Salesforce Investment: Is that a common statement you are hearing throughout your organization lately? Most likely, you are. Many of Salesforce clients are being told this due to the increasing pressure to maintain or reduce costs, while still driving business objectives forward.

If you are being challenged to address this issue, we recommend you start by looking at the following three key areas. Evaluating how your partners contribute to these factors will ultimately enable you to drive costs down and maximize your existing Salesforce licensing. Salesforce Investment

1. Investments & Cost Structure: Am I seeing creative investments from my partner and cost structures that expand the globe?

The right partner will proactively bring you unique engagement models that shift risks and costs to your partner while still allowing you to accomplish your business objectives. You should also be thinking about how you balance your cost structure by leveraging resources not just in the U.S. or India, but also in Latin America and the UK.

2. Extension of Existing Capabilities: Can I leverage existing capabilities we’ve built on the Salesforce platform to meet other business needs?

Evaluating how your current capabilities can benefit your roadmap is a great exercise that can provide a clearer picture of scope, time, cost, and risk of your planned roadmap. For example, those email capabilities you just built, they could easily extend to co-marketing opportunities with your distribution network. Or the new flows you just built could easily be copied or slightly modified to meet the next business process automation challenge on the roadmap. This is an analysis you and your partner who helped build these capabilities should already be doing.

3. Training & Enablement: Is my team adequately trained to understand, expand, and support our current and future needs on the Salesforce platform?

Leveraging your own full-time talent as opposed to partners for support, project, and/or program work is critical to balancing your risk and reducing your overall costs. To do so, you and your partner should be working together to incorporate co-development, peer reviews, personalized KT plans, shadowing opportunities, and other tactics that give you more leverage to quickly skill the right resources, with the right skillsets, for the right work.

We created the checklist below to make answering the above questions simple:

• Our partner is demonstrating quantifiable investments in our mutual success.
• We are leveraging resources from the U.S., Latin America, India, and the UK.
• We have mapped existing capabilities that can be leveraged to each effort on our current roadmap.
• We understand how we can connect existing capabilities we have throughout our Salesforce ecosystem.
• We understand what Salesforce skillsets I currently have and what I need in the future.
• Our partner has provided a combination of knowledge-sharing tactics that have enabled my team to skill up properly to support our Salesforce ecosystem.

If you cannot check all these items off the list right now, consider talking with one of our Salesforce experts to learn about how we can take your budget further than your current partner, while ensuring you are meeting your business objectives this year and next. Reach out to us today!