If you have read our blog before, you will be aware of the fact that we believe in not wasting time, so here is the upfront conclusion: you should hire a Salesforce admin if you are using salesforce, period.

Too often, we have found that organizations select a worker at random, and this worker has the unpleasant task of managing the company’s salesforce.

If, instead, an organization decides to hire a salesforce admin, they can truly utilize the software to its maximum. 

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the industry’s favourite CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, and businesses use it to keep everything from their workflows to their customers.

Thus, Salesforce CRM holds your most important resource: your organizational data and information. 

This makes it imperative to have a person who can handle, analyze, troubleshoot and report effectively upon this data, to maximize your organization’s return on investment for the money spent on Salesforce CRM.

This article will highlight and outline the process to hire a Salesforce admin, the various salesforce admin duties, and the benefits of getting a salesforce administrator from the get-go.

Benefits of a Salesforce CRM administrator:

Hiring a salesforce administrator while the total number of Salesforce CRM users in your organization is relatively small has two titanic benefits, which are:

• Troubleshooting: If you hire a salesforce admin, it is within the scope of his or her duties to assist the team with any troubleshooting issues that the users of Salesforce CRM in your organization may face. 

Even if you look at the very, very short run, you immediately see the benefit of avoiding bottlenecks in the future or diluting any bottleneck backlogs that your organization may be facing at the moment.

• Training: Salesforce CRM administrators are also usually expected to assist the organization by training team members in the utilization, and proper use of the Salesforce CRM platform. 

This is done in order for the team members to be able to maximize their output with salesforce CRM. This initial investment pays off many-fold in the long run, with the team members’ expertise building exponentially over time, which in turn results in smoother workflows.

These experienced members can then train in, and introduce other newer users to Salesforce CRM, potentially drastically reducing the number of Salesforce administrators your organization will need to hire as you expand, scale, and grow your business.

What is a salesforce administrator expected to do?

Some of the most important and useful duties of the salesforce administrator(s) of your organization are given below. 

Here are the seven most important salesforce admin duties:

1. User Account Management: This includes the setting up of new Salesforce CRM accounts, management and transfer of existing Salesforce CRM user accounts, resetting passwords for team members, and so on.

2. Data Manipulation: Your salesforce CRM admin will also be responsible for data analysis, data manipulation, and data distribution. This process includes things like:

• Adding “white” (allowed/ privileged/ authorized) IP addresses to the system database, 

• Storing and executing the data and data snapshots, including the creation and offline (local) storage of backups on a consistent basis.

• Helping your organization’s Salesforce CRM users out with the creation of customized, event-specific or target-specific reports as and when these are deemed necessary.

3. Security: The salesforce administrator will also be responsible for handling all matters related to security, such as the implementation of 2FA (Two Factor Authentication), SSO (Single Sign On), and things such as account retrieval.

4. Troubleshooting: Salesforce CRM users report that their main qualms and problems with Salesforce are autoresponders, workflow management and creation, approval cycles and email campaign-related issues – a salesforce administrator will be able to iron out these processes to ensure a smooth workflow for your Salesforce CRM users.

5. Tool execution and deployment: The salesforce administrator will also be responsible for the timely deployment and efficient utilization of tools such as the following:

• Those for data extraction, 

• Those for the timetabling of APEX cues,

• Those For data de-duplication and anti-duplication,

• Deploying adoption dashboards within Salesforce CRM,

• Running tools to create and analyze monthly (or otherwise scheduled) field reports.

6. Updation: It is the prerogative of the salesforce administrator to decide when to update the system, and what updates are necessary, urgent, important, and also those that are not needed. The salesforce administrator will be the one who actually installs the updates too, in most organizations.

7. Archival Tasks: One of the main salesforce admin duties is the creation, management, filing, organization, and maintenance of the salesforce CRM data archives of your organization. 

This includes the creation of local as well as cloud backups to reduce the possibilities of data loss in the case of any emergencies or malfunctions. 

The main archival tasks of the salesforce administrator are the initiation of an archive to house the field reports of all the data trails that are within the organization. 

This in turn will result in fluid audit trails for the enterprise, which saves everyone a lot of time and headache – no one wants to be spending their time crunching numbers while being audited.

Lastly, the archival tasks of your salesforce administrator will also be inclusive of the extremely important (and often overlooked) aspect of the archival of your Salesforce chatter histories (chatter is a real-time in-app collaboration add-on), which is frequently needed for regulatory, auditing, and transparency compliance purposes.

Remember: When Hiring A Salesforce Administrator

Here are the five top tips that you must keep in mind when considering hiring a salesforce administrator:

1. Consider Outsourcing: In the digital age that all of us are currently living in, no employee in the IT sector comes without a hefty price tag. 

According to Indeed, Talent.Com and Payscale.Com, Salesforce administrators who have 3- 5 years of experience under their belt will have a minimum asking of USD 90,000 per annum, on top of benefits such as a 401k. 

In such a market, going with remote outsourcing to hire a salesforce admin can shave off a lot of the costs. 

Remote outsourcing your salesforce CRM needs also has the added benefit of opening up to you a truly global talent pool, wherein there are no restrictions based upon geography.

2. Do Not Neglect Soft Skills: Your Salesforce administrators will be dealing with all your team members on a daily basis, so soft skills such as interpersonal communication and patience with non-technical team members is of utmost importance.

3. Try To Allow Flexible Working Hours: If you hire your salesforce CRM personnel remotely, then it is a given that you should be willing to allow flexi-work hours, given that your team may be in a different time zone (not compulsory though — many remote workers prefer to match your time frames for work hours too).

However, even if your hire physical, full-time workers, allowing flexible work hours is shown to have a positive impact, according to these articles by Forbes:

• Work Flexibility Is The Most Important Leadership Skill, According To Research
• New Data Proves Flexible Work Really Works: 7 Factors For Success
• Why Flexible Work Boosts Employee Productivity

This is why it is advisable to try and allow your workforce (not just the IT part) to keep their own working hours (within limits of course), but this is another topic, for another article.

4. Test The Automation Prowess of Candidates: This is said to be the most technically demanding part of being a salesforce administrator, so it is always an excellent idea to ask your potential salesforce administrators to demonstrate their automation capabilities, practically.

5. Give Due Weightage To Candidates with Certifications in Salesforce: Without saying, if any of the applicants you end up considering offering a position in your company have a certification in (or from) Salesforce CRM, they should be given more weightage than those candidates who do not have such certifications.

Their certifications need to be treated as a hallmark of proof that they do possess a running and working knowledge of Salesforce CRM and will be able to handle even the most demanding tasks.

Closing Notes

Salesforce CRM is an amazing piece of software that has the potential to give us a many-fold return on your investment within itself, but for this we need to also hire proper staff who will be able to utilize the resource that is Salesforce CRM to its full potential.

That is why it is an industry best practice to hire a salesforce admin from the outset, in order to avoid things such an data misprocessing/ loss, and process backlogs and the like.

We hope that this article has been useful to you in some way, and we’ll see you in the next one.

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