When I first began working in the salesforce.com ecosystem almost 6 years ago, Salesforce was often found in isolated pockets of the sales organization—brought in by front-line managers to enable their teams on the next-generation CRM capabilities that were the core focus of the product. Usually operating outside the bounds of the extant enterprise application suite with minimal IT involvement, it was easily thought of as a point solution for sales forecasting and reporting. Since then, it has grown at a radical clip, becoming more than ‘just’ a CRM application. It’s evolved into a core offering that organizations are putting at the heart of their business.

Salesforce is expanding outside of the sales team with product lines like the Service Cloud and the recently announced Marketing Cloud. As their focus on building the Force.com platform and on strategic acquisitions like Platform-as-a-Service provider Heroku opens new doors, organizations must make the mental shift to begin thinking in terms of a cohesive CRM program—NOT a series of individual projects. This begins with the foundation—identifying executive vision, establishing a cloud governance model, and building an iterative release process that takes full advantage of the flexible nature of the technology. But technology and process are just two legs of the tripod. Your talent—your people—are ultimately what make a program successful.

Building the right team around your Salesforce program begins with these 5 questions:

1. Who will field day-to-day questions from your users? Your end-users drive value to your system and ensuring they have access to front-line resources to field everyday questions is crucial. Whether a dedicated helpdesk function or crowdsourced among super-users, this is also a key channel for collecting user feedback and suggestions.
2. Who will make changes to your system once live? Your execution team represents a wide range of skillsets not just limited to technical/development and system configuration roles. Including user interface design and user experience, master data management, integration and system architecture, quality assurance and testing, and release management, this team needs to be comfortable in an agile, iterative environment.
3. Who will prioritize which changes to make? A strategic approach to system management requires a focus on business value when assessing change requests. A program owner holds responsibility for ensuring that the system is supporting strategic initiatives and is responsive to changing business needs. They should be backed by executive sponsors and in constant communication with representatives from various business units.
4. Who will communicate changes to your users? Developing the appropriate innovation cadence for your organization, and the corresponding communication strategy, is of utmost importance. Poorly communicated changes lead to user dissatisfaction and lower adoption rates. Change management needs to be baked into system management, NOT an afterthought.
5. Who will train new users on YOUR Salesforce instance? You may have arranged training for your end users during the rollout or implementation process, but what about those new to your organization? Whether 5 days or 5 years post go-live, it is imperative that new hires (or those moving to different roles) receive proper training. This goes for ALL levels, from front-line employees to the C-suite.

Having identified the roles and skill-sets required to build a strategic program team, how do you go about filling these? Multisourcing – embracing the elastic workforce – is the answer to staffing in today’s business environment.

“Multisourcing is not simply outsourcing improved—it is an innovative discipline that takes organizations beyond "quick-fix" cost-cutting to enable capability building, global expansion, increased agility and profitability, and competitive advantage. As such, Multisourcing requires a new mindset and frameworks for communicating, interacting with, and overseeing service relationships both inside and outside the organization. Central to success is the creation of a sourcing strategy that is tightly linked to the overall business strategy and constantly monitored by an effective enterprise-wide governance system.”

- Gartner 

A comprehensive strategy for managing Salesforce includes a strategic approach to staffing. Rather than looking at individual projects, view the overall landscape of the program and the possibility of combining multiple sourcing channels to bring the right resources to bear at the right time. To build capability within your organization, look to:

• New internal headcount
• Consulting firms
• Managed service providers
• Contractors/Staff Augmentation
• Re-purposing existing team members

Each approach above has pros and cons. New headcount may require complex signoff and approvals, but are long-term plays. Consulting firms often carry a higher cost, but bring extensive knowledge and experience. Contractors can be spun up and down at will, but usually require internal oversight or guidance. A blended approach can maximize the benefits of each while mitigating drawbacks and risk. Coupled with an executive-driven program vision and a cloud governance strategy tailored for the modern technology landscape, a strategic approach to staffing that leverages the elastic workforce and multisourcing strategies is key to delivering on the business value that the technology promises.

Check out the SlideShare presentation on "How to Staff for Salesforce Innovation" from Dreamforce '12.