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What is a Fractional Salesforce Admin?
You bought Salesforce to improve your business operations. It offers the potential to unify Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success into a single, unified one Rev Ops channel, which delivers incredible data visibility and operational efficiency.
But Salesforce CRM isn’t cheap — and it’s most valuable when highly customized to your business, which makes it even more expensive to implement and maintain (depending on your business needs).
The solution is fractional Salesforce Consultants. By allowing companies to pay only for productive hours worked, this model is the only way to cost-efficiently maximize your Salesforce operations.
Companies have never been more motivated to make every hiring dollar count. In our current economic climate, there is no justification for any wasted hiring budget or staff hours. Today, we’re explaining exactly how you can use fractional consultants to get the best possible ROI from your Salesforce development strategy.
The idea behind fractional resourcing is simple. Instead of full-time employees (FTEs), you’ll hire part-time consultants to work on nearly any part of your Salesforce ecosystem.
Because these consultants are external Contractors, they’re paid only by active, productive hours worked. Fractional Consultants charge a slightly higher hourly rate than an equivalent FTE salary but much lower than a Consulting Partner — and represent massive overall cost savings, either way.
Examples
A Salesforce Administrator's fully loaded FTE cost (salary, benefits, payroll tax, PTO, bonuses/stock) is $150,000+ per year
That same Salesforce Admin as a Freelancer costs $85-$120 per hour
Want to check out more consultant hourly rates? Check out this page.
Ultimately, the goal is to assemble a pipeline of qualified Consultants who will be available and on call as needs and demands arise. Like an on-demand Salesforce expert ready to go. You can work with these fractional consultants on an ongoing part-time basis, known as Managed Services, or bring them in Ad Hoc for special demands, projects or a customized solution.
FoundHQ specializes in connecting companies with vetted Salesforce Consultants in both capacities.
Benefits of a Fractionalized Salesforce Admin
The more advanced and customized your Salesforce instance is, the more value it will generate for your company. But these systems come with a much greater cost and labor burden to implement and maintain.
Salesforce is an expensive tool. But there’s a reason companies rely on it — a high level of data management is now critical to meet business goals and compete. The automation that the Salesforce platform enables organizations with is almost unmatched.
Because it’s such an integral part of a company’s infrastructure, teams should expect to need 4-5 skill sets, if not more, to manage your Salesforce org, especially if it spans multiple Salesforce solutions. You need more resources if you’re managing Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud in the same company.
And yet, there’s no guarantee you’ll have full-time work available every week, from all of these competencies. That’s why working with fractional consultants is so powerful — you’ll pay only for the work you need done, and nothing more.
Working with fractional Salesforce Consultants means one thing — less wasted money and time.
Companies are facing unprecedented challenges around access to resources and capital. They can’t afford to waste a single productive hour; every dollar invested into Salesforce must translate into increased revenue.
If companies want to maintain their Salesforce architecture in this environment, fractional resourcing is one of the only realistic solutions. It’s an incredibly precise model that allocates productive hours (and budget) only when and where they are needed, leading to a myriad of benefits:
Cost Efficiency
The alternative to fractional consultants is, of course, full-time employees or external contracting vendors.
Since employees come with obvious costs like healthcare benefits and bonuses, partners might seem like the obvious solution. But both employees and partners share a critical problem — lack of transparency around what’s getting done.
It’s notoriously difficult to understand the actual productive hours you’re getting from a salaried employee. With partners, who typically work from flat project fees or monthly retainers, the return on investment is even vaguer.
By contrast, you’ll pay fractional consultants only for the productive hours worked — and you can see exactly what was done with those hours, right down to 5-minute intervals.
Flexibility, Scalability, and Expertise
Cost isn’t the only advantage of working with fractional consultants, though it might be the most compelling.
Like other consultant and contractor models, fractional offers greater flexibility, scalability, and access to high-quality talent who’d be otherwise unavailable.
Flexibility: Easily scale up or down your consultant’s workload as needed. Bring in (and move on from) new skill sets, as your own needs and strategies change.
Expertise: Hire the best contractor for the task at hand, rather than ‘making it work’ with the talent you have in-house.
Broader talent pool: There are more Salesforce experts looking for freelance work than there are looking for full-time positions. Marketplaces like FoundHQ make it easy to connect with this wealth of talent — and have the knowledge to source it from all over the world.
Who should hire Salesforce Admin Consultants?
