How to Close Your Salesforce Skills Gaps

Staff augmentation? New FTE? Systems integrator? See how they all stack up.

The Salesforce^® skills gap is real, and it’s casting a long shadow.

Demand for Salesforce talent is up 364% YoY since 2020,¹ and the Salesforce economy is projected to create 9.3 million jobs and $1.56 trillion in new business revenues by 2026.²

That’s a lot of demand and a lot of competition for Salesforce expertise, before you’ve even considered sourcing and retention challenges. So what’s the best way to close the Salesforce skills gaps in your organization? Analyzing potential solutions and selection criteria can help you make an informed decision.

Solution Options: A Four-Pronged Fork in the Road

We recommend Rimini Street managed services for Salesforce, but there are other options. Three of them are:

Temporary staff augmentation
Hiring new full-time employees (FTEs)
External systems integrators

Each can have pros and cons, depending on your organization’s needs, budget, and timelines. To evaluate the alternatives, it’s important to determine your selection criteria. What is most important to you? How many boxes — and which boxes — must your winning solution check off? Let’s take a look.

Decision Criteria

Your organization’s decision criteria will be unique, but it will likely include a combination of:

Breadth of provider expertise and skill including domain experience, delivery capacity, and ability to backfill
Level of service excellence including scope of services, tools, responsiveness, availability, and knowledge management
Benefits of the provider’s support model including incentive to deliver excellence, scalability, pricing model and cost, and retention challenges

Another factor to consider is the relationship focus of the provider’s support model, including the provider’s relationship with Salesforce, relationship with you, and the presence — or not — of an engaged account lead and service delivery lead. Does the relationship feel like a partnership, or does it feel transactional?

Jeremy Muldoon, Salesforce solution architect at Rimini Street, advises, “In order to achieve better business outcomes with Salesforce, you need to align your Salesforce support services model with your business objectives and organizational roadmap so you can continue to both operate and innovate on the platform.”

Comparing Solution Options and Decision Criteria

Figures 1-3 show solution options mapped to certain decision criteria: expertise, service excellence, and support model benefits, based on Rimini Street experience.

Regarding expertise, it should be noted that given Salesforce’s diverse and ever-growing product portfolio, a new FTE’s expertise would likely be continuously decreasing relative to the ongoing evolution of the Salesforce platform.

Expertise and Service Excellence

Expertise and Benefits of Support Model

Service Excellence and Benefits of Support Model

Aside from the relative comparisons in Figures 1-3, there are specific limitations of the staff augmentation, new FTE, and systems integrator Salesforce support models.

Staff Augmentation: Typical Limitations At-A-Glance

Single resource with limited skillset
Reactive service
Availability limited to business hours
Costly hourly rates
High turnover in the Salesforce ecosystem

Hiring an FTE: Typical Limitations At-A-Glance

Single resource with limited skillset because Salesforce platform continually evolves
Service based on capacity and priority
Availability limited to business hours
A costly resource
Support may not be a core competency
High turnover in the Salesforce ecosystem

Systems Integrators: Typical Limitations At-A-Glance

Junior-level skillset
Reactive service
Availability limited to business hours
Costly, unpredictable bucket of service hours
Support is not a core competency

Rimini Street Managed Services for Salesforce At-A-Glance

Rimini Street delivers premium managed services and benefits that the other potential Salesforce support models may not, including:

A strategic partnership with you
Responsive application services, proactive services, and critical production support
An expert team led by a customer success manager and a service delivery manager
A team incentivized based on client satisfaction
A fixed annual price with an unlimited consumption services model
24/7/365 follow-the-sun availability
Best-in-class service level agreements (SLAs)
Scalability
Documented and transferable knowledge management
Partnership with Salesforce