What is the Business Case for Salesforce Consultancy
As a business with Salesforce, you can utilise many kinds of support. These options include internal roles like a system administrator or a PMO team and external roles like a contractor, consultancy, or Premier Support directly from Salesforce. Each of these can offer different types of support, and there are various reasons for using each. The only certainty is that you will need some sort of support for most versions of Salesforce, and not just for the initial implementation.
So when should you use a consultancy? You might think, as the founder of a Consultancy, I would say that a Consultancy is always the answer! But I don’t believe it is; not all work requires one.
I have created the table below to show my view on the value (out of 10) that different types of support can provide in some typical scenarios.
Obviously, this is a very high-level guide, and if asked for details about any of these, I would probably say:
However, you will notice that I hold very high importance on a company having a specific internal Salesforce resource. This becomes increasingly important with more complex versions of Salesforce. I know many 'accidental admins” in the ecosystem who got given the responsibility for Salesforce in a company they worked for and then learnt the skills. If this is the way you approach internal support on Professional Edition or higher please, please use a consultancy to help skill them up. Salesforce is too big now to be able to rely on learning on the go, even with Trailhead.
Back to the point though, what is the business case for a consulting? This will depend on your specific requirements, but in the content of the information above, here are my main 8 :
Consultancies work on many orgs each day. This results in a lot of learning, which would cost a lot to replicate or hire.
Salesforce is MASSIVE; no one individual knows it all. However, consultancies can access trusted knowledge in most areas quickly and when needed. Most importantly, this can save on mistakes and the building of technical debt.
The variety of specialist roles involved in a Salesforce project can easily be large. This includes Project Managers, Business Analysts, Developers, Testers, cloud-specific experts, and people who configure your system. Bringing in all these roles instead of using a Consultancy that already has good people in these roles will waste time and money, especially for small to mid-size projects.
Most companies have some degree of organisational scar tissue. It is often very hard to see this or a way around it when you are constantly surrounded by it. Bringing in a consultancy with an external perspective and high system knowledge will help you find and document these costly behaviours which often bring large and quick gains.
As a consultant, I have helped customers achieve large gains by using lessons learned from industries other than their own. This area is sometimes overlooked as people look for consultancies who know their industry really well but can bring step changes for companies.
You don't need to, and shouldn’t use a consultancy for everything in your Salesforce org. You can bring in your trusted consultancy when required and flex the support you get from them to help your System Administrators or to advise prior to projects being given the green light. At the core of what we do, consultants like to help.
Keeping up to date with the Salesforce Eco-system is hard work, even for a consultant. The tri-annual release notes are lengthy, the available apps constantly grow, and Salesforce products are introduced or re-named with surprising regularity. It is the consultancies' job to know what is going on, and this alone can save a substantial amount of time, money and competitive advantage.
I have recently discovered that it is unusual that I help customers hire their Salesforce teams; however, it is not unique. Using the knowledge of your trusted consultancy to help with this can help you get the right people into roles quicker and can often increase the attractiveness of the role to the applicant.
If you do decide to use a consultancy, I have a quick plea for you, let them get rid of technical debt and listen to them. If they don't give good advice, you have the wrong one. If they do, listen, as there is no business case in paying for something you don't use.
