Achieve Outstanding CRM Administration

• Finding the right person(s)
• Investing in your administrator(s)
• Providing adequate staffing
• Getting help from Salesforce

• A solid understanding of your business processes
• Knowledge of the organizational structure and culture to help build relationships with key groups
• Excellent communication, motivational, and presentation skills
• The desire to be the voice of the user in communicating with management
• Analytical skills to respond to requested changes and identify customizations

• In small businesses, the role of the administrator is not necessarily a full-time position. In the initial stages of the implementation, the role requires more concentrated time (about 50 percent). After go-live, managing Salesforce CRM day to day requires much less time (about 10–25 percent)
• If you have several business units that use Salesforce CRM solutions—such as sales, marketing, support, professional services, and so on—consider using separate administrators for each group, to spend between 50–100 percent of their time supporting their solutions.
• Another common practice for large implementations is to use “delegated administrators” for specific tasks such as managing users, managing custom objects, or building reports.
• If you operate in multiple geographic regions, consider using one administrator for each major region, such as North America, EMEA, and APAC. To decide how to classify regions, consider whether they have a distinct currency, language, business processes, and so on, and train your administrators in the multicurrency and multilanguage features. Also appoint a lead analyst or administrator who will coordinate the various regions.
• If you need customization beyond the metadata (click not code) capabilities of Salesforce CRM or want to develop new applications, you may also need a developer to create, test, and implement custom code.