When companies need to upskill (or build) a Salesforce team as quickly and as budget-friendly as possible; while maintaining a high level of technical quality, they resort to Staff Augmentation.

Staff Augmentation is a model designed to solve exactly this issue. By bringing on skilled contractors at 40 hours a week, you can get critical work done without the commitment, higher cost, and lengthy onboarding that comes with hiring employees.

It’s how you can go through staffing your Salesforce team without the hassle of having to go through the HR and administrative employment processes and issues that come with it.

Staff Augmentation is still an unfamiliar term to many executives and hiring managers — but that’s changing rapidly. Here’s what you need to know about Staff Augmentation and how it could help you build the agile, flexible, cost-effective Salesforce team you need depending on your business needs.

What Staff Augmentation Is (And Isn’t)

Staff Augmentation typically, but not always, involves hiring offshore talent. It’s best done through a partner who does staff augmentation services and who’s well-established and familiar with that local market.

With Staff Augmentation, you can have an entire “in-house team” hired and working at full capacity within a matter of days rather than weeks or months — for a dramatically lower cost.

Staff Augmentation might be a good option if:

• You have a significant amount of work to be done, but only for a short or indeterminate period of time
• You don’t have the budget for the FTE headcount you’d realistically need.
• You have urgent work to be completed, and no time for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding
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The benefits of FTE, with more flexibility

For the parent organization, the experience of working with talent hired through Staff Aug are nearly identical to working with any full-time, distributed team.

Hiring managers can expect the same daily visibility they’d have into any worker’s activities; augmented workers attend meetings, collaborate with in-house staff, and are reachable during business hours by normal channels like Slack, email, or Zoom. These are workers completely embedded into your operations, not unlike an FTE.

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The only real difference is the flexible, open-ended nature of the arrangement — and that’s what makes Staff Augmentation so powerful.

Who Should Use Staff Augmentation?

Staff Augmentation is typically used by large enterprises. However, as remote and asynchronous work becomes more normalized, mid-market businesses and startups are becoming more interested, too.

In general, organizations rely on Staff Augmentation for execution and maintenance, keeping Salesforce vision, planning, and strategy in-house.

Some of the best Salesforce positions to source through Staff Aug are:

• Salesforce Engineers
• Salesforce Developers
• Salesforce Admins
• Technical Architects
• Solution Architects

This model is also a good fit for contexts that require little planning and strategy, such as day-to-day Salesforce CRM operations management.
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Finally, Staff Augmentation is for organizations who know what they need to get done — they just have to connect with the right people to do it. It’s different from other resourcing options, like Managed Services, which are best for companies who aren’t really sure where to start with Salesforce and want to outsource the entire operation, not just optimize it.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

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The benefits of Staff Augmentation boil down to speed, flexibility, and cost savings.

The Salesforce talent market in the US is tight, with many companies competing for the same pool of Salesforce experts. So too are budgets being squeezed tighter than ever, causing leaders and hiring managers to look for innovative solutions to add Salesforce expertise to their teams outside of wild hiring sprees.

Flexibility

Laying off full-time employees is an expensive and unpleasant process. Beyond the cost of severance and turnover, layoffs damage team morale and can even harm a company’s reputation. Once it’s time to hire again, you’re looking at weeks to months of recruiting, interviewing, and negotiating with candidates, plus lengthy training and onboarding.

Staff augmentation is a solution to that problem, allowing you to hire full-time employees conservatively and bring on flexible support as needed. The size of augmented teams can be increased and decreased at a moment’s notice or brought on only for a specific project or time frame. Projects can be long or short-term, depending on the company’s specific needs, and Staff Aug. makes it easy to accommodate.

Speed

Closely related to flexibility is the speed and efficacy of resourcing through Staff Augmentation.

Employers can onboard new contractors in a matter of days, and quickly grow the team, replace people, or scale back depending on the outcomes they see.

Staff Augmentation is an ideal situation for teams who need to start getting critical work done, focus on the results, and adjust their strategy once things are in motion.

Cost-effectiveness

As a rough estimate, a Salesforce developer (depending on the years of experience) hired through Staff Augmentation might represent a total cost of $120,000/year. By contrast, a full-time employee could be paid $150,000 in salary alone — not to mention benefits, bonuses, and training costs.

When approached through a Staff. Aug. agency or service, Staff Augmentation gives companies access to an overseas talent pool with more attractive pricing options (and a diverse skillset) — without the risks and uncertainties of seeking it out themselves.

Talent is among most companies’ highest operational costs. In a business environment where great workers — not to mention investment capital — is in shorter supply than ever, saving as much as 30% on labor has a huge impact on a business’s bottom line.

Common Challenges (And How To Avoid Them)

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Staff Augmentation is still an unfamiliar, even intimidating, concept for many organizations. Connecting with offshore talent — and integrating them into your existing team — certainly sounds like no easy task.

Most leaders considering this model are concerned about two things: communication challenges and navigating new labor markets. Here’s how to address both challenges.

Collaborating across time zones

This is probably the most commonly perceived barrier that prevents companies from exploring Staff Augmentation.

Managers might be concerned that hiring, for example, Salesforce developers in India, means they won’t get answers to urgent questions during normal office hours. That’s more than an inconvenience — for many professionals, a 6-7 hour delay in answering chat queries or email could seriously impede their workflow.

But most reputable agencies providing Staff Augmentation are well aware of this issue. Many (including FoundHQ) require their contractors to be online for at least some, if not all, of the contracting company’s business hours.

The key to success is to define all communication expectations upfront. From the very first contact, organizations must make it clear when contractors are expected to be online, when they should be reachable, and through which channels.

Hiring in unfamiliar markets

Staff Augmentation typically means connecting with offshore talent in lower-priced, lower-competition markets — that’s what gives it a cost advantage!

Yet it’s risky and time-consuming for companies to attempt to recruit and hire in an overseas market on their own. Sometimes  companies attempt to do it just by networking on LinkedIn, where they have no established presence, no existing relationships, and no ability to thoroughly vet and verify candidates.  

That’s why a responsible approach to offshore Staff Augmentation will always involve going through an agency with deep knowledge of the local labor market and a network built primarily from firsthand referrals.

This is exactly the powerful differentiator that FoundHQ brings to the Salesforce resourcing ecosystem.

Staff Augmentation Example: ACV Auctions

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Founded in 2014, ACV is a digital marketplace for vehicles. The platform connects auto dealers, commercial partners, and customers, creating a simple, transparent to buy, sell, and assess the value of vehicles online.
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After raising $93m in its Series D funding round, the company has been in a state of hyper-growth, and Salesforce plays a vital role in their core product offering.

To move forward, they needed to double or triple the size of their Salesforce team and fill crucial gaps — while maintaining flexibility and keeping costs down.
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After connecting with FoundHQ, they determined that Staff Augmentation was the answer.

Through Staff Augmentation with FoundHQ, ACV was able to onboard a candidate for their most critical role within five days. After clarifying its hiring priorities, FoundHQ was able to take over the entire interviewing and hiring process.

Today, ACV has connected with seven more qualified contractors, with more to come as their company grows. There’s zero long-term commitment and no project minimum, and ACV pays a single invoice at the end of each month for all the contractors’ hours.

Read the full case study here.

Conclusion

Staff Augmentation offers all the benefits of hiring full-time Salesforce employees without the usually added rigidity, long-term commitment, and higher cost that Salesforce Consulting Firms entail.

When approached carefully, there’s no reason these talented contract workers can’t provide exactly the expertise and support your team needs — only where, when, and how you need it.

By partnering with an experienced agency, your company can find vetted, qualified Salesforce contractors who will become a seamless part of your internal team. No matter the Salesforce platform, whether it’s Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, or others, be sure to partner with an agency that has highly sophisticated vetting processes.

Salesforce Staff Augmentation Services with FoundHQ

At FoundHQ, we focus solely on Salesforce resourcing. Our network of over 3,500 consultants across the globe has been nine years in the making. We know how to vet Salesforce talent because that’s all we do.

We take the time to understand your business processes and needs and match you to Salesforce professionals who have the right experience and background to deliver. Getting the team enhancements through Staff Aug. with FoundHQ means getting top-notch talent at a fraction of the cost of Consulting Firms.