From Support to Strategy: Rethinking Salesforce Managed Services And Busting A Common Myth

You’d be surprised how many companies treat Salesforce like it’s a one-and-done project.

Big implementation. Go-live. Training. Maybe a phase two. And then… things slowly stall out.

Admins get overwhelmed. Change requests stack up. The business wants to move fast, but Operations resources (from Sales Operations to IT to Revenue Operations) are stretched thin. So priorities get lost in translation - or worse, left behind entirely.

We’ve seen this cycle play out across industries, and we get it. Most teams aren’t trying to under-invest in Salesforce. They’re just stuck with a support model that was never designed for strategic growth.

That’s where Salesforce managed services come in.

What Managed Services Actually Entails: Not (Just) Taking Tickets

The term “managed services” gets thrown around a lot. To be clear, I’m not talking about outsourced help desk tickets or a patchwork of freelance admins.

A real managed services agreement gives your business consistent access to a cross-functional team typically for a set number of hours per month. That includes architects, developers, and consultants who all get to know your org, your processes, and your people.

You’re not just submitting work tickets - it’s so much more.

It’s Not Support. It’s Strategic.

A major component is understanding how your business operates and its current and future goals, then prioritizing work collaboratively to align to that. This includes evolving your Salesforce environment with a clear purpose and direction that flows from those business-level goals.

It’s structured enough to provide clarity, but flexible enough to shift when business needs evolve.

Now, to be clear, any Salesforce partner offering Managed Services will engage in plenty of break/fix work. 

But the real value is in surfacing ideas you hadn’t thought of yet. Or seeing a pattern across clients and suggesting a lightweight automation that saves your team hours every week. Or flagging a problem in your quote-to-cash process before it shows up on a CFO dashboard.

Because we’re working with clients across industries, we bring an outside-in view that internal teams often don’t have time to develop, such as:

• Implementing a new pricing structure for a SaaS company or building more automated renewal sequences based on new recurring revenue models

• Guiding a manufacturing company through ERP integration with SAP or NetSuite

• Helping a transportation client streamline their field service ops

• Designing handoffs in Salesforce for a professional services firm that runs projects in Asana or Smartsheet.

The tools and industries may vary, but the pain points don’t.

Supporting Your Admins

We've had clients who had their Salesforce Admin receiving 100+ requests a day.

That's impossible to keep up with. Just prioritizing that workload soaked up valuable bandwidth!

By categorizing request types and working through the backlog, not only did we reduce the noise, we created space for the Admin to focus on longer-term improvements that were more beneficial to the business. This helped reduce incoming requests as we built the right automations and processes to create a more effective business that positively supported multiple teams.

We've also had clients lean on us when a Salesforce Admin has left their organization, opting to outsource vs. go through a new hiring process. Those cost savings have been appreciated by the C-suite!

Why This Model Works

Companies investing in managed services aren't looking for help with one issue. They’re looking to keep building.

They have their own ideas, requests from other teams, operational pain points, and executive pressure to show the value in these investments.

But the bandwidth to execute typically isn’t there internally. Not to tackle everything.

A strong managed services partnership solves for that by:

• Bringing continuity so you’re not re-explaining your process every sprint.

• Moving faster because work gets scoped, designed, and delivered with minimal handoffs.

• Sharing best practices, enabling you to benefit from what’s working in other organizations like yours (from strategic goals to technical Salesforce details)

• Keeping spend predictable with a fixed hours-per-month agreement. Most clients begin with 40 hours per month.

What I really like, however, is how the right partner helps you avoid waste.

We’ve talked teams out of building the wrong thing just as often as we’ve helped build the right one. Homegrown systems, custom automations or integrations … the list goes on, and we’ve been able to say “hang on, there’s an easier path that’s more sustainable for the next 5-10 years. Here’s how.”

That value is more than simply avoiding technical debt. It keeps clients making the best decisions for them over and over, which builds up into something amazing.

Pro Tip: Governance Makes This Highly Effective

Can I be painfully honest for a second?

Most Salesforce wishlists are longer than your budget allows. You’ve got Sales asking for lead routing tweaks, Finance requesting quote approval changes, Service needing new case flows...the list goes on.

This is why strong internal governance matters.

When companies get the most out of managed services, it’s because they’ve appointed a clear product owner: someone who can gather input, set priorities, and serve as a single point of contact for your partner.

Otherwise, hours get eaten up by un-prioritized noise or trying to determine what’s most important. (And nobody’s happy when this happens.)

Fix Your Unknown-Unknowns

I’ve seen a lot of implementations be based more on gut feelings and guesses. These are ones we’re called in to clean up.

Your partner should provide expertise from the outset and align to your business objectives before ever working on your Salesforce instance. Unfortunately, that often isn't the case in the consulting world.

What’s Simple Often Isn’t

Updating a price book? Need a new quote template? Have a different way of collecting payments for one-time purchases vs. recurring ones?

Depending on how your business functions, these can be very complex Salesforce projects.

A good partner gives you a clear estimate of how long your needs will take while explaining why it’s so complex. This is where your expert’s proficiency comes in - you can tell when you’re working with a senior-level resource vs. someone who’s only been in Salesforce for a couple of years.

Because helping you understand the “why” behind everything (or challenging if you truly need something you’re asking for) helps you better understand your systems and make more informed decisions.

Big Picture: Salesforce is a Lifecycle Platform

Managed services isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about building what’s next and tying systems together so your teams have the full picture.

We’re talking about giving your sales team visibility into onboarding progress, surfacing open support issues before renewal conversations, and/or showing marketing which leads actually convert into closed-won revenue.

Salesforce can do all of that. Much of this with out-of-the-box functionality many companies simply aren’t aware of or have the time to fully explore.

But only when it’s treated as a living system that requires continuous improvement.

Once, we had a client that was acquired. Usually in these scenarios, the parent company migrates everything into their tech stack.

But the acquiring company looked at both stacks and said “your Salesforce is so much better than ours, we’re going to use yours as the standard and pull everything in to what you’re doing.”

Years of investment and working with their internal teams, who did a great job staying focused on what the overarching company goals were, led to something I’ve never seen before!

Partnership > Vendor. That Shows Up In Value Provided.

When we start working with a client, we’re not trying to win a single project. We want to earn a seat at the decision-making table and be lockstep with your strategic needs that guide all Salesforce investments.

Managed services provides a structure to support that relationship: one that’s flexible, fast-moving, and focused on long-term value.

The best Salesforce orgs aren’t the flashiest.

They’re the ones that evolve consistently, align cross-functionally, and stay focused on business outcomes.

That takes more than a support desk. It takes a partner who’s as invested as you are, one bucket of monthly hours at a time.

Curious to learn more? Get in touch and let’s have a conversation. I’m also active on LinkedIn if you want to chat with me directly!