Yelp's Perfect Salesforce Team Structure

Yelp has 1 Admin per 600 users.

This should be chaos!

But they have the PERFECT team structure.

How on earth does Yelp support 3,000 users with 5 Salesforce Admins?

The Sales culture at Yelp is known to be epic.‍

It evolved as a high volume, churn, and burn environment.

• Yelp has 20MM accounts in Salesforce

• At times, adding 3,000 new accounts per day

• +250,000 tasks per day

• +1MM opportunities per month

I suspect there are data quality challenges and tech debt all over. BUT. They manage it with only 5 Salesforce Administrators.

WHAT 🤯

The key to a high-impact Salesforce team. Separate these 2 functions:

1. Strategy / Project Delivery

2. 2. Tactical / Day-to-Day

Here is how Yelp does it:

• A core Salesforce team of 30.

• A supporting cast of 18 Revenue Operations Specialist.

  • These are ex-Sellers and the day-to-day Salesforce liaisons for users.

  • They exist to focus on the end user experience.

  • While responding to ad hoc requests from the business.

These Specialists are a key unlock for the team structure. They take care of the business and respond to their every need.

Meanwhile, the Salesforce team is centralized in Technology and they are free to drive strategy and execute on the roadmap.

The structure of this team is even more interesting:

• 5 Salesforce Administrators

• 3 Salesforce Engineers

• 2 Salesforce Architects

• 13 Business Systems Analysts (!)

• 3 CRM Product Owners

• 1 Salesforce Engineering Manager

• 1 Director of Business Technology

👉 The Rev Ops Specialists alleviate the need for an army of Admins.

👉 A whopping 13 Business Analysts allow for proactive roadmap planning and a tight partnership with stakeholders.

👉 Meanwhile, the Architects and Product Owners have room to breathe and really focus on identifying problems and designing solutions.

The Business is supported and the Salesforce team can focus on real product strategy.

Want to learn how other Center of Excellence are built? Check out our gallery here.