In one of our previous blogs, we talked about a void in the Salesforce and other CRM systems in the marketplace that needs to be filled. We called this Salesforce Admin as a Service. Its the idea that there are a ton of tasks daily and weekly that need to be done to ensure you are getting the most from your CRM system. No one wants to do them but they need to get done.
Today, I wanted to just dig in a bit more to the reason why it is so hard for companies in the small and medium sized business space to get the help they need from traditional consulting companies or integration companies.
The truth is pretty simple, it comes down to money. Integration and Consulting companies typically have folks on their teams that are highly skilled and relatively hard to find in the marketplace. This means they are expensive to hold on to. Which in turn means that the company has to find high dollar projects to stick them on so they can make some kind of margin on the project. Every day that a highly skilled person sits in their home office or at the office and is not staffed on a project, the company hears a loud flushing sound, which is money being flushed down the toilet.
Even if the Consulting company or Integrator is a small or regional based player in the ecosystem, they face the same challenges mentioned above as a really big firms. So it should be no surprise that when you call your Integrator up on a random Tuesday and want them to create a dashboard for you that you need for a meeting tomorrow, the first question they ask is “how much do you have to spend on this project?”. They know that they can’t help you out because what you need is something simple done for a low price and they only have high priced talent to do longer term work.
This is the gap that Placeshift is stepping into in the Salesforce and general CRM market. We are perfectly content taking those calls on Tuesday to help knock out that dashboard for tomorrow’s meeting. We are thrilled to get that email to help load up some new contacts that can take up to two hours to do. We jump for joy when we can help with a quick integration package from the App Exchange.
We are the extra pair of hands that everyone wants to do the work that no one wants to do.