Cost-Effective Strategy to Hire a Dedicated Salesforce Developer

Salesforce CRM represents a significant investment and its customization necessitates additional expenditure on hiring Salesforce developers.

Based on recent data from Indeed and Glassdoor, the average annual salary for a Salesforce developer ranges between $80,000 and $160,000. Consequently, for smaller companies with a constrained budget, hiring and managing a full-time in-house specialist might be financially challenging.

Our blog post showcases how hiring a dedicated Salesforce developer can enhance your business, ensure cost savings from resource utilization, and how you can amplify these advantages using our innovative solution – the fractional Salesforce team model.

Top Challenges of Hiring a Full-time Salesforce Developer

Taking on a full-time, in-house Salesforce development team often feels like a puzzle with ever-shifting pieces.

Small to medium-sized businesses often find hiring and training full-time Salesforce experts impractical, especially given the six-month window professionals typically need to reach full productivity. Coupled with a 40% turnover rate for sought-after positions, these companies frequently undergo hiring cycles about every 18 months.

Another challenge is that there’s the hefty financial side of things, especially for smaller projects. Beyond the obvious salaries, there are hidden costs like benefits, payroll taxes, and the occasional overheads.

Once you’ve hired full-time experts, you’re investing further in software, tools, and maybe even more workspace. As projects evolve, scaling the team can feel like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. And the constant cycle of Salesforce updates? It demands consistent upskilling.

The need for varied expertise is paramount, but an in-house team might fall short in covering all areas. Plus, being heavily dependent on such an employee means that any sudden exit could seriously disrupt your operations. Moreover, full-time developers may get tired of repetitive tasks and necessitate career development investments to retain them.

Given these challenges, numerous companies choose a hybrid method or fully rely on Salesforce development outsourcing to attain optimal outcomes. And here are three typical models for hiring Salesforce developers.

Popular Hiring Models for Dedicated Salesforce Developers in Today’s Market

With over 20 years in the CRM and custom development industry, we’ve explored various partnership models with our clients: On-Demand, Time & Material, Dedicated, and Blended.

And here’s what we’ve learned about the three most popular engagement models for hiring a Salesforce developer, from our own experience:

Time & Material

Under this model, clients are billed for the actual time spent and resources utilized by the Salesforce developer. This approach is ideal for medium-sized projects with fluid or initially undefined scopes.

The main advantages are the flexibility for scope adjustments and payment only for actual work, often leading to lower initial cost estimates. The challenges, though, include potentially unpredictable final expenses and the need for vigilant project oversight.

Salesforce Time and Materials Model | Ascendix

Dedicated Team Model

The Dedicated Team model is an arrangement between a client and a service provider where the provider offers long-term software development experts tailored to the client’s requirements based on their skills and experience.

This model lets clients hire a remote Salesforce developer or a full team exclusively dedicated to their project. Acting as an extension of your in-house team it’s apt for long-term projects that might have changing requirements.

Hiring a dedicated Salesforce developer or a development team offers many benefits. Firstly, you’ll have predictable monthly costs. Over time, the team becomes deeply familiar with your product, reducing revisions, speeding up market entry, and ensuring smarter decisions.

Hiring a dedicated Salesforce developer provides flexibility in setting priorities, complete management of the developer’s activities, and fosters productive collaboration. With an onshore/offshore dedicated team, resource planning becomes smoother, ensuring better productivity.

The dedicated development team services will align with your company values and the team shares accountability, tackling challenges proactively. Nonetheless, its services come with consistent monthly costs. Adjusting the team size, whether scaling up or down, can be complex. Moreover, during times of reduced workload, resources in a dedicated team may be underutilized.

Salesforce Dedicated Team Model | Ascendix

To fully harness the advantages of the dedicated team model while minimizing its inherent challenges, explore our innovative Fractional Salesforce Team offering.

Introducing the Fractional Salesforce Team: A Cost-Effective Solution to Traditional Dedicated Team Model

Managing Salesforce can be intricate for businesses that don’t require a full-time professional. To address this, we’ve introduced the unicorn solution – Fractional Team model.

Our innovative approach combines the best of all engagement methods, offering a cost-efficient alternative to hiring in-house full-time staff with added expenses like 401k, payroll taxes, and bonuses or separate full-time dedicated specialists.

Salesforce Dedicated Team vs Fractional Team Models | Ascendix

Our fractional Salesforce team model provides unmatched flexibility, enabling companies to adjust services to fit their specific needs and budget. Instead of hiring a full-time team of a Salesforce consultant, developer, and project manager on 100%-time basis, our client can assemble a fractional team comprising 20% of a lead consultant’s time, 50% of a Salesforce consultant, 25% of a project manager, and a dedicated Salesforce developer.

Fractional Salesforce Team Structure | Ascendix

Enterprises can also leverage larger teams, including:

• Salesforce Admin or Consultant,
• Salesforce Solution Architect,
• UI/ UX Designer,
• Project Manager,
• Data Analyst,
• QA Engineer,
• Salesforce Business Analyst,
• Salesforce Developer.