Hiring multiple FTEs for Salesforce alone can feel like a pipe dream at smaller and mid-sized businesses.
Obviously, resource constraints are nothing new, especially for startups and smaller organizations. But today, budgets are squeezed even tighter. Every hour and dollar spent is being scrutinized to make sure it delivers measurable ROI.
That’s why fractional consultants are such a good fit for startups and mid-market companies.
If you need multiple skill sets but the hiring budget is limited, there’s only one solution: engage the same number of people for a smaller number of hours.
Of course, enterprise Salesforce teams can use fractional Salesforce consultants, too. But in these situations, the best use-case is typically fractional advisors or strategic consultants. These qualified contractors can support CIOs and other leaders with planning for large-scale projects instead of executing day-to-day management and maintenance.
Tips for Engaging Part-Time Salesforce Admins
For most small and mid-market companies, fractional Salesforce consulting is a better model. But it still needs to be approached carefully for best results.
Here are the best practices to follow as you plan your fractional Salesforce strategy.
Combine Fractional Admins and FTEs
Many companies worry about constantly cycling through consultants, wasting time in repeated onboarding, and failing to build niche knowledge of their organization and industry.
But our own domain expertise has revealed something surprising: at many organizations, turnover among consultants is lower than in-house employees.
Generally, it does make sense to retain a small number of Salesforce FTEs. But these employees are well-supplemented by fractional contractors — and companies are often surprised at just how strong and long-lasting consultant relationships can be.
Employees provide the institutional knowledge, while experienced consultants support and execute their plans. And you retain the ability to move on from consultants, and seek out new competencies as your in-house needs change.
Plan the Work
The advantage of fractional consulting is to only pay for productive hours. But unless you hire a fractional advisor, you need to determine the desired outcomes and goals. The consultant’s job is to show up, follow directions, and do the work established in the roadmap.
Before bringing on a fractional Salesforce consultant, plan exactly what needs to be done. Of course, many companies need assistance with the planning itself — which is the perfect use case for a fractional advisor or strategist. These folks have a bit more years of experience and can guide you through your decision-making process.
Measure and Monitor Output
There is a tradeoff to paying only for productive hours — per hour, you’re paying slightly more for a consultant compared to an FTE.
That investment will (more than) balance out. But companies should still carefully assess how consultants are spending their allotted time. Ensure that tasks and processes are getting done on a timeline that aligns with your expectations.
Clarify Expectations
A fractional consultant will feel embedded in your organization in many of the same ways an employee would — they’ll use your project management tools like Asana or Jira, and be reachable by typical channels like email, Slack, and Zoom.
But one key difference is that you cannot expect the same availability and response times from someone who isn’t engaged full-time.
When onboarding your fractional consultants, set clear standards around how soon they’re expected to reply to messages (like 24 or 48 hours) and when they need to be online and available.
Getting Started with Fractional Salesforce Admins
This is the most common starting point for companies interested in leveraging part-time or fractional Salesforce Consultants.
There are a variety of scenarios and use cases the model works well - based on our experience helping hundreds of companies engage Salesforce Consultants, these are the most common situations to look at a part-time Salesforce Admin:
Part-Time Solo Salesforce Admin.
Tons of startups get stuck in the messy middle with Salesforce, which we define as the point where Revenue Operations teams don't have the capacity or capability to deliver what's needed in Salesforce.
For some, you're at the point where you should hire a full-time Salesforce Admin. Before making that commitment, though, you want to make sure you have a clear understanding of what needs to be done, not only today but 9-12 months from now.
Many just need a set of experienced hands and don't require an FTE just yet. You bring on a fractional Salesforce Admin with experience working at your exact stage of growth. They collaborate with Rev Ops to execute on the priorities and make recommendations on how to better utilize and build.
Hiring a Specialized Salesforce Admin
This applies to companies that have internal Salesforce Administrators and those with no team.
As you encounter initiatives or projects that call for a specific type of Salesforce experience, leveraging Contractors is an easy, low commitment way to bring on the knowledge you need. Obviously, if you're implementing a new product from the ground up, you want to go in the direction of Managed Services.
But if you just need to make some modifications to Salesforce CPQ, fix that integration with Marketo, or deploy more straightforward add-ons like Salesloft then a fractional Admin is a good way to handle these one-time projects.
A Salesforce Admin to Boost Capacity
This is common in scenarios when you have more work to be done than your current team can support or you need to quickly backfill a Salesforce Admin that left the team.
