Define Your Salesforce CoE

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define the mission and scope of a Salesforce Center of Excellence.
  
• Identify the core capabilities of a Salesforce CoE.
  
• Contrast reactive development with proactive governance strategies.
  

In the previous unit, we established that governance is critical for the health and success of your Salesforce environment. But governance by itself is like a set of laws; just because you have laws, it doesn’t mean anyone is actually making change happen. You need, well, a government: a group of people who create, enforce, and change those laws as needed. In the Salesforce ecosystem, that governing entity is the Center of Excellence (CoE).

What Is a Salesforce CoE?

A Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) is a team of experts made up of people from all throughout your organization, kind of like an assembled superhero team. And like a superhero team, they each bring their own skillset and perspective, making them greater than the sum of their parts. Members range from executive sponsors and stakeholders to technical architects and Salesforce team leads, and many more. Collectively, they’re responsible for the long-term success of the Salesforce Platform.

In more practical terms, think of the CoE as the steering committee and knowledge hub for all of your Salesforce-related initiatives. Its members connect strategy with technical execution to digitally transform your organization.

The work of a CoE falls within three categories: Vision, Standards, and Enablement. Together, these categories act as pillars that form a solid foundation for your Salesforce environment.

1. Vision: Executives and stakeholders collaborate with architects to generate a roadmap that defines where the platform is going. All CoE members and the users they represent can see the direction and manage expectations.
   
2. Standards: The organization’s stakeholders and data consumers work together with the Salesforce team to define rules for how work on the platform is completed. Members ensure all user needs are met by collectively developing processes, identifying data requirements, deconstructing unnecessary data silos, and establishing Salesforce development best practices.
   
3. Enablement: Trainers and stakeholders define strategies for training, communication, and support, ensuring a community is there to function as a safety net when users struggle with changes.
   

But don’t think that those three groups of responsibilities need only those roles. Nearly every role in a CoE has something that they can contribute toward any given CoE decision. For example, you might need compliance personnel involved to ensure that the vision falls within legal boundaries. IT representatives might need to collaborate on standardized development schedules to prevent syncing issues and other cross-system failures. And executives can take part in enablement activities to demonstrate to their organization that the Salesforce changes align with their vision and have their backing.

Get Proactive, Not Reactive

Without a CoE, Salesforce development is usually reactive—the team updates features on a first-come-first-served basis, and solves problems only when they can no longer be ignored. A CoE shifts the organization into a proactive stance. Decisions become strategic instead of tactical. So how does a CoE help you proactively build those three pillars?

Your Salesforce vision becomes proactive when your CoE engages in strategic prioritization, instead of “whoever screams loudest gets their feature built first.” Roadmaps can be built so that they prioritize projects based on ROI and strategic value. The CoE can also bake maintenance time into the release schedule, so that even tech debt and small tweaks to existing functionality have their place. Roadmaps should also flexibly allow the CoE to adjust the schedule when emergencies arise.

Salesforce standards are naturally proactive, because they establish rules for your processes and data. After Salesforce is declared as the organization’s Source of Truth, the CoE can ensure consistency; for example, making sure that a “Lead” in Sales Cloud means the same thing as a “Lead” in Marketing Cloud, and also the same thing as a “Lead” in any external applications that share data with the Salesforce Lead object. With consistent definitions in place, it’s easier to define commonly accepted process and data guidelines.

Enablement becomes proactive when the CoE commissions comprehensive documentation accessible to all users, and standardizes the organization’s onboarding and support protocols. Take that proactiveness one step further by establishing a standard interface style, so that users understand future additions more easily. If that standard interface requires custom components, make those components reusable to improve your Salesforce team’s scalability.

Case Study: Cloud Kicks and the Path to Success

Cloud Kicks, a high-end custom sneaker manufacturer, became a victim of its own success. Though the company started with Salesforce from its first days, 3 years of rapid growth and no governance left its Salesforce org in a messy state. The Sales team had requested 400 custom fields on just the Account object. The Service team couldn’t view sales data that would’ve aided their support work due to overly restrictive sharing settings and permissions. Every time the admins tried to deploy new features, the update broke multiple triggers and flows. And these are just some of the problems they regularly dealt with! Users were so frustrated that they started keeping data in personal spreadsheets; one Service team member even set up a database on AWS for his fellow team members to share the data they needed.

Cloud Kicks hired Amara, a certified technical architect, to right the ship before it sank. Amara’s first move wasn’t to write code, and it wasn’t to give orders—she established a CoE. “The problem isn’t the software,” Amara explained to the CEO. “The problem is that everyone is driving the car in a different direction. We need a CoE to act as our GPS and our mechanic.”

Amara gathered stakeholders from Sales, Marketing, Service, IT, Training, the C-suite, and her own Salesforce team. Together, they formed the Cloud Kicks Salesforce CoE. It took time, but after 6 months of governance and structure, Cloud Kicks’s Salesforce situation has vastly improved. The Salesforce team has moved from off-the-cuff deployments to a monthly release cycle with published release notes. The CoE approved the removal of over 200 redundant fields and established a data governance policy that gives everyone access they need. And the CEO now has a roadmap that shows exactly how Salesforce will support Cloud Kicks’s upcoming move into the European market. Cloud Kicks is on the path to success, with its leaders, users, and technical team all involved in the growth of its Salesforce environment from tip to tail.With a CoE, companies like Cloud Kicks transform Salesforce from a simple CRM tool into a competitive advantage.

In the next unit, you get a detailed breakdown of the core capabilities of a Center of Excellence.