Optimizing Your Salesforce Investment: How Does Collaborating with a Top Managed Services Partner Help?

The highly competitive and dynamic business landscape has driven organizations to look for efficient and cost-effective ways to manage their operation. Businesses are increasingly relying on customer relationship management (CRM) tools to achieve this goal. Amid the numerous options available, Salesforce is undoubtedly the pioneer as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC).

There has been a significant increase in YoY Salesforce implementations and users. However, many enterprises still follow the approach of ‘implementation first, figuring things out later’. Being a cloud-based platform with multi-module workflows, Salesforce facilitates solution customization to meet an enterprise’s existing requirements. Despite the flexibility and scalability it offers, businesses reach a point where their internal IT teams can’t keep up with the demand for Salesforce upgrades to meet the growing business needs. And here’s where the Salesforce managed services partner with tailored support and maintenance for the deployed Salesforce instance changes the game.

What is Salesforce Managed Support Services?

Salesforce managed services are strategically planned processes deployed to ensure businesses achieve optimized output and ROI from their Salesforce org. Mostly, it involves a third party, also known as a Salesforce managed service consultant. A managed service partner offers a highly proactive, robust, responsive, and scalable approach to managing their Salesforce environment within the allocated IT budget. They also aid the in-house IT team with the latest Salesforce upgrades, provide the necessary technical support, and ensure end-to-end system security, while keeping the instance up and running.

How to Calculate ROI from Salesforce Managed Services?

For many businesses, opting for managed services is yet another service, increasing the overheads. However, if considered from all aspects, investing in these services is a wise decision that bears great fruit in the long run. How? Let’s see!

The first and most important aspect of ROI generation is to ensure business systems continuity. Each interruption instance translates into income loss for the business. To assess the overall impact, several factors should be considered, including the number of incidents during a specific duration, downtime/length of incident duration, number of affected employees, and average income loss during the system downtime. For each organization, these numbers vary but a complete system failure that slows down the business is a critical challenge for every business. This doesn’t stop here as it damages the brand name and customers’ trust, and it is just the tip of the iceberg!

The second aspect of the managed services’ ROI calculation is the costs associated with certified Salesforce professionals. Hiring a complete team of specialists to manage a technology or system is not only time-consuming but expensive too. This applies to Salesforce experts as their higher demand in the market equates to higher remuneration. Moreover, the recruitment process of an entirely new team incurs additional costs. Hiring skilled Salesforce professionals requires an HR team that understands the nuances to assess these experts. Lack of such hiring competency results in the risk of the wrong hiring.

To overstep these uncertain and usually unbudgeted expenses, many businesses with Salesforce as their CRM go for managed services. Imagine it this way- if the overall cost of hiring additional resources and income loss due to downtime in an organization is more than the fees of a Salesforce managed service provider, then it is worth thinking about investing in the latter.

Optimizing Salesforce ROI by Collaborating with Managed Services Provider

Enterprises managing their Salesforce ecosystem single-handedly do realize the enormity of tasks involved while aligning the Salesforce instances with their evolving business operations. Collaborating with a reliable Salesforce admin managed services provider can drive business outcomes at the cost and speed they want, resulting in optimized ROI.

• I. Optimized Cost: Salesforce managed services bring in professionals for easy and efficient management of the Salesforce ecosystem at reduced operational costs. All overheads associated with hiring an entire team of Salesforce experts or training of in-house IT team, investments in tools, or deploying additional resources for complex upgrades are slashed. Additionally, businesses don’t have to worry about spiraling IT costs. Since most of the managed services partners operate via an easy-to-scale, pay-as-you-go model, enterprises only have to pay for the services they are utilizing.
• II. Focus on Core Business Operations: With Salesforce managed services in place, enterprises can shift the focus of their qualified employees and IT teams to value-generating activities. These services empower enterprises to utilize their workforce, money, and time on core business priorities and objectives. Moreover, the in-house IT team now has an extended branch in the form of certified professionals who can advise them on Salesforce-related roadmaps.
• III. Strategic Partnership Opportunities: Partnering with a Salesforce managed services provider opens new doors to strategic partnership opportunities that can accelerate an enterprise’s growth and innovation. Such collaborations with experienced professionals foster highly synergistic relationships and provide businesses an easy access to expertise, additional resources, and industry insights. These partnerships go beyond simple transactional engagements as they evolve into long-term alliances built on shared visions and mutual trust.
• IV. Compliance Management: Several industries like healthcare and finance have strict and highly dynamic regulatory compliance requirements. Through Salesforce managed services, these compliance criteria can be easily met within the time and budget. Partnering with a third-party vendor allows tailoring of these managed services to meet the business needs that include compliance as well. By utilizing resources that come with Salesforce managed services, the compliance processes can be standardized to avoid any penalties or other legal actions.
• V. Security-as-a-Service: With cyber-attacks and security breaches becoming superseding sophisticated, Salesforce managed services help businesses leverage the latest security features of Salesforce through regular updates and upgrades. It should be noted that data security is a paramount concern for Salesforce as the company frequently releases new security updates. Businesses can easily leverage these updates and add another defense layer to their CRM data, thus paving the way for more proactive and faster threat response. This helps enterprises anticipate and thwart cyberattacks and breaches in time.

Final Thoughts

As technology like Salesforce is becoming an integral part of each business, it is safe to say that the health of these platforms directly impacts the business’s health. In other words, optimizing Salesforce ROI translates into optimized business ROI, which makes managed services a strategic imperative. The more scalable, responsive, and flexible a Salesforce instance is, the more likely it is for businesses to achieve their goals. And embracing Salesforce managed services is one of the best approaches to ensure cost savings, improved efficiency, and a Salesforce instance that fits the business needs like a glove!