FoundHQ typically goes from Project Kickoff to Contractor Start in 7-10 business days, so there are few options that deliver capacity faster than with Contractors.
Situations where you know what needs to be done are very different than scenarios requiring a Consulting Firm.
You don't want a lengthy SOW process and a bloated discovery phase just to get the execution done.
Plugging in Contractors means the actual production starts on day 1.
FoundHQ Customers Hiring Fractional Admins
G2
Objective: Find 2 Salesforce CPQ Administrators to help during a revamp.
G2 already leveraged Salesforce CPQ but was undergoing a revamp to their renewals process.
They have an experienced Director of GTM Systems in place, capable of setting the strategy and architecture for the initiative but lacked the horsepower needed to deliver.
The main areas that needed additional capacity:
Salesforce CPQ Admin/Developer to help with some of the custom development and workflow automation, a skill set they don't yet need on the team full-time.
CPQ Data Analyst to handle clean up across thousands of legacy records and deals.
The project timeline was fairly contained in scope, so they engaged 2 Contractors for an 8 week sprint with each individual working ~20 hous per week through completion.
FoundHQ Time to Deliver: Kickoff to Start Date in 14 Days
Schedule a kickoff call with the FoundHQ team. This will be a high-level introduction to your Salesforce org, a discussion of the current support services you have in place, and an evaluation of the ongoing support you need.
AuditBoard
AuditBoard is a high-growth, Series B SaaS startup with a relatively established internal GTM Systems team, including a Director, a Salesforce Architect, and 2 Administrators.
They initially came to FoundHQ for a 10 hour per week Salesforce Administrator to help with ad hoc request in Sales Cloud. This individual has been embedded in their team - on a part-time basis for the past 2+ years.
During an overhaul to their CPQ instance, they engaged a Salesforce CPQ Administrator since their 2 internal Admins lacked CPQ expertise.
This individual worked in a 30 hour per week capacity during the key delivery phase before tapering down to fractional, ad hoc support at a 5-10 hour per week utilization level.
CommerceIQ
This is perhaps the most common use case we see, particularly from startups.
CommerceIQ hired a new Director of Revenue Operations, who stepped into a company with no internal Salesforce expertise.
These situations present immense challenges because Rev Ops has no ability to implement the strategy they were brought in to set.
Immediately upon joining, she came to FoundHQ to identify a Lead Salesforce Admin, someone capable of working with stakeholders as a Business Analyst, proactively recommending features and opportunities to evolve Salesforce, and serving in a hands-on delivery role.
This Contractor will remain an embedded member of the CommerceIQ team, potentially indefinitely.
Altana AI
Objective: Engage a Salesforce Admin to handle urgent work then help plan roadmap.
Altana is a relatively early-stage SaaS startup with ~30 Sales Reps total.
Initially, the VP of GTM Strategy came to FoundHQ looking for help with some urgent break-fixes, challenges with data visibility & reporting, and some help with standard workflow automation and AppExchange product integrations.
They were looking for a tactical Salesforce Admin, working ~15 hours per week, to handle execution with plans for that individual to then work in a more proactive manner after delivering on the initial work.
It's these scenarios, where companies are too small to need a full-time Salesforce Admin, that fractional Contractors can deliver efficient value.
This Contractor has been an embedded member of the Altana team for the past 24 months.
Fractional Salesforce Admin Pricing
In our view, the biggest reasons to consider using fractional Salesforce Consultants - and specifically working with FoundHQ to do so - comes down to:
Speed: FoundHQ delivers a shortlist of Contractors within 48 hours of project kickoff.
Flexibility: All engagements are hourly, so you only pay for hours worked. There is no upfront payment, no monthly retainer, and no minimum hourly commitments.
Quality: The best Salesforce Contractors come from years working at top Consulting Partners - you're literally getting the same person you would through a Partner without having to pay the premium.
Cost: On average, a Salesforce Contractor will cost ~40% of the hourly rate as the same person from a Partner.
US-Based
Mid-Level: $85/hr-$90/hr
Senior: $100/hr-$105/hr
Lead: $115/hr-$120/hr
LATAM Based
Mid-Level: $45/hr-$50/hr
Senior: $55/hr-$60/hr
Lead: $70/hr-$80/hr
Get Matched to the Right Salesforce Consultant
FoundHQ is the easiest way to get work done in Salesforce.
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