We've Got Your Back With Salesforce Managed Services

Everybody needs a little Salesforce help sometimes. And sometimes, you need help every month on a recurring basis. This is why we developed an ongoing support option for our clients: Idealist Consulting's Managed Services. We offer three unique Managed Services offerings: Idealist Scout, Idealist Guide, and Idealist Assist. To view these support levels in more detail, check out our Managed Services page here.

Often we have clients that arrive at our doorstep knowing they need Salesforce help but are unsure what that service might look like.

They may assume they want to do a full project with us. Projects, however, are typically time-bound, meaning they have start and end dates and have defined outcomes (like needing to migrate off of a legacy system and build out a Salesforce instance to accommodate the needs of a development team). But not every engagement is a project. That’s why we developed Idealist Consulting Managed Services, a way to engage with us on a recurring basis when you don’t have a big project to tackle. Click here to get in touch with on of our Salesforce experts today.

Who are Managed Services for?

There are two types of clients that Managed Services help the most:

1. Those who want to continue to invest in their system long-term. Managed Services are not for a one-off “something broke, I need to fix it fast” moment. They are designed to offer ongoing help and strategic planning (with occasional emergency fixes when if come up).
2. Those who are looking to augment staff. Managed Services support is an opportunity for your organization to continue to integrate your database into your business processes, without having to invest in another employee. You could use this service to help you continue to build super users while also training the staff who are working alongside the consultant. You could also use Managed Services to identify user stories, which will help you continue to build out your Salesforce instance and address all the things that your staff needs to be effective.

Additionally, we find that Managed Services can work for organizations with either of the following conditions:

• Those that have heavily customized Salesforce instances that won’t benefit from your standard call center help.
• Those who have a set technology budget that needs to be spent over a specific time period.

Here’s an example of a client who greatly benefited from a Managed Services partnership:

When the Washington D.C. Public Library Foundation came to us, they were seeking help because their previous database administrator had moved on to another job. The Development Director was new to the organization and found herself with limited organizational knowledge of their Salesforce instance.

Rather than hire a full-time Salesforce database administrator, she instead reached out to Idealist Consulting to augment her internal staff with a dedicated resource. Some of her needs included improved reporting, moves management configuration, 3rd party app integrations, and Salesforce training. Because she needed ongoing help with new tasks that would crop up on a monthly basis, we agreed to get her a dedicated resource that could work with their team under an ongoing support agreement.

Using Managed Services allowed her to focus on what she does best, fundraising.

What else can you do with Managed Services?

We see these contracts mostly used for additional ongoing support and staff augmentation. Here are two examples of clients who used Managed Services contracts in one of these ways.

Ongoing support

The Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York (NPCC) worked with us to build a custom Salesforce Community for their members. After the initial build-out, we continued to work together through a Managed Services contract because they knew they would need ongoing support. You can read more about their experience here.

Staff augmentation

CASA (Community And Shelter Assistance Corp) of Oregon used Managed Services to augment their staff and optimize their use of Salesforce. They had been using Salesforce for six years but they had a vision for improving their use of the tool. They engaged us to help with the optimization and then later as an additional Salesforce admin while they continued to work through their use of the platform. You can read their story here.

Who are they not for?

We don’t always recommend Managed Services, even if you might fit into some of the criteria listed above. Here’s who they are not for:

• An organization or admin who is just starting out with Salesforce.
• An organization that doesn’t have time to learn or maintain Salesforce and just wants to off-board it to an outside consultant.
• Implementation projects.
• Small, one-off projects.

Managed Services not for you? Maybe it's time for a project or implementation.

We offer a couple of other offerings to meet your Salesforce needs. Below you can find a bit about each of these offerings.

Projects: You’ll use a Project when you are adding a new department or major use case into your Salesforce instance. For example, if you are expanding your services and are in need of adding more large-scale functionality to help you track this new service.

Implementations: If you’ve just purchased Salesforce or a tool owned by Salesforce, this type of contract is for you.

Optimizations: You’ll use this type of contract when you have had Salesforce for a while and want to refresh your instance to ease and improve user adoption and experience, upgrade to Lightning, or more closely align your instance to fit best practices.  

Additionally, there are many self-serve resources if you wish to educate yourself, and in some cases, you may want to lean on Salesforce Premier Support.

How to get started

Start by reaching out to us using the Let’s Talk button below. We’ll start with a conversation about what your priorities are, why you’re looking for support now, and what areas of your system you’re looking to build out.

We'll help you find the support structure that works best for your needs. We like to think of ourselves as a high-touch, white-glove support experience. If that sounds appealing to you, reach out to learn more.

Let’s Talk