How Much CPQ Specialization is Too Much on an Internal Salesforce Team?

You shouldn’t NEED to rely on outside Consultants. You want to set strategy, design solutions, and build in-house.

Accomplishing this across your entire Internal Tools infrastructure requires specialization and you want to establish a high degree of knowledge in each tool and use case.

It’s why there are scenarios that call for external resources. CPQ is a big one.

• The platform has a high degree of complexity

• It will require heavy customization

• These projects will be very data intensive

• And it’s absolutely mission critical

Chances are you don’t have the degree of specialization needed to do it right. And even if you do, it will consume the full capacity of your team.

Nothing else will get done in that period. But that's not my main concern when I see a company with such a heavy emphasis on a single area of competency.

What happens when you specialize in just ONE area?

Salesforce at Qualys

An internal Salesforce team of 14 people + 3 on Financial Applications.

(2) Business Systems Leaders†

• Sr. Director, Enterprise Applications

• Head of CRM Application Engineering

† Both come from deep backgrounds in ERP and CPQ

Salesforce Administrators/Engineers†

†An interchangeable layer used for build (Apex, flows, config)

(1) Technical Business Analyst

Previously a Salesforce QA Engineer

(1) Product Lead (CPQ/Billing)

(1) Product Lead (CPQ/Billing)

(3) Finance Applications

• Sr. Manager, Finance Applications

• Principal QA Engineer

• Sr. QA Engineer

It’s a VERY back-office focused group. This may lead to world-class CPQ & Billing infrastructure.

But what about the front-office GTM Systems strategy?

• 400+ Sales Reps

• 125+ Support Reps

Core competencies within a Salesforce team are incredibly powerful and it enables you to handle complex work in those specific areas.

But the mandate of these teams is to go WIDE.

Sometimes that will mean not being able to go as deep in some areas. And that’s OK.

Companies should focus on a diverse background among Leaders, Architects, and PMs, allowing the organization to set the general product vision for all Internal Tools.

Then, bring in Specialists to fill in gaps wherever they exist - in some scenarios, you may have the general vision and need an outside Architect to fill in on the specific technical architecture; other cases, you may have a very capable Architect but could leverage Advisory Firms to collaborate with them on the broader planning.

External Consultants should be used upstream and downstream of your existing capabilities but you want team members in place capable of collaborating in that end-to-end journey.