Salesforce Outsourcing- Is it a leap of faith or a ladder to success?

“Outsourcing” is almost a quarter century old industry concept, once on which decision-makers didn’t believe, is now “A TRILLION-DOLLAR Industry”. The concept came in early 1980’s when the companies started outsourcing their non-core business operations to the other parties. Salesforce being the first ranked among the CRM’s is an important platform for any industry focused on marketing and customer relationship.

Why Outsource?

When Salesforce was first introduced to the world as a SAAS (Software As A Service) platform, nobody knew it will become world’s number #1 CRM Platform to cater small to big size companies IT needs, being on a cloud-based technology its demand growing rapidly passing each year. Every year Salesforce introduce many tech products to meet varieties of expanding business needs in this quick shifting market. Even if the trend of IT development been shifted to the Agile mode in a couple of last years from traditional methods, companies still can’t induce workforce overnight to meet their technical demands.

Not every business will just go ad-hoc into development solutions from the beginning, most of them either want frequent customization or integration of their current system with Salesforce, these kinds of tasks are progressive in nature and require many iterations before finalizing, this only means involvement of an IT team later on at some stage.

Where agile methods make development faster and easier, it becomes equally important to quickly deploy applications and maintain quality for companies to stay top of their games. And when you are in the market for your business, losing grounds means losing money.

Soon companies realized it is better to offload and prioritize application development tasks, their related services, and support work. It becomes rather clear to their understandings that it is better to buy services on demand than to hire dedicated staff. This made so many things very clear for them:

1. Do what you are an expert to do.
2. Work according to team size.
3. Save time by distributing tedious & lengthy tasks, focus only on growth.
4. Collaborating with teams & partners outside the company is always a good idea.
5. Save huge cost by managing workload balance between In-house staff & offshore teams.

Companies are now thinking more about partners with whom they can work with to provide astonishing Salesforce services & solutions for which they cannot focus or don’t have time to lose. Moreover, It becomes quite challenging sometimes for a Non-IT Company to manage IT Development tasks as they face hurdles like onboarding and maintaining SFDC Experts, Identifying & Implementing their product business logics, Identifying application security layers & Strategizing work-flow management.

Most of us think that Companies outsource their SFDC related work just to avoid the development cost, but in reality, it is just not the cost, Sometimes it is to avoid unrelated time consumptions, overcome workforce scarcity as a start-up, delicate technical issues and to bring more quality factors to their application products. A legendary management consultant ones said.

“Do what you do best and outsource the rest”

-Peter Drucker

When & What to Outsource?

Any development, administration, and support work which the companies think that they don’t hold the expertise in and don’t have enough budget to initiate according to their business roadmap, should go ahead for outsourcing.

Properly implementing Salesforce requires a thorn knowledge before diving, but if you are looking for a workaround, outsourcing complex tasks & consulting a salesforce.com partner sometimes makes it very convenient. To establish their well managed Salesforce cloud product, companies should work with someone who is experts in this domain and are working from last many years in this field. These experts can either be outsourced or hired, However, build a team for some minor activities is fine but in the case of huge development, support, and maintenance projects, Industries should consider looking for a dedicated Salesforce Partners.

So What before outsourcing? Companies should go ahead and check for the Salesforce Market Place “Salesforce AppExchange” where they can test and compare soo many apps (Free & paid). Check if the solution what they are looking for closely resemble any already published app or not, That way they just need to pick and customize the market app itself as per their requirement Or they can always hire someone to do it for them. Even Cloud Analogy have published their own (Free) apps on AppExchange Listings.

Think Before You Outsource.

As a best practice, Companies should consult SFDC experts to advise them on to decide accordingly whether to consider AppExchange Apps or building an In-House application. Also, they should seek professional advice for their Salesforce application development, customization, integration and implementation time frames, on cost and budget before to induce any capital to start work.

Companies should research upon & consider profiling each Salesforce consultants to whom they want to outsource their work.

This will go on with initiating contacts, doing meetings, asking product related questions, and finally filtering out the qualified consultant’s list, The process goes on until desire qualifiers meet the list criteria. They should ensure that SFDC Consulting Company does exist on the AppExchange Listing, check out their products, case studies, blogs for more details.

Lastly, Ensure that the selected Outsourcing Partner is capable enough to take the workload, have a sufficient number of Salesforce certified professionals, release products on time, can hold daily/weekly meetings for updates & provide task completion reports, is a legitimate registered company, registered on Salesforce as a partner & genuinely holds the expertise to deliver what is desired!!