One key driving force that leads companies to outsource Salesforce administration is reducing overhead costs. However, there are many other benefits associated with outsourcing your Salesforce admin—including continuous support for your CRM and in-depth platform knowledge.
Since outsourced firms often have experience working with a wide range of industries, their expertise helps align your platform to your business goals.
We’ve seen a variety of ways outsourcing Salesforce administration helps companies, and here are the 5 key benefits we’ve identified:
- Protection from administrator turnover
- Decreasing ramp time to full productivity
- Utilization of Salesforce to industry best practices
- Wide range of Salesforce expertise
- Reducing labor costs
1. Protection from administrator turnover
One recent study shows that the turnover rate for employees with cloud computing skills sits at 42%. However, the demand for people with these technical skills has increased each year at a steady rate of 12%.
This means that hiring an administrator who’s the right fit for your organization is just one part of the equation. Your organization also needs to invest in retaining these highly qualified employees.
Otherwise, you would be wasting your time and resources on onboarding new administrators. Since your new hires would be spending more time onboarding than on the Salesforce platform itself, you will see a gap in productivity during that ramp-up period.
Outsourcing your Salesforce administration can protect you from these turnover effects. You no longer have to spend time interviewing multiple candidates and going through the trial and error process of finding the right Salesforce administrator for your organization.
Instead, the outsourced firm bears the cost of turnover. In fact, these organizations often have processes in place to guarantee a smooth transition from one administrator to another if the current Salesforce administrator on a project chooses to leave the company.
Some outsourced firms also have multiple people dedicated to a single project. That means that your organization would still be protected when a dedicated administrator is out of office because there are other team members who can step in to manage your platform.
2. Decreased ramp time to full productivity
Whenever you onboard a new Salesforce administrator, it can take them weeks to months to familiarize themselves with your environment. The process of understanding your system architecture, such as how all your fields and automations are used in practice, takes time, so their initial productivity will suffer as a result.
If you hire someone who doesn’t have extensive knowledge of how Salesforce works for your vertical, they’ll also need to spend additional time learning best practices within your industry.
In our experience, we’ve found that outsourcing Salesforce administration can save you up to four weeks of ramp time. That’s because outsourced firms typically have streamlined processes in place to help their admins familiarize themselves with a new customer’s platform efficiently–yet effectively.
For example, at EBQ, our onboarding process begins with a structured kick off meeting where we gain a full understanding of the client’s Salesforce goals. We then perform an initial audit of the environment where we map business processes and perform technical analysis to check if the system conforms to industry standard best practices.
With our experience ramping up hundreds of administration projects, our admins know the right questions to ask and procedures to follow to reach full productivity in as short a time as possible.
3. Start using Salesforce with best practices
We’ve found that a lot of our clients’ biggest pain point before hiring us is that their Salesforce was set up in a way that causes inefficiencies or redundancies.
Since Salesforce is such a powerful platform, it can get overwhelming for an inexperienced administrator–especially when the admin is a random power user who ends up shouldering the burden of the platform. In many cases, we find that the system was not set up with scalability in mind.
Outsourcing your administration team ensures that your organization is set up for success–no matter how far along you are on your Salesforce journey. Even if you think your platform was set up correctly, an outsourced firm can help you identify potential ways to improve your instance and stay on top of the ever-changing industry standards.
Another benefit is that some organizations–like EBQ–provide detailed documentation at no additional cost. As you continue working on Salesforce, you will be able to understand the “why” in each decision that was made by the outsourced organization.
4. Wide range of Salesforce expertise
The wide range of expertise you gain from outsourcing your administration is immense. Since these outsourced firms live and breathe Salesforce full-time, they’ll know how to customize the platform to benefit your organization’s unique requirements.
For example, EBQ has worked with all types of organizations from nonprofits to the health and life sciences industry. Hiring an external company to take care of your Salesforce needs is beneficial because they can mix and match industry best practices to fit your organization’s needs. The breadth of experience that a team can bring to the table speaks for itself.
Our clients enjoy having a full team that supports them continuously and each client works with the same team throughout the entirety of the relationship. Our team includes:
- Consultant
- Solutions Architect
- Senior Consultant
- Salesforce Administrator
This means that our clients get many perspectives and a range of expertise when they hire us as a single outsourced team.
5. Reducing labor costs
The hiring process can be tedious and costly. Once an administrator is hired, you’ll need to pay for much more than their salary. In our experience, you’ll end up spending at least an additional 1.25 – 1.5x of their salary on burden costs, which includes everything from equipment to benefits.
According to Glassdoor, an average Salesforce Administrator’s annual salary is around $95,000. That means that hiring and retaining an entire internal Salesforce Admin team could cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Although most Salesforce admins are already certified before they’re hired, they need to get re-certified yearly. If you plan to cover their certifications, your organization would need to pay at least another $200 a year just on certifications.
When you choose to outsource your Salesforce administration, you no longer need to worry about paying for these fully burdened costs. In fact, you often pay much less for an outsourced Salesforce administration team while getting continuous support.
Final thoughts
The benefits of outsourcing your Salesforce Administration go beyond costs. You also gain expert insight while setting up your platform with best practices from the get-go.
Outsourcing can also help you avoid the time and effort associated with onboarding a new administrator onto your team while protecting you from turnover effects.
With an administration partner like EBQ, you also get continuous support from your CRM team—even if your dedicated administrator is out of office. If you’re thinking about outsourcing Salesforce administration, explore our CRM Consulting services to learn how you can get more out of the platform while paying less.