With the fractional Salesforce team at Ascendix, you only pay for the actual work hours, optimizing your Salesforce operations and providing a budget-friendly solution for your projects.

By supplementing your existing Salesforce team with fractional admins, consultants, or developers you can quickly address emerging needs, either part-time through Managed Services or for particular projects.

Our Fractional Salesforce team is ideal for projects with evolving scopes or those that aren’t strictly defined. For instance, during the ideation phase, you might need only a Salesforce consultant and a business analyst.

However, the implementation phase could demand a broader team, including a Salesforce consultant, developer, project manager, and QA engineer. Post-launch, a fractional virtual admin might suffice. As a business expands, our fractional team can be adjusted, ensuring Salesforce support remains in sync with the company’s requirements.

Besides that, our innovative approach has other benefits:

Access to Diverse Salesforce Expertise

A dedicated in-house Salesforce team understands your organization intimately but may possess a narrow perspective and managing Salesforce effectively demands a diverse skill set, especially when utilizing platforms like Sales Cloud, Experience and Marketing Cloud, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot). But it’s often impractical to maintain these specialized skills full-time.

By contrast, multiple members of our Fractional Salesforce Team offer a breadth of experience and varied insights, fostering enhanced practices and a more flexible Salesforce environment.

Transparency and Efficiency

Full-time staff comes with added expense, while freelance contractors, though seemingly advantageous, don’t provide clear insight into their productivity.

With our fractional Salesforce developers and consultants, you only pay for the hours they work, ensuring transparent and precise insights into their contributions, even down to five-minute segments.

Seamless Extension for Internal Teams

Our fractional Salesforce team will evaluate your needs and blend with your current team, improving your Salesforce org. This lets your internal team refocus on neglected areas, balancing speed and quality as they tackle the company’s priorities.

Additionally, if your dedicated professional just left your project or if there’s an urgent need, a new fractional consultant or developer can swiftly join your project due to standardized processes, mitigating turnover risks.

Adherence to Best Practices

Internal Salesforce teams, juggling many tasks, risk burnout and might not stay current with best practices. Our Fractional Salesforce Team, dedicated to your ongoing Salesforce training will keep your organization updated and prepared for future needs.

Comprehensive Salesforce Services and Support

It’s crucial for organizations to ensure every hour and dollar invested in Salesforce translates to substantial revenue.

Rushed project deadlines may lead in-house teams to overlook detailed requirements and user training. However, a Fractional Salesforce Team ensures thorough implementation, design flexibility, comprehensive user training, and complete documentation, paving the way for seamless integration and ongoing success.

Moreover, Salesforce fractional teams deliver specialized skills for Salesforce projects without the cost of full-time employees.

Why Choose Ascendix’s Fractional Salesforce Teams

If you have an in-house Salesforce team or a team lacking technical skills, we seamlessly augment your existing capabilities and bridge the gap.

With Ascendix’s Fractional Salesforce Team, you’ll only pay for the services you require, avoiding the cost of a full-time employee, access our US and Europe-based teams of Salesforce experts, from architects to data migration specialists, and flexibly scale services to meet your changing business needs.

The key benefits of our flexible Salesforce services are that we offer all the advantages of a dedicated team at a more adaptable cost, team composition, and engagement approach and will help you:

Implement your Salesforce solution or rehabilitate your Salesforce implementation project at any stage if your technical staff just left it and you are not satisfied with the quality of the delivered services.

• Enhance your Salesforce capabilities with custom CRM workflows and solutions like customer or partner portals etc.
• Get your legacy data safely migrated on the Salesforce platform, with experts taking care of field mapping and eliminating redundancies.
• Manage tricky system and data integration projects.
• Design and build a custom Salesforce application both for an AppExchange platform and internal use.

We are a Salesforce Crest consulting and AppExchange partner meaning that we are among the top 15% consultancies with gold competencies offering a broad array of services through a global delivery model.

Since 2001, we’ve been serving an international base of over 300 clients and our Salesforce professionals bring forth a flawless ecosystem without any business disruptions.

We are a Salesforce Expert Managed Service Provider and have been building our Salesforce expertise, bit by bit, client by client, and project by project; steadily for over two decades.

With our fractional approach, you get access to 70+ certified Salesforce professionals like admins, consultants, developers, or architects who will address the temporary/ permanent/ direct staffing requirements of our global clients without the associated costs.

We specialize in areas like Sales, Service, Experience, and Marketing Clouds as well as Pardot and in 20+ industries like Commercial, Residential, and Land Real Estate, Capital Markets, Investment Management, Mortgage & Lending etc.

Want to cost-efficiently maximize your Salesforce operations and enhance your workforce capabilities? Book a free consulting call to discover more about our Fractional Salesforce Team offering.