What Is a Salesforce Architect?

Whether you’ve already completed your Salesforce implementation and you’re still waiting to see the ROI you were hoping for, or your organization is considering migrating to this powerful CRM, you likely need the support of Salesforce Architects to help you meet your goals.

These experts can set your organization up for growth and flexibility, with one eye on maintaining key avenues to help you update your Salesforce organization’s functionality as your company grows over the next year or five.

Here, I’ll dive into the three types of architects you’ll work with on the road to ROI and how this team of experts collaborates to ensure you’re hitting the benchmarks you need on time.

3 Types of Salesforce Architects Work Together

From a Salesforce practice perspective, all three types of Salesforce Architects must be engaged in order to help clients get a Salesforce organization where they want it to be.

At Apexon, each client account is typically assigned one of each of these three professionals, although their involvement may vary significantly based on the project at hand.

Type 1: Salesforce Solution Architect

If you’re familiar with Salesforce’s “Click not code” mantra, you know that their software is built to be highly configurable at the click of a button. Their AppExchange makes it easy to install reusable and flexible plug-ins and update your Salesforce dashboards and reports without writing a single line of code.

A Salesforce Solution Architect knows the intricacies of this approach, and they can help select and configure the features you need to arrive at the solution you want.

Salesforce Technical Architect

Of course, there are also situations in which everything a client needs can’t be delivered using click and configure – in that case, a Salesforce Technical Architect steps in to provide the technical know-how and code with a deep understanding of how their additions will impact the Salesforce organization’s functionality. 

Salesforce Program Architect

A Salesforce Program Architect like me has usually played both of the other two roles in the past, and they have a comprehensive understanding of the downstream impact of each decision their team makes and of the business transformations that may come down the line.

In the quest for a ROI, you need all three of these roles to work in tandem to transform how your organization leverages Salesforce to succeed in the long term.

How Salesforce Architects Collaborate to Help You Get the ROI You’re Looking For

Salesforce Architects work together to oversee all aspects of each project’s planning and execution, and their involvement happens in waves. Throughout, the Program Architect guides clients with the blueprint in hand to make sure everyone stays on course.

An example from the healthcare industry

I recently worked with an enterprise client in the healthcare industry that was looking for help with an enterprise-wide digital transformation. They had a vision and a goal, but they didn’t know how to put all the pieces in place.

We went through a discovery phase, followed by blueprinting, and then planning. In the final implementation phase, which involved all three Salesforce Architects on the account, the Solutions and Technical Architects stepped up, and the Program Architect stepped back to focus on implementation. Once you go into the implementation phase, that’s where the rubber meets the road.

A Classic Pain Point for Sales Organizations of All Sizes: Deduplicating Contact Information

Salesforce Architects can help support everything from resolving duplicate contacts automatically to drawing your Salesforce org roadmap for the next five years.

To take deduplication as an example, a smaller organization may think that they don’t need to spend the time or money upfront to include a tool that can flag and resolve potential duplicate contacts upfront.

Clients often think that it won’t be much of a chore to implement this kind of fix down the line or that it’s not much of an issue, but in two years, when your headcount has tripled and you have 40,000 entries in your contact list, you may just find that a quarter of them are duplicates.

If this is the case, your team may be wasting time badgering the same people about the same opportunities or worse, contacting someone who’s already converted and using the wrong name to address them due to a typo someone made last year.

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool, but if you’re not proactively looking to the future and ensuring that the data your team inputs is clean and high-quality, you’ll accrue a huge amount of technical debt. Salesforce Architects work to ensure that this doesn’t happen by asking the right questions up front and ensure that you have best practices for data quality in place.

Bring Salesforce Architects in to Advocate for Efficiency in Your Organization

Salesforce Program Architects are your extra set of eyes on efficiency. They bring an understanding of what your licensing needs are, and this can be a tremendous help from a technical perspective. 

For example, rather than buying thousands of Salesforce licenses that are more powerful than what your sales team needs to do their jobs well, a Salesforce Architect can help you assess what levels you need to purchase to give your teams appropriate access for their assigned functions. When it comes to ROI, this kind of guidance can make a substantial difference on an annual basis.

But this is just one type of high-level recommendation Salesforce Architects can provide. To learn more about how Apexon’s team of experts can help you get the most out of your Salesforce org, reach out to start the conversation today.