Six tips for supporting Salesforce with a small team

Providing strong internal Salesforce support can make a pivotal impact on the platform’s success in your organization. Maintaining a squeaky clean database and leveraging the full value Salesforce provides are important tasks for your Salesforce Administrator. A Salesforce Administrator supports your team by adding new users, implementing new functionality for stakeholders and making updates after the three major releases each year. And, for most teams, supporting Salesforce is just one of many priorities.

Depending on the number of users you have; the products you have installed; and the size of your database, you may need one or more full-time administrators. These admins typically play a critical role in growing sales considering their importance in maintaining the sales CRM database.

The tips below can help you with supporting Salesforce effectively and efficiently while keeping within a limited budget.

1. Create a Salesforce roadmap

Stakeholders usually believe their needs deserve urgent attention. But handling larger projects or small requests ad hoc places added pressure on your team and hinders delivery on other priorities. We recommend building a Salesforce roadmap—a list of Salesforce initiatives with milestones and deployment dates.

The plan should have a sign-off from the executive team. Share it widely throughout the office. If someone approaches with a new development ask, you will have a roadmap to work from and can more easily assess your team’s bandwidth.

2. Use Cases as an internal help desk

Cases, a standard object within Salesforce, can work well as an internal support portal, allowing your team to organize, escalate and prioritize tickets all within Salesforce. Internal users can create cases manually or by emailing a designated support address through a feature called Email-to-Case.

Priority and Type are standard fields on the Cases object. You can add custom values to the Type field to match users’ concern areas (e.g. accessing reports, lead conversion, data quality). Also, you can easily create reports to track Case volume or productivity.

3. Supplement internal resources with a support services provider

Supporting Salesforce users can be made easier with help from a consulting partner. Support Services, provided by a partner, can boost your internal bandwidth by providing remote Salesforce admin support on a month-to-month basis.  Most providers support day-to-day tasks like adding users or creating custom fields as well as larger requests involving data migration, rolling out new releases, or creating custom dashboards.

This option is ideal for teams that don’t require a full-time admin or teams that are unable to find a qualified candidate in their area.

4. Take advantage of Salesforce optimizer

Salesforce Optimizer is a free tool for Professional and Enterprise level accounts. The feature provides optimization tips through a custom report tailored to your org.  The report highlights unused functionality, provides tips for deploying new releases or Lightning migration and details current usage of Salesforce features.

This resource explains how to run Salesforce Optimizer in your org.

5. Host internal user training sessions

Internal users can resolve more of their own issues when they have adequate training. Hosting internal sessions can help lower ticket backlogs while boosting adoption and user engagement.

Training sessions should cater to employee roles. So, the session for the sales team would include the lead conversion process and accessing reports on the opportunity-pipeline. The session for customer service reps would focus on organizing cases and accessing contacts’ opportunity history.

Trailhead can serve as a resource for building training content. Salesforce product experts provide instructional content for multiple user roles and experience levels. The resources can work well in a group presentation or be used for individual training.

6. Ask for help

If you’re constantly spinning your wheels on best practices in Salesforce; database management; or even everyday functions, there are many support options available. Turn to the Success Community for quick answers from other users; consider Premier Support; or enlist a consulting company to build a support package that meets your needs and budget. Hiring a consultant who has worked with similar organizations can help you rapidly achieve your goals in a cost-effective way.

Many companies choose to hire a consultant to manage ongoing Salesforce maintenance, configuration, and support. Supporting your internal Salesforce users can help improve CRM adoption and ROI. Read about why support services might be right for you.

About the author

Spencer Pereira has a degree in integrated marketing communications and writing. He has worked in various marketing roles at Google and Valmont Industries.