How do you build a high performance Salesforce team?

Talent Hub recently met with Morvana Warrington of Anne Street Partners to get her thoughts on the skill sets and personalities required to build a high performance Salesforce Team.

Morvana is an experienced, best practice Salesforce.com Consultant who manages the Salesforce platform and team at Anne Street Partners. Morvana has several years experience delivering successful end-to-end Salesforce transformation projects across clients within financial services, media, non-profit and startups.

To read Morvana’s summaries on recent projects you can take a look at her personal blog: http://morvana8.wordpress.com/

 

 How did you find your way into Salesforce?

I came to Australia in 2005 – one of many job interviews happened to be at Salesforce.com

Salesforce had just setup an office in Sydney and had begun a recruitment drive to find people capable of helping them get established. I stayed there for almost 4 years selling, mentoring the younger team members and absorbing the intensive; continuous training and best practices on how businesses can get the most out of Salesforce. As part of the induction they send you to 3 week boot camp in San Francisco – not only did I have the best time – (the people are super friendly) – it was the highest quality new recruit training I’ve experienced since or prior.

Salesforce themselves use their own product to run their business globally and it was inspiring to see how they use Salesforce to achieve operational excellence, in particular their sales and support process runs like a well-oiled machine.

Once I left and used Salesforce at other companies I realised that companies had not always achieved the same benefits and results, and companies felt unsupported in their journey to make Salesforce work for their unique business.

Seeing this led me to pursue a career where I could help teams and companies harness the power of Salesforce using best practice techniques and match business needs to Salesforce capability more accurately.

This is when I decided to become an independent Salesforce consultant.

 

How do you feel a Salesforce team should be structured and why?

At the moment my belief is the most successful Salesforce teams will be those who can operate within agile/scrum approach – a methodology we lived by in the project team at News Corp and a method I’ve since implemented at Anne Street Partners.

The pace of business change, tight project deadlines and new tech releases – makes agile/scrum the only feasible way to gather requirements and deliver in a time-frame expedient enough to realise the benefits. For us it’s living in a mode of delivering minimum viable solutions on a daily basis, and sharpening those solutions when you have moments of down-time.

Retaining and hiring an appropriate Salesforce team is in itself no small feat. There is and continues to be a very small pool of experts in Sydney, however it’s getting better. I’d say for any company: a business analyst / reporting analyst, good quality Salesforce admin, a change manager, a consultant (contractor) for complex implementations or transformations and one or two developers is a minimum. You need a team like this (especially if you growing to over 50 users) to maximise how much you’re getting from your salesforce investment.

The Salesforce resource pool is a tight knit group but also a group that could theoretically pick and choose their favourite projects and be discerning about involvement in teams, companies and projects that are not positioned for success.

The wrong balance between BA’s and developers or where the size of the team slows down transition time or business stakeholders are too distant or too close to contribute effectively – are all reasons the dynamic can fail.

The demands companies place on Salesforce are high and complex. Salesforce as a system can deliver many requirements – but can the team you have in place deliver these requirements and can they do it accurately and rapidly? Companies of all sizes are increasingly expecting complex integration with Salesforce and other systems. This requires a deeply experienced and skilled team, with back-end and front-end skill-sets.

On the question of how big does a company need to be before a dedicated Salesforce resource is required; depends a little on how far you want to push the Salesforce envelope, how much does your company ‘lean’ on Salesforce automation like workflow rules? Alerts? Coding?. Automation saves time but also creates a heavy maintenance footprint each time your business rules shift.

KEY NOTE: The more complex your setup of Salesforce – the more you’ll have to invest in a salesforce team to maintain and nurture it regardless of company size.

 

In your experience is the skillset the major importance or is the personality and work style as important?

Personality and professionalism are equally important. We invest in people who can handle a fluid set of priorities and who are keen to continuously learn new things. But also teams need to be able to blend well with open dialogue as with agile/scrum everyone helps each other out and everyone needs to have the confidence and drive to take the lead whenever it makes sense.

Leadership to me (although I’m new to management) is more about supporting and removing obstacles and keeping communication high and frequent. People do amazing work if you can remove unnecessary ‘office politics/corporate hoop jumping’ and non-value activities and support them to do work they love to do. And everyone in the team is a leader, their leading their own destiny in tandem with accomplishing what we need to achieve as a whole.

 

We regularly see clients in the market bringing on Salesforce Developers without putting them through a rigorous technical test as they don’t have the knowledge in house to design and score a test. As someone who comes from a functional background but hires Developers, what advice would you have for people in this situation?

At Anne Street Partners – one of the techniques we’ve used is to bring the prospective developer into our office for two days. And during the two days we gave them a number of real-life coding challenges to tackle. The expectation being for the candidate to then produce a report at the end of the two days on how they would solve the challenges. This worked extremely well and we gained a highly valuable resource that we love having on our team.

 

In your opinion, what makes a good:

 

Salesforce Developer

In general a good balance of technical knowledge, communication skills and work ethic, has a config before coding approach to solutions.

 

But it depends on the business requirements, one type of developer may not fit a particular business and the type of salesforce implementation they have or want.

 

At Anne Street Partners we have a lot of data integration needs, but also UI and Process Builder transformation, so we’ve selected one developer with a background in both HTML / web design and apex, and one developer who’s more of a data / agile / solution architect. This mix of backgrounds suits our Salesforce roadmap.

                                                                                  

Salesforce Consultant

Ability to understand and add value to all business, process, functional and technical conversations. Good visionary and strategic brain. Deep functional / capability knowledge. Able to mediate between the business and vendors for best outcomes, able to manage sprints, understand agile, project manage, very broad knowledge of all technology (not just Salesforce), can keep stakeholders advised and happy

 

Salesforce Administrator

Passion for salesforce and what it can do, keen to learn (IT support types can easily pick this role up if a mentor available)

 

What advice would you give to a company who are looking to build an in house Salesforce team?

Talk to a Salesforce Consultant first about your journey so far and what you’d like to achieve in the future (roadmap), provide them an orientation of your Salesforce system or current systems – they’ll be able to advise on team skill-set and resources required.