You Don't Need a Full-Time Salesforce CTA (But You Still Need One Sometimes)

The full-time CTA problem

A Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) in the US earns between $160,000 and $320,000 per year, depending on experience and location. Add benefits, equity, and overhead, and you're looking at $300K-$400K in total compensation.

There are only about 400 CTAs globally. The certification is notoriously difficult—most people fail the review board multiple times. Even getting to the review board requires passing the multiple-choice exam, which costs $6,000 and has a pass rate around 1-3%. Then there's the hundreds of hours of study and coaching.

This scarcity creates a hiring problem. If you need architectural expertise for a complex Salesforce project, your options are:

Hire a full-time CTA (expensive, hard to find, probably overkill unless you have constant architecture work)
Use a senior consultant who isn't CTA-certified (works for simple projects, risky for complex multi-cloud implementations)
Wing it with your existing team (how you end up with technical debt that requires a rewrite 18 months later)

Most mid-market companies and growing consultancies don't have enough architecture work to justify a full-time hire, but they still run into situations where they need that level of expertise.

When you actually need an architect

Not every Salesforce project needs an architect. If you're doing a straightforward Sales Cloud implementation—standard objects, basic workflows, maybe a few custom fields—a good admin or consultant can handle it.

You need an architect when things get complicated:

Multi-cloud implementations: Sales Cloud + Service Cloud + Marketing Cloud, especially when data needs to flow between them and you have to figure out where different business logic lives. Or when you're integrating Experience Cloud and need to design a secure, performant data model that works for both internal users and external portal users.

Complex integrations: Salesforce + ERP + e-commerce platform + warehouse management system, where you need to figure out the data flow, error handling, API limits, and what happens when one system goes down. According to Salesforce's State of IT report, 57% of IT leaders say integration complexity is their biggest technical challenge. This isn't the kind of problem you solve by trial and error.

Technical debt audits: Your Salesforce org has been around for 5+ years, you've had three different implementation partners, nobody knows what half the automations do, and now you want to add new functionality but you're worried about breaking something. An architect can assess what you have, identify risks, and design a path forward that doesn't require burning everything down and starting over.

Compliance and security: Healthcare, financial services, any industry where you have regulatory requirements. You need someone who understands Field-Level Security, Sharing Rules, Platform Encryption, Shield, and how to design data models that enforce compliance without making the system impossible to use.

Performance and scale: You're hitting governor limits, pages are slow, batch jobs are timing out. This requires someone who knows how to profile Apex, optimize SOQL queries, design efficient triggers, and when to move logic out of Salesforce entirely.

The guide to Salesforce architects breaks down different types—Solution Architect, Technical Architect, Application Architect, System Architect, Domain Architect—but the common thread is that these are problems requiring strategic technical decisions, not just configuration.

The fractional model

The fractional CTO/architect model has become standard in software development over the last decade. Instead of hiring a full-time executive or architect, you hire someone for a set number of hours per month or on a retainer basis.

For Salesforce, this looks like:

Monthly retainer: You get X hours of architect time per month (typically 10-20 hours). Use it for architecture reviews, solution design sessions, risk assessments, technical debt planning, whatever you need. Unused hours don't roll over, but you have consistent access.

Project-based: For a specific initiative—migrating to a new Salesforce instance, designing a complex integration, pre-acquisition technical due diligence—you bring in an architect for a defined scope. Could be 40 hours over two weeks or 100 hours over two months, depending on the project.

On-call support: Some firms offer an on-demand model where you pay a lower monthly fee for access, then hourly rates when you actually use the architect. Useful if your architecture needs are unpredictable.

The economics work because the architect serves multiple clients. They might work with 5-8 companies simultaneously, giving each one 10-20 hours per month. This is viable for the architect (they're billing 50-80 hours per month total) and cheaper for the client than a full-time hire.

Research on fractional consulting models shows typical rates are $150-$500/hour depending on expertise level. Even at the high end, 15 hours per month is $7,500/month or $90K/year—less than a third the cost of a full-time CTA.

What you actually get

The value isn't just in hourly rates. It's in the flexibility and breadth of experience.

Flexibility: Your project pipeline isn't constant. Maybe you need heavy architecture support for three months during a big implementation, then minimal support for the next six months while you focus on user adoption and minor enhancements. With a fractional model, you can scale up and down. With a full-time hire, you're paying for someone who's underutilized half the time.

Broader experience: A full-time architect at your company sees your org and your problems. A fractional architect working with 5-8 clients sees patterns across industries, different approaches to similar problems, and brings that knowledge to your projects. When they recommend an integration pattern, it's because they've implemented it successfully elsewhere, not because they read about it in documentation.

Faster ramp-up: If you hire a full-time architect, there's a 3-6 month ramp-up period where they're learning your org, your business, your systems. A fractional architect is already ramped up on Salesforce architecture in general. They spend less time on organizational learning and more time on solving your specific problems.

