In recent months, Salesforce has announced a strategic shift in its growth targets. In recent statements, the company has put increasing emphasis on net new annual order value (NNAOV) as a strategic and financial metric. This marks a strategic shift from its historical metric: annual order value (AOV).
You can see this in action in a recent analyst call, where Salesforce said: “Do not take AOV growth as the lead indicator of revenue growth in the future… [Now,] I would say NNAOV is king or queen, okay? The whole company has been aligned around that.”
So what does this mean for the future of Salesforce support?
Salesforce’s Shift from AOV to NNAOV
In technical terms, this is a shift from annual order value (AOV) towards net new annual order value (NNAOV), i.e. contract value minus attrition. The move is designed to put less focus on purely booking new deals, instead focusing more on helping existing customers succeed with the technology they already use.
This is a departure from Salesforce’s historical sales strategy. And it suggests that Salesforce support will now be increasingly incentivized to focus on customer success – rather than driving sign-ups to new Salesforce products and services. If so, this would be good news for an ecosystem that has become increasingly frustrated by Salesforce’s help desk support in recent years. But how much difference will this actually make?
To understand that, we need to take a step back and consider the broader challenges and options available when it comes to Salesforce support.
What Does Salesforce’s Strategic Shift Mean for Your Organization?
In the Salesforce support ecosystem, many teething issues have been quietly brewing for some time:
- The platform is getting more complex, increasing organizations’ reliance on external support of all types.
- Many also feel that direct Salesforce support has focused more on selling new Salesforce products and services, rather than solving current problems.
- Salesforce has also released more SMB-focused products. This results in more customers that need support, but with less internal experience and lower budgets.
- Licensing is also more complicated, with plenty of overlap between different cost models, making it harder for customers to control their costs.
To a greater or lesser extent, this move from Salesforce should help to solve these problems, by shifting the focus from selling products to solving issues.
This is clearly positive news for the Salesforce ecosystem. But in truth, many of these issues are far too systemic to be solved with some new targets.
What Do Customers Actually Need for Their Salesforce Support?
Any discussion of the Salesforce support market has to start with one very fundamental fact: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here, because the needs of organizations requiring support are hugely diverse. Here are just a few examples:
- A small organization has signed up for a 12-month Salesforce contract. Now, the team needs to roll out these products in a way that’s technically sound and cost-efficient.
- A long-term Salesforce customer manages well with a mixture of internal experts and the Salesforce help desk support. But they’re now looking to integrate Salesforce with a new third-party system – a time-limited project requiring a very specific skillset.
- A growing medium-sized business has relied on Salesforce for years, but the implementation is struggling to adapt to evolving requirements. Here, a more robust level of long-term support is required.
- An enterprise is adopting Salesforce for the first time, meaning it needs to build a Salesforce deployment from the ground up. This is an incredibly high-risk implementation project – getting it wrong simply isn’t an option.
In truth, the options are unlimited – and for each organization, the ideal solution will look slightly different.
What Are the Options for Salesforce Support? And Which Is Right for You?
Salesforce’s strategic changes will hopefully mean that Salesforce support works better for more customers. But it won’t suddenly become the best solution for everyone.
That’s because there are far more structural factors at play here than revenue targets. This applies to the broader support market, as well as Salesforce itself. To understand this in more detail, it’s helpful to discuss the pros and cons of the three main options:
1. Salesforce Support
This involves relying on Salesforce’s in-house support team to help with issues like security, performance, and cost optimization.
Pros:
- Salesforce generally provides a consistent standard of knowledge about its own products, particularly via Salesforce Knowledge articles.
- This approach is well-suited to issues like bugs, outages, performance issues, and core platform behavior.
- Service level agreements (SLAs) are available to guarantee response times.
Cons:
- This option is expensive – the premium support tier costs 30% of net license fees. The higher Signature Success tier is even more expensive and only available to enterprises.
- Despite the cost, none of these tiers include implementation support. For this, you’ll need another option.
- The support can also be less personal and hands-on, with support teams relying heavily on help documentation.
- The high cost results in many smaller and medium-sized organizations being priced out of this option entirely.
Internal Expertise
Some organizations prefer to hire skilled employees to help optimize their Salesforce environment.
Pros:
- Employers can hire skills that match the specific requirements of the organization.
- Employees are more responsive and available than external support.
- Organizations aren’t reliant on external partners or vendors, increasing your strategic autonomy.
Cons:
- This option can be highly expensive. It’s also unlikely that a single skillset will cover all your needs, so multiple hires will likely be required.
- Hiring and retaining skilled Salesforce Developers and Admins is difficult and time-consuming.
- The approach is difficult to scale quickly (in either direction) as organizations’ needs and requirements change.
Salesforce Partners
There are around 11,000 partner businesses in the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem, many of which offer bespoke support and implementation services.
Pros:
- You can choose the approach that works best for your business, since vendors come in a range of sizes, skillsets, and locations.
- Generally, partners offer more personalized, effective, and proactive support than Salesforce. The long-term relationship helps partners act as enablers rather than firefighters.
- Implementation providers are available, unlike via Salesforce Admin support.
Cons:
- Getting Salesforce partner support without a long-term contract is difficult, making the option impractical for ad-hoc or quick turnaround requirements.
- There is significant variation in the quality, experience, and skillset available. Even with a thorough consultation process, it’s still impossible to guarantee it’ll be a good match.
- Smaller vendors may be cheaper, but they can lack scale and authority. Larger vendors will likely have better quality control, but will be more expensive and often won’t accept smaller customers.
The truth is, all of these options can work for the right organization at the right time. But even the change in Salesforce’s targets can’t make it a panacea, because the structural challenges we’ve discussed in this article still remain.
Balo: A New Approach to Salesforce Support
While each of these options is valid in the right circumstance, there are still situations where none are ideal. That’s because all three involve some level of time-based or contractual commitment, making them unsuitable for fast and reactive support.
Balo offers a different approach, by mixing vetted Salesforce expertise with on-demand response. Here’s what that looks like:
- With 600+ experts on the waitlist, all experts go through a rigorous application, self-assessment, and interview process. Only the top 1% of global talent is accepted.
- Customers can choose expertise by product expertise, type of support, urgency, language, or location.
- Experts can be sourced in as little as an hour, perfect for quick-turnaround projects.
- You can also compare quotes from multiple experts and choose who to speak with.
- Flexible, on-demand support offers the full range of options from quick-turnaround troubleshooting to long-term implementation support.
This approach is specifically designed to mix the best of all the options we mentioned above.
And for new customers, there’s an additional benefit: Balo is currently offering AUD$300 of free credits to new customers, giving you 1-2.5 hours of expert Salesforce support completely for free.
Sign up today and redeem free credits using code: NEW2BALO
