The easiest way to hire a Salesforce Administrator for any project

What is Salesforce Administration?

Just in case we skipped too many steps ahead, let's take a look at Salesforce Administration 101.

At the most basic level, Salesforce Administration involves the day-to-day support, maintenance, and management of your internal Salesforce org. A big piece of it is focused on the users - ensuring they are properly trained on the features available and aware of what data needs to be input for proper Sales reporting, lead attribution, forecasting metrics etc. Salesforce Administration best practices say that you should have at least 1 Salesforce Admin for every 30-40 users with the recommended number increasing incrementally as you add users and feature complexity.

If you don't hire the right Salesforce Admin team, you run into data quality issues and user adoption challenges that negatively impact your ability to get value from the platform.

What type of Salesforce help do you really need?

You may have already decided that you need a dedicated Salesforce Administrator. Alternatively, you may have yet to evaluate your options. In either case, your next step is figuring out what strategy works best for your company.

You have three choices when hiring a Salesforce Administrator. These choices include hiring a:

1. Salesforce Consulting Partner

2. Salesforce Administrator Consultant

3. Full-Time Salesforce Administrator

You may already know what type of arrangement fits your needs. In that case, you can focus on finding a qualified Salesforce Administrator using our platform. However, other companies may still wonder which option makes more sense.

Firstly, no company should completely outsource its Salesforce product strategy. Still, your staff members may have limited Salesforce knowledge or you may need a specialized Salesforce skill set for a one-time project. In that case, you may want to hire a Salesforce Admin Consultant on a short-term project. We see this as a common approach for companies that need to hire a specialized Salesforce Consultant to integrate Conga CLM, for example. They’ll help you to assess your goals and expenditures for a specific project and also help you to establish best practices.

A skilled Salesforce Administrator understands how to make the platform meet your unique needs. They’ll help your stakeholders get the most out of the Salesforce features available, proactively recommending what you could build and how to do it.

A primary role of Salesforce Administrators is to stay updated on the new product releases and additional tools and capabilities available. They are like a trusted advisor, typically working with the Revenue Operations team or on a standalone Business Systems or Enterprise Applications team. They serve as a trusted advisor, acting as a bridge between your business and technology teams. Since the platform has such expansive capabilities, companies typically need someone that straddles the Business and Technology, so they have enough awareness of what the stakeholders and users need as well as an understanding of how to deliver those solutions.

A Salesforce Admin in Action

Think about your company’s sales team. They may use Sales Cloud to track opportunities and close sales. If so, they can benefit from the guidance of a Salesforce Administrator. The Administrator will help your sales team set up personalized dashboards, workflow automations, alerts, and more. They’ll also help your Leadership run customized reporting, allowing teams to take a more data-centric approach to their go-to-market strategy. More importantly, a Salesforce Administrator will help you to shorten your sales cycle, identifying ways to automate manual processes, integrate 3rd party solutions that help with sales automation or revenue intelligence, deploy CPQ and CLM solutions to automate the closing process etc.

While some Salesforce Administrators are only focused on Sales Cloud, the core CRM offering, others will work across the range of products available in the Salesforce arsenal. After all, there's a solution for nearly every business unit, including Marketing, Customer Support, Finance, and other mission-critical business units. The more teams within a company using Salesforce, the more value it delivers to the business through a unified view of the customer.

Typical Salesforce Admin Responsibilities

A good part-time Salesforce Admin can help in a number of different areas. It will always start with them gathering requirements to identify your goals with the platform, set expectations for the projects it will take to deliver those results, and scope out a project timeline.

For instance, a Salesforce Admin can help you to arrange user training if you're having issues with user adoption. Alternatively, they can identify features or 3rd party products to streamline the contract execution and document management process. Or they can craft a long-term CRM product roadmap and develop a hiring strategy that will allow you to scale.

Typically, a Freelance Salesforce Administrator is the best option when you aren't sure what you will need in the long-term but know you have projects you'd like to implement today. Finding a Salesforce Admin Consultant or deciding to hire a part-time Salesforce Admin gives you the maximum flexibility.

For more established companies that know their go-to-market strategy, have a structured sales process and know how that team will scale, it might make sense to hire a full-time Salesforce Admin.

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