When you purchase Salesforce, you receive a savvy user interface, industry-specific products, lots of online support, training, and certification resources. In other words, a simple plug-and-play solution, right? As is true with pretty much everything in life, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that. While Salesforce is great right out of the box, it’s not going to immediately reflect your business’s unique needs and processes. That’s where bringing in a Salesforce admin comes in handy.
Having a dedicated resource to manage your Salesforce ensures you’re making the most of your investment in the solution, so if you’ve been wondering whether or not your organization needs a Salesforce admin, the short answer is yes. As for the long answer, we’ll lay out all the reasons why you’re going to want to bring in a 3rd-party Salesforce admin.
Let’s get started.
Keep Your System Clean and Organized
A Salesforce admin is a bit like your system’s housekeeper. For example, it should come as no surprise to anyone that many people have a tendency to add records over and over and over (and over) again. And while that may seem like nothing more than a bad habit, what’s really happening is a major situation of duplicate records, one that not only causes confusion with your data, but can also eat up your storage.
We’ve seen organizations unnecessarily upgrade their storage year after year because they were running out of space for their system. Once our Salesforce admin looked into the issue, however, they discovered that a lot of that extra information was just duplicate records. Once the admin cleaned out the clutter, the company suddenly had a lot more storage space.
And something similar often happens with applications. People find a new application that works great for their business, but they don’t realize that system might have a debug log attached to it. So every time an error happens, the log tracks those errors. While that’s actually a good thing, (it’s what debug logs are for), where you get into trouble is when no one is tracking those debug logs, and they start to clog up your storage.
You need someone who can constantly clean and scrub your system on the backend to ensure you’re not constantly clogging up your storage space with duplicate data you don’t need.
Evaluate the Fields in Salesforce
Now let’s get technical for a second. Salesforce is an object-relational database. This means that each object within Salesforce has its own name. An account is an object, for example, but so are contacts, and so are opportunities, and all of these different types of objects are related by different fields. If you look on a contact page, you’ll find a field on there called the account name. Because that field exists on the contact page, the account name and the contact page are related.
That may be all fine and dandy, but the issue arises when you know that you only have a set number of fields within Salesforce. (Some companies can have as many as 500.) At some point, you’ll need to evaluate those fields to optimize your system. A Salesforce admin understands how these objects and fields work together and can recommend what needs to stay and what you can let go of based on your processes and business goals.
Provide Proper Visibility and Security
Salesforce can be as open or as locked down as you’d like it to be. Best practice recommends that you lean more towards a locked-down environment, where access to information is restricted only to the people who need to access it. Malicious intent aside, rules like these keep people from calling the wrong contacts (or mass emailing your entire database…)
An experienced Salesforce admin understands the profiles within the system and can help you determine who can see what based on the role that they’re in and your organization’s hierarchy. It’s beneficial to have someone on hand to set those roles and adjust visibility as needed—especially as your company grows.
Remove Silos and Integrate Your Systems
Speaking of company growth, as companies grow, aspects of their business begin to get siloed off from one another. Your marketing team may use data from a tool like Hubspot, while the sales team relies on Salesforce, and the accounting department uses another software altogether. Before you know it, your data becomes so segmented that something simple, like sending out an email, requires you to go to multiple systems to make sure everything is accurate.
With a knowledgeable Salesforce admin on your side, you have someone to guide your company on an integration strategy that ensures your systems play nicely and that you have a single source of truth for your data.
Salesforce Admin as a Service
These are just a few examples of the many things a Salesforce admin can do for your organization. Essentially super users, a good Salesforce admin can do everything from help you keep your system in tip-top shape to train your staff on better ways to make the most of this powerful tool.
In fact, there’s practically nothing a quality Salesforce admin can’t handle, and if you find yourself in need of one, Surety Systems is proud to offer Salesforce Admin as a Service. If you’re ready to kick things off, contact us today.
