Why Your MIS/IT Department Shouldn’t Manage Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is a highly-customizable CRM, and few companies use it in exactly the same way. In large part, the Salesforce CRM can become whatever an organization needs it to be to manage various parts of it’s customer data and business interaction.

As a customizable platform, Salesforce is not usually an “install-it-and-forget-about-it” solution. When companies adopt Salesforce, some part of the company needs to take ownership for additions, changes, and anything beyond the initial implementation.

In my years of working with Salesforce, I’ve seen a number of different approaches to how companies choose who “owns” the Salesforce platform for the company. Some companies align ownership with Sales or Sales Operations. Others align it with the Finance department. And, many organizations align Salesforce ownership with their MIS/IT team.

I will be first to admit that a “one-size fits all” solution for positioning Salesforce management in all organizations doesn’t exist. Sometimes companies just have to work within the framework of their organizational structure as it exists today. However, I have seen too many companies that assign management responsibility for Salesforce to their MIS/IT group without carefully thinking through the strategic impacts of doing this, and then months or years later express frustration with Salesforce.

So, getting to the point... “Why shouldn’t my company’s MIS/IT team manage our company’s Salesforce instance?”

Salesforce Is More Like a Living Organism than a System

Salesforce releases new features and updates to its platform three times a year (Spring, Summer, and Winter). Salesforce develops new capability organically - from customer feedback and suggestions, and also acquires new companies and technology on a regular basis. Although some of the updates are minor, many introduce entirely new capabilities, features, and functionality. Because of this, some have said that Salesforce is a living, breathing organism - not a system.

Furthermore, most organizations evolve significantly from year to year. New products, new targeted customer segments, new initiatives, new employees, new office locations, organizational re-alignments, mergers and acquisitions, etc., all contribute to a dynamic environment with lots of internal changes. Because of this, Salesforce managers need to be alert and connected with many groups and levels within the company.

MIS/IT teams are often spread very thin with multiple competing priorities, ranging from hardware maintenance, premise-based software management, end-user support and training. One needs only to spend a short time observing this part of the company’s office space to notice the long hours these valuable people put in.

Whenever something changes within a company or the Salesforce platform, successful Salesforce managers make adjustments quickly to avoid creating a business/technology gap. This gap is painful for people that rely on Salesforce for their job function. If not addressed, leaders and employees may become more disgruntled about having to use Salesforce. You may hear the comment, “Salesforce doesn’t work,” and Salesforce user morale decreases, cascading to other problems like decreased data integrity, decreased job productivity, etc.

Monitoring this kind of organic change in an organization takes focus and attention. If the team managing Salesforce cannot be laser-focused on managing Salesforce (and its ecosystem) independent of any other company technology, you may want to consider shifting the responsibility to another group.

The MIS/IT Operations Challenge - Understanding & Supporting Company Strategy

In modern-day computer science, there are various schools of thought about what to call an organization’s internal technical capabilities group and what should be their operating focus. Regardless of your organization’s take on all of this, most companies have challenges with keeping MIS/IT and business on the same page about company strategy.

In fact, in a PwC survey of 1,500 business and technology executives, only 54% agreed with the assertion that “business and IT share an understanding of the corporate strategy”. At the same time, many companies claim that technology is paramount to their corporate strategy. This poses a giant conundrum.

Let’s map this thought process out a little more, through the eyes of a typical business executive:

We’ve invested in Salesforce as a key part of our strategy to improve customer experience in our Sales and Service operations, optimize data flow, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

Salesforce is a software product.

Typically, software should be managed by MIS/IT - that’s just how it’s done. That’s what we do with other software and systems at our company.

However, now you’re telling me that almost half of the companies out there - have problems with MIS/IT and Business people not sharing an understanding of corporate strategy?...

A quick search of “business technology gap” on the Internet yields hundreds of results from various consultancies and publications about how to fix this problem in MIS/IT.

However, the answer may be much simpler. Rather than spend countless hours trying to reshape your MIS/IT team for Salesforce management, stand up a team (or person) independent of that organization, entirely focused on the company’s strategy with Salesforce, and aligned directly under top strategy leaders.

Depending on the size and scope of your company’s Salesforce implementation, you may need to pull in more technical skill to support this independent Salesforce team. However, all focus of the team should be on the pairing of Salesforce with the company’s strategy. This will do a few things for you: no competing priorities with technology projects outside of Salesforce, ability to keep Salesforce strategy in-tune with the company strategy, and an organizational vista better suited to watch the whole organization’s usage and needs of Salesforce from a business strategy perspective.

Culture & Communication Differences Between Business and MIS/IT

Another challenge with trying to manage Salesforce within the MIS/IT organization has less to do with skill or strategic focus, but on the 2 C’s: Culture and Communication. Turning back the clock a bit, each one of us followed some kind of a path to arrive at our current occupation. We all go through a process of discovery - learning what we’re good at, what our interests are, what kind of companies/industries we’re interested in, and what job opportunities are out there.

As a society, we’ve attempted to normalize this journey to help others decide what career path to pursue, through Career Aptitude Testing models. The typical aptitude parameters for MIS/IT careers focus on technical things (system logic, linear thinking, understanding the rudiments of technology, coding, etc.), with some emphasis on the communication of ideas and processes.

In my experience, it is rare to find a MIS/IT professional that can also speak the language of business strategy leaders well. Sometimes we layer-on “translators” (i.e. Business Analysts, Project Managers, etc.) to bridge this communication gap. However, this adds additional complexity to the communication process, and creates more distance between the problem to be solved, and people that can solve the problems.

The solution to effective Salesforce management takes a little more creativity at the beginning with recruiting and team-building. In order for your organization to have a more successful experience with Salesforce, you may find it best to build a team (or recruit an individual) with more of a zig-zag career path (between Business and MIS/IT). Someone with a propensity for technical things (and experience with Salesforce), plus experience actually communicating with and interacting with business leaders on a variety of topics directly - not just technology. This will give you someone that can better link what Salesforce is capable of, with what you need it to do.

Conclusion

In summary, any team or individual tasked with managing Salesforce should have the following attributes and organizational placement:

• Position Salesforce Ownership for Focus and Attention - The team managing Salesforce needs to be laser-focused on managing Salesforce independent of any other technology.
• Align Salesforce Under Business Strategy Leaders - Salesforce is a strategic platform first, and a technical product second. Keeping Salesforce in-tune with company strategy is key.
• Look for a Balanced Skill-Set - Being able to keep up with the latest features and functions of Salesforce, but also stay connected with (and even anticipating future changes to) company strategy and direction.

Wherever your company is on the path of Salesforce adoption and usage, positioning it appropriately in your organization can help you have greater success with your CRM experience.