Your Salesforce org isn’t just a tool. It’s a platform. And if you’re treating it like a tool, you’re already behind — and these five risks are already eating away at your team from the inside.

I sat down with Mike Sommer on a recent episode of The Hiring Edge podcast to unpack exactly this. Mike is the founder of Business MRI and a former Enterprise Architecture and COE practice lead at IBM. He’s spent decades inside Fortune 1000 Salesforce environments — not during the fun launch phase, but during the cleanup phase, when teams built wrong start falling apart. If you lead a Salesforce org or you’re responsible for staffing into one, this is the conversation that should keep you up at night.

The five risks Mike and I broke down are quiet ones. They don’t show up in your sprint board. They don’t trigger alerts. They build slowly, and by the time you feel them, you’re already in recovery mode.

Risk #1: Key Person Dependency

This is the most overlooked and most devastating risk on the list.

One person holds all the institutional knowledge. Undocumented configurations. Integration logic that lives nowhere except in their memory. Process rationale that made sense three years ago but was never written down. When that person leaves — and they will leave — operations grind to a halt.

Mike put it plainly: “No one’s in charge. Not someone who understands how the system works, but who makes the decisions? How do decisions get prioritized?”

The root cause is almost always the same: companies treat Salesforce like a really expensive tool instead of running it like a platform. When you make that mistake, you never build the governance, the documentation, or the redundancy needed to survive a single departure. This is exactly the Unicorn Prevention System and how key-person risk takes root.

What’s the Quick Win for a Single-Admin Org?

Spin up a delegated admin immediately. Someone who walks alongside your primary admin, learns the system, and can log in and keep the lights on if something happens.

Don’t make documentation a chore for one person. Let the naturally gifted educators on your team record and share knowledge in their own way. Short Loom videos. Commented flows. A simple wiki. AI tools can actually help a lot here — there are Salesforce documentation tools now that can auto-generate field-level and object-level summaries. There’s no excuse anymore for a single-admin org with zero documentation.

Your goal: no single point of failure. That’s the benchmark.

Platform vs. Tool: Why the Mindset Shift Matters

Before we get to the other four risks, this framing matters enough to name directly.

A tool is something you use. A platform is something you run. When Salesforce is treated like a tool, it gets managed reactively — tickets come in, changes get made, no one steps back to look at the whole picture. Documentation is an afterthought. Governance doesn’t exist. You’re always fighting fires.

When Salesforce is run like a platform, it has an owner with real authority. It has architecture standards. It has a roadmap. It has documentation that reflects how the system actually works today, not how it worked two years ago.

The difference isn’t budget. It’s mindset — and the leadership to enforce it.

Risk #2: Understaffing (But Not How You Think)

Most leaders look at a 200-ticket Jira backlog and think: we need more people. Mike flips that on its head: “Is the backlog even relevant?”

He shared a story that should live rent-free in every Salesforce leader’s mind: a Fortune 5 company was spending a million dollars a week on Salesforce development. They had completely reverse-engineered the platform into a custom CPQ monstrosity. They kept throwing bodies at the technical debt. The system eventually blew up.

When they rebuilt, the SVP put a mandate in place: “You’re not to change a single thing unless you can come to me and prove otherwise.” They leveraged out-of-the-box functionality, adopted best practices, adjusted their business processes to match the platform — and they needed fewer people to do better work.

Tech Amplifies What You’ve Got

Here’s the brutal version of that lesson: bad process plus more people equals amplified bad process. At scale. Every single day.

Before you post a new headcount req, stop and ask: Are we solving a capacity problem or a process problem? If your existing team is underwater, is it because there’s too much work — or because the work itself is broken?

I interviewed a candidate recently making $180,000 a year. She’s working 70 hours a week. She’d happily take $135,000 for a normal 40-hour week. That’s not a salary problem. That’s burnout. And that company is going to lose her — along with all the institutional knowledge in her head — because no one stopped to ask whether the work itself was the problem.

Risk #3: Talent Quality — A Players, B Players, and What You’re Actually Tolerating

Not everyone on your team is an A player. That’s fine. The real problem is when you let the wrong tolerance level set in.

An A player isn’t about an MBA from a top school or being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about leaning in, being teachable, taking risks, and producing outcomes — even when the outcome isn’t what anyone expected. Especially then.

I had a guy reach out to me recently. He’s an admin making decent money. He found my calendar link, booked a call, and showed up prepared. Brave. Initiative. Thinking ahead about his career while others are waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder. That’s an A player move. And I told him what I tell everyone in that position: why the admin role is evolving faster than most teams realize. AI is eating into the basic configuration and click-work. The people who thrive will be the ones who understand the business — not just where the buttons are.

A Players and Company Culture: The Williams F1 Lesson

Mike added a critical nuance here: A players want to work for A companies. But not every company is an A company — and that’s okay.

