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Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you want to make sure your organization can use its Salesforce investment to the fullest potential, while still being nimble and cost-effective.

To balance effectiveness and efficiency, you need to make sure your team isn’t held back by a lack of agility, or a surplus of complexity, that slows performance.

Here are some straightforward ways that you can be a Trailblazer, leading the charge to help your team become a lean, clean, and efficient achievement machine. Let’s start off with the letter “A”:

 

Avoid Risk

You’ve grown accustomed to Salesforce's high standards of trust and security, taking every measure to protect your customers’ data. But be sure your team hasn’t overlooked any major security risks in your org. Here are some tips:

  • Direct your team to review the Salesforce recommended items on the Health Check, in Critical Updates, and on the Optimizer Report.

  • Back up your data — and develop and test a successful disaster data recovery plan.

  • Make sure your team doesn’t fall behind on Salesforce Releases — pay close attention to security and feature updates.

 

Be Careful with Complexity

There’s a fine balance between customizing your org and over-customizing your org. Excessive, unneeded, and outdated customizations can slow your org and users, reduce the agility you may have once enjoyed with Salesforce, and sow confusion by managing unnecessary layers of complexity. Here are some tips to maintain balance:

  • Design well up front.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel: Salesforce offers a wide variety of features, services, and solutions across our ecosystem that will help your team maximize efficiency.

  • Use out-of-the-box solutions whenever possible: Get your team into the habit of first determining if there’s an out-of-the-box feature in Salesforce or a solution on AppExchange before creating something custom.

  • Have your team document early and often how your schema, automation, integrations, and solutions work together.

  • Monitor as you go. Be mindful of your account limits.

  • Implement retention and archival strategies, and always monitor usage against Salesforce governor limits to avoid crises and prepare for future growth.

  • Maintain a lean org: Have your team conduct an annual audit with the Optimizer Report and clean up any technical debt accordingly.

  • Participate in an Org Health Assessment Accelerator once a year to learn from a comprehensive org audit performed by a Salesforce expert — this is for Premier customers.

 

Control Change Management

Key tips to remember:

  • Have a deployment plan or calendar that is well-documented and communicated across teams working on change management in your org.

  • Stick to a consistent release schedule (for example, the Salesforce Release is scheduled for three times a year).

 

Want to learn more about how to maximize your Salesforce usage? Join us for our upcoming webinar, How Boston DND Is Improving Boston’s Neighborhoods with Salesforce, Faster, featuring demos and tips from our org health expert. Register for the webinar today!

 

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