Investing in Salesforce for your digital transformation? Here’s how to ensure you have the right skills for success.

Demand for Salesforce talent is at an all-time high.
PwC applies a mix of three talent sources. A blend of the right skills and experience leads to better outcomes.
Salesforce is a game-changer when it comes to elevating customer experience, streamlining your business and boosting profitability.

Have you chosen Salesforce for your organisation? Good choice. There’s a reason why Salesforce is the world’s #1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) provider. It’s the best technology to connect with customers in a more meaningful and profitable way. ¹

You may now be wondering how to match the practice with the promise. How do you ready your current workforce, bring new skills on board, while simultaneously running the digital transformation project itself? It’s a challenge at any time, but the current worldwide post-pandemic digital skills shortage paired with high employee attrition rates, make it more so. Demand for Salesforce talent is at an all-time high. The Salesforce Economy is expected to grow significantly, producing more than 9m new jobs and US$1.6t in new business revenue worldwide by 2026. In Australia, $35.5bn in new business revenue is predicted with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%. ²

“The Asia Pacific region is growing strongly and we are seeing huge demand amongst customers and partners for local talent with credentialed digital expertise.”

Eloise Lloyd, Director, Talent Programs and Partnerships, Salesforce APAC

We’d like to share how we solve this resourcing gap for ourselves at PwC and show how creating the right blend of skills and experience can unlock value for any organisation looking to grow its capabilities on the Salesforce platform. We apply a mix of these two:

1. Acquire existing Salesforce talent from the market.

This has obvious benefits, especially if you’re seeking very senior people with exceptional experience. They can come at a premium cost while being time-consuming and complex to recruit. However, once recruited, these people will be fast starters, bring a deep knowledge of the platform and will likely have solved complex problems multiple times before.

2. Partner with an external skills specialist such as Revolent.

Revolent hires mid-weight IT professionals and cross-trains them on Salesforce before deploying them on-site. They therefore have both delivery and product experience. These specialists are provided to clients on a flexible, high-value, low-risk model that can be scaled up or down according to project needs.

Plugging the resourcing gap in Health

We created this model following an urgent project with a Health sector client during the pandemic. We swiftly set up a national contact centre, underpinned by Salesforce technology, to enable them to support customers with critical health services. With only a limited Salesforce skill set in-house to manage the ongoing operation of the technology post-launch, we joined up with Revolent to help plug the resourcing gap. Here’s what we learned:

Key recommendations:

There are technical, and functional business skills required. Hire both. We worked with the client and Revolent to identify and advise on what they were, and how they were needed. We then selected and matched candidates who had the right attributes.
The handover is paramount. As the system integration partner it was PwC’s role to not only share all the tasks that needed to be done on an ongoing basis, but provide the history on the project. Dedicated sessions with new talent are critical to walk through the current design and architecture while highlighting why something was done in a particular way.
Factor in transition time from the outset of the project. We built in time to ‘shadow’ the new team and provide oversight on new solutions and deliverables.
Resource flexibility is key. By working with a cloud talent creation and enablement specialist like Revolent, instead of hiring a permanent employee, we were able to offer a 12-month contract period. This means you can scale up or downsize as demand dictates.
Timing is everything. Bring talent on board early, between the design and build phases of the technical solution, then again between the build and testing stage, and finally when deploying the solution across the business.

Salesforce is a game-changer when it comes to elevating customer experience, streamlining your business and boosting profitability. Identifying the right skills, and where to source them, is key for any Exec starting a transformation journey or adopting the Salesforce platform.

Contact the authors

Chinmay Shekhar

Senior Manager, Advisory, PwC Australia

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References

PwC was named a leader in Salesforce implementation by the IDC MarketScape in 2022.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/salesforceresearch/viz/IDCSalesforceEconomy2021_16312093055570/D_IDC_Country?publish=yes
https://www.revolentgroup.com/

Investing in Salesforce for your digital transformation? Here’s how to ensure you have the right skills for success.

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