Do you need a Salesforce.com Administrator for your project? Yes. Yes. Yes. Who wants a system that no one is using, is not user friendly and no one understands it? If you want it – take the risk of not hiring a Salesforce.com Administrator for your Salesforce Project (or for that matter any CRM project). Although your Salesforce.com sales rep will not be telling you this – Salesforce.com recommends having an administrator as a best practice. Salesforce.com administrator will add lot of value to the ongoing success of the project. If you can not afford one full time – go for a shared part time resource from a professional service provider.
How many Salesforce.com Administrators we need for our projects?
A Salesforce.com administrator can make lot of difference to success of your CRM project.
Salesforce.com recommends one full time administrator for a project having more than 30 users. The following list recommends the number of administrators that you need based on the number of users you have in your Salesforce.com deplpyment:
- 1 – 30 users < 1 full-time administrator
- 31 – 74 users 1+ full-time administrator
- 75 – 149 users 1 senior administrator; 1 junior administrator
- 140 – 499 users 1 business analyst, 2–4 administrators
- 500 – 750 users 1–2 business analysts, 2–4 administrators
- > 750 users Depends on a variety of factors
What tasks normally Salesforce.com administrators do?
There are many – howeveer here we are listing top 10 tasks that Salesforce.com Administrator can do and that will make a lot of difference to your project:
- Help (motivate) other users to increase adoption of using Salesforce.
- Maintain data quality and devise ways to improve data quality. Perform deduplication on regular intervals.
- Train end users on existing functionality, new features, new releases etc.
- Create new reports and dashboards based on growing business needs and encourage end users to use them in decision making.
- Maintain the application and data security by enforcing organization security policy and data sharing rules.
- Implement business processes and rules by implementing Workflow rules, Approval Processes, Formula fields and Validation rules.
- Maintain various resources like communication templates for email and mail merge, products master and other core data.
- Help implement the new features released with each new Salesoforce.com release (they come with three releases every year) and deploy these features for end users. And of course training the users on these new features.
- Be a part of your business team (whether Sales, Marketing or Service), understand the critical business needs and ensure that application is on the right growth path.
- Learn the industry best practices and implement the same in your Salesforce.com organization.
Salesforce.com Administrators v/s Developers?
A Salesforce.com developer will not have the necessary skills and approch that a Salesforce.com administrator can have. As a Salesforce.com administrator we need someone who understands the entire bredth of functionality that Salesforce.com CRM offers and also understands your business processes and practices. While developers have in-depth knowledge of programming (usually Apex and Visualforce) – they usually lack the breadth of knowledge about Salesforce.com. Go for a Salesforce.com administrator – preferablly a Certified Salesforce.com Administrator.
How to find a good Salesforce.com Administrator?
Look inside – if you have someone in your IT or Sales support team who has an inclination to perform this role – you can train them. Persons with Business Analyst, Application Support, Sales Support background can work out great. However it will take them time to learn – involve them early in the project.
Alternatively you can hire someone from outside – with lot of experiece as Salesforce.com administrator. According to online job search aggregator “Indeed” the national average salary for Salesforce.com administrator in United States is USD 84000 (at the time of writing this post).
Another alternative is that you can hire external Salesforce.com administrators from one of the Salesforce.com consulting partners.
There are several service providers (like us) who also offer ‘Offshore’ Salesforce.com administrator as a shared or full time resource. An offshore administrator resource can reduce your cost to one third or more compared to when of hiring a inside Salesforce.com administrator. You can contact us with your Salesforce.com administrator needs to recieve custom proposal and a free trial.