Risk reduction: Maybe you hire an architect and six months in, you realize they're not as strong as you thought, or they're not a culture fit. Now you have to go through the hiring process again. With a fractional arrangement, if it's not working, you switch providers. Less commitment, less risk.

Real scenarios where this works

Financial services multi-cloud audit: A mid-market wealth management firm had Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and Experience Cloud. They'd grown through acquisitions and now had three different org strategies across their business units. They needed to figure out whether to consolidate, how to handle cross-org reporting, and what their data governance model should be.

Full-time architect would be overkill—once they solved this problem, there wasn't enough ongoing architecture work to justify the role. They brought in a fractional architect for 30 hours over three weeks. Got a detailed assessment, a consolidation roadmap, and a data governance framework. Cost: ~$15K. Compared to a bad decision that would have locked them into a suboptimal architecture for years.

SaaS company pre-IPO architecture review: A B2B SaaS company preparing for IPO needed to demonstrate that their Salesforce setup could scale and meet SOC 2 compliance. Their existing team was strong on implementation but hadn't dealt with compliance or the scale they were projecting (10x growth over two years).

Fractional architect spent 20 hours/month for four months: reviewed their current architecture, identified security gaps, designed a data model that would scale, documented everything for the auditors. Total cost: ~$40K. Comparable to hiring a full-time architect for three months, but they got someone who'd done this before and knew exactly what auditors would ask about.

Healthcare integration strategy: A hospital system was consolidating patient engagement tools. They had Epic for EHR, Salesforce Health Cloud for patient outreach, a third-party patient portal, and various legacy systems. They needed an integration strategy that met HIPAA requirements and wouldn't break when Epic upgraded.

Architect designed the integration architecture, specified which data should sync where, how to handle PHI, error handling, and monitoring. Project-based engagement, 60 hours over six weeks. The alternative was using their existing consultancy, which was great at implementation but didn't have the architecture depth for this kind of cross-system design.

What this doesn't solve

If you need 20+ hours per week of architecture support consistently, you should probably hire full-time. The fractional model works when your needs are intermittent or project-based.

It also doesn't work if you don't have a competent implementation team. The architect designs the solution, but someone still has to build it. If your team doesn't have strong Salesforce development skills (Apex, Flows, integration patterns), having an architect won't save you—you'll end up with a great design that's poorly implemented.

And it's not a substitute for domain expertise. A Salesforce architect can design technically sound solutions, but if you're in a highly specialized industry (pharmaceutical manufacturing, insurance underwriting, whatever), you need someone who understands both the technology and the business domain. Sometimes that's a full-time hire who's deeply embedded in your business.

When to graduate from fractional to full-time

There are clear signals that you've outgrown the fractional model:

Consistent utilization: If you're maxing out your architect hours every month and still have work queued up, that's a sign you need more capacity. At that point, the economics of a full-time hire start to make sense.

Organizational knowledge becomes critical: Early on, an external architect can add value without deep organizational context. But as your Salesforce ecosystem becomes more complex and intertwined with your business operations, you need someone who's immersed in your specific setup.

Strategic planning requires constant presence: If architecture decisions are happening weekly in leadership meetings, and you need your architect in those conversations, a fractional arrangement becomes awkward. Full-time means they're in the room for those discussions, not catching up via email afterwards.

Team mentorship and growth: A fractional architect can review work and provide guidance, but they can't mentor your team the way a full-time hire can. If you have junior developers who need to level up to senior roles, having a full-time architect accelerates that.

How this fits with other services

This is different from the 3-day kickoff service we wrote about previously. Kickoffs are one-time: you're starting a project, you need discovery and initial architecture, you get a blueprint and SOW.

Architect-as-a-service is ongoing. You have an existing Salesforce org, you run into architecture questions regularly, and you want access to expertise without hiring full-time. Could be monthly retainer, could be project-based, but it's recurring.

A typical pattern we see: consultancies use the kickoff service for client discovery, then use the architect-as-a-service model for ongoing support across their client base. Instead of hiring an in-house architect, they have access to one (or multiple) as needed, paying only for the hours they use.

Getting started

If you're trying to figure out whether you need this, ask yourself:

Do you have architecture questions that your current team can't confidently answer?
Are you making technical decisions that will be expensive to reverse if you get them wrong?
Do you have the budget for 10-20 hours per month of architect time?
Do you have a team capable of implementing whatever the architect designs?

If the answers are yes, this is worth testing. Start with a project-based engagement—pick a specific problem (integration design, technical debt audit, multi-cloud strategy) and hire an architect for a fixed scope. See if the value matches the cost.

If it works, move to a retainer model for ongoing support. If you find yourself consistently needing more hours than the fractional model provides, that's the signal to hire full-time.

Need architecture support but not sure what model fits? We can help you figure out whether you need a one-time kickoff, project-based engagement, or ongoing retainer. Talk to us →