If you’re a B company trying to attract A talent, you need to sell the vision. Not the fiction, the vision. Mike and I talked about the Williams F1 team as an example. They were dead last. They brought in new leadership, attracted better investors, signed Carlos Sainz. It didn’t happen overnight. But they knew where they were, they admitted it openly, and they sold where they were going. That’s what attracts A players to imperfect situations.

If someone on your team is consistently resistant to positive change after the decision has been made — not questioning during the decision, but resisting after — that’s a B player at best. It’s your job to decide whether you’re going to develop them or whether they’re setting a ceiling for everyone around them.

Risk #4: Wrong Team Composition

Beyond skill and headcount, most organizations get the fundamental mix wrong.

Wrong role types for the phase they’re in. Wrong balance of full-time employees versus contractors. System integrator consultants doing jobs that should be owned internally — often because no one stopped to think about what the right ownership structure actually looks like.

Can You Trust Your SI’s Advice?

Mike is direct about this: companies get advice from people who have a financial incentive to tell them a skewed version of reality. Not because they’re dishonest — but because they’re coming at it from a different lens. If your SI makes money when you build, guess which direction they’ll lean when you ask whether to build or configure?

That doesn’t make them bad partners. It means you need someone on your side of the table who doesn’t have that incentive. Someone whose job is to tell you the truth about what you actually need.

He sees this pattern constantly: companies say, “We need a technical architect.” You dig in and realize they need six weeks of architect-level guidance plus ten hours a month of oversight, and then an admin or consultant to build and maintain. Instead, they post a full-time $180K role that attracts a first-year solution architect when the job actually requires 20 years of experience.

A good technical architect will tell you the truth: “I’m not putting my name on this.” A great one will tell you what you actually need instead.

Risk #5: No Shared Source of Truth

Mike called this the real number one problem — and saved it for last because it underlies everything else.

“It’s not the people. It’s not the tech. It’s a lost shared trust.”

There’s no central place that reflects the reality of the business. Documentation lives in someone’s shared drive, on a Lucidchart someone made two years ago, or in someone’s head. Everyone thinks they’re covered because something is written down somewhere. But without a shared, living view of what the system actually is — tied to your production environment — every decision your team makes carries unknown downstream impact.

The AppExchange vs. Custom Build Problem

This shows up most visibly in the build-vs-buy decision. Without a clear picture of what you have, what it does, and how it connects to everything else, you can’t make a rational decision about whether to extend the platform or build something new. You’re guessing. And the consequences of guessing wrong at the architecture level are measured in years and millions of dollars.

Where Do You Actually Stand?

Mike’s recommendation: go to scan.businessmri.com. It’s a free, three-minute self-assessment built on Salesforce architecture best practices and 75+ real projects worth of learnings. It shows you where you actually stand — across documentation, governance, team structure, platform maturity, and more.

He described it perfectly: “It’s like stepping on the scale. You can’t lie when you see what it is.”

No consultant required. No commitment. Just a clear-eyed look at where your org is today vs. where it should be.

The Director of the COE: The Role Most Companies Won’t Fund (Until It’s Too Late)

Every one of these five risks comes down to the same root cause: companies don’t give their Salesforce platform a seat at the table. They don’t fund it properly, they don’t empower the people running it, and they don’t hire a director-level leader who has the organizational authority to say no.

Mike calls this the Director of the Salesforce COE. Not a manager. A director with real authority — someone who can tell the business: “I hear what you want. Here’s our mandate. If your priority takes precedence over what’s already in the queue, go convince that other team to give up their slot.”

That’s not dysfunction. That’s transparency. That’s how platforms are actually run.

Empowerment and the Culture of Fear

Without that empowered leader, what you get instead is a culture of fear. Admins and architects who know what the right answer is but don’t have the authority — or the safety — to say it out loud. Leaders who approve every request because saying no feels risky. Backlogs that keep growing because no one is authorized to cut them.

The COE Director is the person who protects the platform from the business — not adversarially, but structurally. They’re the reason your org doesn’t turn into that Fortune 5 CPQ disaster over time.

What Should You Do This Week?

You don’t have to solve all five risks at once. But you do need to know where you stand.

Start with the free assessment at scan.businessmri.com. Three minutes. No sales pitch. Just clarity.

Then ask yourself honestly: Do you have a Director-level owner for your Salesforce platform with real organizational authority? If the answer is no — or “kind of” — that’s your first hire.

Building the Right Salesforce Team Starts With the Right Partner

If you’re a Salesforce leader who knows your team composition is off, or you’re looking to hire your first real platform owner, we can help. Salesforce Staffing, LLC works exclusively in the Salesforce ecosystem — every role, every level, every specialty. We don’t fill seats. We match the right talent to the right org at the right time.

Talk to our team about building your Salesforce org or watch the full conversation with Mike Sommer on the JoshForce YouTube channel.

Josh Matthews is the founder of Salesforce Staffing, LLC and TheSalesforceRecruiter.com and host of The Hiring Edge podcast. He has been recruiting since 1999, operating Salesforce-only since 2018, and has conducted more than 15,000 interviews.