When you need to cut back on staff (but not on skills) with Salesforce

In this difficult economic landscape, organizations everywhere are making cutbacks. That can mean scaling back spending and even letting employees go. No business wants to make these incredibly hard decisions but sometimes they’re unavoidable. Often the need to cut back on staff leaves mainly the core revenue earners, with those in supporting roles facing the bulk of redundancies.

Technical specialists sometimes fall into this category. However, if you do unfortunately have to make such reductions, there’s an important consideration. How do you ensure you can keep your vital Salesforce^® tools and services maintained and running smoothly, and you don’t fall behind technologically?

In this article, I’ll suggest some ways you can keep your team supported with a solid technology foundation — and do so cost-effectively, in line with today’s economic realities. 

A Salesforce Partner can play an important role

If your organization has already engaged the services of a Salesforce Partner, you’ll know some of the ways they can help you make the most of your technology. Optimizing solutions, improving user experience, fixing any bugs that may appear, ensuring security updates are performed — all these and more. However, it’s during the harder times that a capable partner can deliver perhaps their greatest value, in ways you may not have previously considered. 

A Salesforce Partner can have a vital supporting role if you need to fill newly-created skills gaps, or your company needs technical expertise on hand but doesn’t want the cost of increasing your headcount. If your partner offers Salesforce managed services and outsourcing, and has the necessary experts and capacity, they can provide the experts you need reliably, flexibly and cost-effectively.

How managed services help keep costs down 

According to a 2022 report from Research and Markets, recent years have seen a huge increase in adoption of managed services, and their forecast indicates this will only grow in future. Their research estimates that “successful deployment of managed services will help reduce IT cost by 25-45% and increase operational efficiency by 45-65%”. Compelling stats, but you may be wondering how managed services actually provide these benefits in reality. 

Hiring dedicated in-house staff with technical expertise can be expensive — especially those with the necessary skills in a particular technology, such as Salesforce. With a managed service provider, organizations can keep their headcounts and associated costs low because the partner’s services replace the need to hire multiple roles. And unlike with in-house hires, you can scale your managed services investment up or down flexibly and responsively, according to your needs — and without affecting your operations . 

Furthermore, unlike in-house personnel, or contracted freelancers, a Salesforce Partner’s experts will be sure to have the range and depth of skills needed. They also won’t have their attention inevitably diverted toward the organization’s other technology-related matters. All of these things mean they can have a bigger impact on evolving and shaping your Salesforce solution for greater efficiency and usefulness. 

Outsourcing specific skill-sets flexibly on demand 

Sometimes you may need more specific, ultra-specialized skill-sets and a full, dedicated resource for a certain period of time. That’s when the right Salesforce Partner will be able to provide another very valuable service. If they offer IT outsourcing services, they will be able to deliver outsourced developers, architects and other skilled professionals to meet your needs as work and demands fluctuates — for instance, when you want to embark on a new internal/customer project. You might need help with a technology you’ve never worked with before, like Heroku or Mulesoft, or maybe it’s a new part of Salesforce’s offering such as B2C Marketing Cloud. Perhaps you’re developing or launching a new product that uses Salesforce — in which case, a partner that is a Product Development Outsourcer (PDO) can be invaluable. Whatever you’re lacking, your partner should be able to step in and help. 

You can outsource specialists for a short or long duration — however long you need them — to work with your in-house team until the project is completed. It’s much more cost-effective than finding and hiring (or contracting) such experts yourself, as there’s no salaries and employee benefits to pay or long-term commitments to make. And, of course, just finding the right people can be a long and laborious process for your staff  — and their time is your organization’s money. 

When you outsource these skill-sets from a Salesforce Partner, you can be sure that the people you get will be able to meet your expectations fully, instead of taking a gamble on the labor market. A truly worthwhile partner will even give you the opportunity to interview and vet candidates yourself, so your team can be satisfied they’re absolutely sure they’re suitable. 

Supporting you with our Salesforce managed services and outsourcing

To paraphrase the saying, “cometh the hour, cometh the partner”. We want to help your organization to thrive during tough times as well as the easier ones — and we know that VRP Consulting is the ideal Salesforcer Partner to do that. 

VRP has a deep bench of experts around the world, with local client-facing teams in EMEA, the UK and North America, and delivery hubs at scale in Europe and Asia. Our Managed Services practice offers flexible packages starting at just 20 hours a month, with rollover hours to ensure you’re making full use of your investment. We can even provide optional 24/7 “follow-the-sun” support if you need it. 

You can trust and rely on the expertise of our Salesforce managed services and outsourcing. VRP is an award-winning Salesforce Partner —  winner of the 2022 and 2020 Salesforce Partner Innovation award — and one of only 22 Salesforce Managed Services Navigator Experts worldwide. We’re also Salesforce-recognized experts in PDO, the Customer 360 Platform and more. 

So, if you find your business needs to make some hard choices, and you have to cut back on staff or spending, we’re here to move forward with you and help ensure you have everything you need for success. Just get in touch if you’d like to discuss it. 

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About the Author

Wojciech Malinowski

Chief Operating Officer, VRP Consulting

Wojciech is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of VRP Consulting, based in our Krakow office. He is responsible for back office operations for all our delivery hubs, including HR, RPD, IT & Compliance as well as Delivery.