Owning for Success

The #1 challenge for Salesforce customers?

Adoption

The #1 REASON?

Underinvestment in ongoing ownership = training, fixed, enhancements, administration.

Your business changes every day. Salesforce supports your business and if it lags, adoption can seriously be affected.

Other BEST practices

• Conduct executive session to get everyone on board first. Having data consolidated in one place is often the single-most important driver that gets executives excited about the possibilities.
• Understand and communicate the benefits for end-users. It may be increased efficiency, it may be improved scale so that nothing falls through the cracks, it may decrease human error and it may also give end-users the visibility every day to better get to their goals. Consider a ‘rah-rah’ changement management session to get people excited that they are moving to the cloud.
• Communicate early and often so that the plan is well ingrained and there is minimal confusion. Communicate months and weeks in advance and have an hour by hour plan for the day of Go-Live.
• Enforce the usage by driving your pipeline calls from Salesforce reports or your weekly team meetings based on metrics derived from Salesforce. End-users will always optimize the “game” provided them and if leadership is managing by the numbers it will always be a focus of attention for team-members
• Handhold your end-users. Provide a central resource with important links, quick reference guides, walk-through videos and other instructions to guide end-users through key flows.

So how much Salesforce support do I need on an ongoing basis?

While the desired ratio can fluctuate widely depending on customer's business, complexity, and even culture, etc... Some companies are content to "barely hang on" while others create a sophisticated governance structure or center of excellence (COE).

• Barely Hang On
  • Part-time, uncertified staff who have "day jobs" on other responsibilities
  • Cheap and easy but downtime, data integrity issues, poor adoption and misalignment over time with changes to the business
• Starting to Control
  • One full-time staff
  • Centralized release management, change control processes
  • Minimizes mistakes and downtime but still tend to be more reactive and not opportunity-driven
• Basic Governance
  • Goals and objectives
  • Process methodology, standards compliant, good data standards
  • Coordination, efficiency and improved alignment with business but not at an insignificant cost
• Center of Excellence
  • Partnered deeply with business
  • Metrics managed, architecture standards
  • Business enabler but a deep investment and attention required

# of FTE's

To get a rough size of number of recommended admins: MondayCall suggests the following very rough rule of thumb.