we’ll find time for a free consultation.