💃 $1,000,000 Salesforce Project - Hours Allocation 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Let’s peel another layer off the onion of a $1,000,000 project ⬇️.

WHAT $1MM GETS YA!

What You’re Getting for 5000 Hours

Quick refresher on 5000 hours of deliverables -

🗣️ Enterprise marketing app implementation - Marketing Cloud (any of the 3!), Eloqua, Marketo, etc

☁️ Sales Cloud implementation - Rip ‘n’ replace of legacy CRM.

🗂️ ERP integration - Base data, and Product and Financial data

🔀 Data migration - Legacy CRM data to Salesforce with facilitations and accommodations for the marketing and ERP solutions.

Here are some considerations-

🤔 There will be more than 5000 hours total. Just the Salesforce team will bill 5000 hours, and the ERP and marketing strategy/agency partners will have their own hours buckets.

🤔 The Sales Cloud implementation will have some major lifts, like CPQ or CPQ-like functionality, custom commissions solutions 😫, and a multitude of frontend integrations like company website, and CMS.

🤔 ERP integrations are not direct integrations with Salesforce. The complexity of billion-dollar companies requires enterprise middleware to do all of the things that 10-digits of financials requires. Mulesoft, Appconnect, and even Azure are examples of robust middleware.

BURN BABY BURN 🔥

5000 Hours of Salesforce

To be clear, the client’s full “digitalization” of their stack will be way over $1,000,000.

You’re focused on the Salesforce piece, though, which is $1,000,000 @ 5000 hours. So where are all these hours going?

Sales Cloud | 1500 hours

Resources-

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant | Solutions Architect | Project Manager | Business Analyst | Developer Team

Hours Logging Activities-

📅 Meetings. Weekly meeting. Internal daily scrum with the development team. Project daily scrum with the project team. Escalation meetings. Checkpoint meetings. Pre-meetings before the meetings 🙂.

🧑‍🎨 Design and Build/QA. The things you actually like to do. But in a $1MM project, you’ll spend more time in meetings than in the admin console 😢.

😫 UAT. Prepare the users, test script and results documentation, and the UAT-data prep. Coordinate testers and manage the results.

⚙️ Deployments…and post-deployment testing. Your TA needs to setup pipelines for a $1MM Salesforce project. If they don’t? Praying for you 🙏…..

Frontend, Inbound Integrations | 250 hours

Resources-

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant | PM/BA

Hours Logging Activities-

📅 Meetings. Yup. More meetings.

⚙️ Configuring apps your familiar with (like Zapier) and some you aren’t, like the random appointment apps.

🫡 Testing. Yup. More testing.

Data Conversion and Migration | 300 hours

Resources-

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant | PM/BA

Hours Logging Activities-

📅 Meetings. Yup. More meetings.

🔀 Conversion. Covered here 🙂

⤵️ Migration. Covered here 🙂

Exceptional solutions like CPQ and Commissions | 1500 hours

Resources-

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant | PM/BA | SA

Hours Logging Activities-

📅 Meetings. Business requirements gathering is thicc for these custom solutions.

🧑‍🎨 Designing and Build. Getting some quality postman time in.

🥵 QA. Testing custom solutions, where happy path is rare and exception management is the average work being done 😓.

ERP integrations | 500 hours (this could easily balloon 🎈)

Resources-

🧠 Technical Architect | Solutions Architect

Hours Logging Activities-

📅 Meetings. Yup. More meetings.

🧑‍🎨 Designing APIs. Getting some quality postman time in.

✍️ Writing requirements for the development team.

🫡 Testing. Integration testing can be tedious, but developers seem to like it 🤷‍♂️.

CRP Testing | 200 hours

CRP stands for “conference room pilot”. Have you done CRP testing? It sucks…but is super valuable to project success.

Resources-

💃 🕺The project team. It can take about 1 week with multiple resource. 5 people x 40hr week = 200hrs. Tons of scenario and data prep too.

Hours Logging Activities-

🫡 Testing. Duh!

Project Management | 1000 hours

Resources-

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant | Project Manager

Hours Logging Activities-

🤯 1000 hours? Where does it all go?

Hold my PMP-

Scope management. Resource planning. Project reporting. Project team comms. Stakeholder comms. Executive comms. Risk management. Blocker removal. Change request management. Approval, validation and decision management. Daily stand ups. Jira board administration. Task assignment. Time tracking. Meeting notes. Documentation management. Retrospectives. That’s about half the list 😅.

What do you think👇

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

People expect their ERP experience to be like driving a cruise ship. But salespeople expect their CRMs to be like driving a Ferrari.

And so the CRM will need extra attention. Every click matters. Every field on every page layout must have intent. Every object needs to make a sale easier or more likely.

This is all in addition to connecting the frontend and the backend.

5000 hours seem about right?

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes