Hire vs. Outsource - What’s the Right Approach for Your Salesforce Build?

How to consider what the right move is for your organization.

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When you’ve reached the point where your Salesforce deployment needs more attention, there are a multitude of different paths forward to consider. Whether you have just completed an implementation, looking at expanding functionality, or everything is just a mess, the question will come up:  Do we hire our own admin full-time or outsource?

It’s an important consideration in terms of both time and budget.  Hiring a consulting company is often much quicker to implement, with a significant difference in overhead and management requirements.  Here are some main reasons why you should consider outsourcing your project versus a direct hire:

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Expertise and Specialization

An important first consideration is to think about both the breadth and depth of expertise and specialization that might be needed. With a direct hire, you get the full scope of that person’s experience. With a third-party, you can typically have the benefit of a much wider and deeper scope of expertise, as you can have multiple fractional resources with differing areas of expertise. They can bring  a variety of specializations that could be difficult to find in an individual hire. Whether it’s different cloud products, integration expertise, or expertise in product management, it’s good to think about the full scope of expertise you are looking for. 

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Cost

According to Glassdoor, the salary range for a Salesforce admin (as of February 2024) is $73K - $121K per year. Add in employer taxes and expenses, and you are looking at a significant investment. If you go third-party, you have the flexibility to right-size the resources you need. Many organizations are often caught in the “middle ground” of needing some help in maintaining and developing their org, but not enough to justify the expense of an FTE. This is the space where going third-party could start to make sense. In addition, your requirements or needs might exceed what can be expected of an admin. If you require developer, or even architect, level resources for more complex use cases, the salary ranges can quickly shoot into the stratosphere.

Flexibility and scalability

How much flexibility and scalability do you think your deployment requires? Some organizations have a fairly steady set of requirements that they don’t anticipate changing. Many organizations, however, might want to have the flexibility to scale way up or way down depending on internal or external factors. This is a lot tougher to do with direct hires, and usually no problem for third-party solutions.

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Speed and Efficiency

If you have immediate needs to be addressed or requirements you want delivered rapidly, a third-party solution is almost always going to have you a more rapid time-to-value versus a direct hire. External vendors are usually able to digest and jump in rapidly, and additionally have the ability to bring multiple resources to bring to bear if needed. And if a technical roadblock comes up, it’s often overcome much more rapidly with the breadth of knowledge that is available. 

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Risk Mitigation

With any investment, whether it be a direct hire or third-party, there is always consideration for the level of risk the business takes on with the investment. “Are we going to get what we need from this investment?” This is another place where a third-party can have and advantage. With any reputable third-party vendor or consultant, the work delivered should be warrantied and bring certain guarantees of delivery with it. The contract should (to oversimplify things) say you are paying us this amount to receive these things. A direct hire carries with it a much higher risk of not getting what you are expecting for the investment.  

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Training and Documentation

Many organizations are facing a business challenge that might need some help now, but they don’t necessarily need (or want) something full-time indefinitely. When considering a third-party vendor here, look for firms that don’t try to trap you into a consulting “doom loop.” Reputable vendors will look to solve your challenges and get you to the level of self-sufficiency you are looking for, not try to make you dependent on them forever. Additionally, you can have the flexibility of having your third party vendor produce full documentation and training for users, allowing you more self-sufficiency than you started with and providing you with long-term value that extends beyond the initial engagement. 

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In summary, most organizations will reach a point where they need more attention to their salesforce deployment. Often, the financial savings, flexibility, scalability, and risk mitigation makes looking at a third-party vendor very attractive before taking the full leap into hiring another full-time resource.