Why Salesforce Admins Must Be Part of Business Continuity Planning

Salesforce administrators play a unique role in their organizations, one that can add value to IT teams. The data in Salesforce can easily contain everything a business or nonprofit needs to:

• Forecast Growth: From opportunity data to past wins and losses, from donor data to campaign activity, sales and executive management rely on Salesforce data to analyze  and forecast growth.
• Identify Risks: Salesforce data can show an organization which customers are at risk of not renewing (or which donors are decreasing their support). If Service Cloud is in use, that data can identify those customers or donors who might churn.
• Manage sales and marketing. Not only can a Salesforce Org contain campaign data, activity data and prospect conversion data, it can reflect territory and campaign performance, providing the insights needed by sales and marketing management.
• Manage the customer or donor lifecycle. From prospect to lead to contact to support, Salesforce data is vital to managing and maintaining customers or donors through every stage of their relationship with your organization.

Salesforce administrators are responsible for the health of that data, and for the value it adds. They ensure it adds value through the customizations they make to enable their Salesforce org to support the business or (nonprofit mission). If that data or metadata (customizations) were lost, business continuity would be at risk.

Salesforce administrators, at the intersection of business continuity

Even though many Salesforce administrators are not formally part of their organization’s IT team (they often report to sales or operations management), admins sit at the intersection of business data and business continuity. If a Salesforce admin is not involved with IT’s business continuity planning, they need to be — their organization depends on Salesforce data and metadata (customizations), and business continuity depends on being able to quickly recover in the event of critical information loss.

So how should a Salesforce admin start the business continuity conversation, if they’re not yet involved with IT in continuity planning?

• Document the value of your org’s Salesforce data and metadata. The value doesn’t have to be quantified in terms of monetary value. It can be quantified in terms of usage. For example:
  • How many reports and dashboards are in daily or weekly use by your executive team or other management?
  • What customizations do your teams rely upon to do their jobs?
  • What objects and fields have their data most frequently updated?
  • What other systems or processes rely on Salesforce data?
• Review how you’re currently protecting that data and those customizations. Whether you use Salesforce’s Export service, or (as recommended by Salesforce) a third-party backup app like Spanning Backup for Salesforce, it’s important to have data and metadata protection reviewed and tested.

And if you’re not currently doing anything to protect your Salesforce data and metadata, you’re not alone. At least 35% of all admins surveyed assume that Salesforce will enable you to get lost data back fast. This blog will help you understand why that’s not a completely accurate understanding.

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• Step up and out of your comfort zone, and schedule time with IT management. Speak with your direct manager first about closing a potential gap in business continuity planning. Let them know you’ll have documentation on the value of Salesforce data and customizations to your organization, and you want to be sure Salesforce data is part of business continuity planning with IT. Assuming there are no concerns about your meeting with IT, start driving the conversations forward.

The end goal? Ensuring you have a seat at the table when business continuity planning is discussed, so that your Salesforce org’s critical data and metadata is part of that planning.

How Salesforce admins can extend their data protection impact

As a steward of mission-critical organizational data that resides in the cloud, Salesforce admins have a valuable perspective to share on the role of human error and programmatic errors in cloud and SaaS data loss. Since Salesforce may be used alongside other cloud and SaaS systems, sharing resources like these for G Suite and Office 365 before the next business continuity planning session may extend the discussion in productive ways.

And if you’re not yet doing what Salesforce recommends by using a third-party AppExchange partner to protect your data and metadata, schedule a demo of Spanning Backup for Salesforce today.

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