Every business has its problems, and even though Salesforce is such a powerful tool, it’s not immune to Salesforce administration mistakes. There is always an aspect of the administration that needs careful attention. Salesforce can supercharge companies to increase their sales, close deals faster, and execute tasks more efficiently.
It is sometimes challenging, however, to administrate and customize Salesforce. With its complexities in functionality and the myriad of essential features, Salesforce administration mistakes occur. This inevitably increases cost and slows down production, causing user dissatisfaction and frustration.
Over time, a new Salesforce administrator eventually finds its navigational rhythm and understands that Salesforce administration mistakes can be avoided, and they can yield a more efficient form of delivery. This learning curve’s associated costs, which generally occurs, can be reduced if guided with expert precision. Too often, the negligent novice approach to Salesforce administration results in companies losing valuable production time and profit.
Administrators need to create a wise implementation strategy to achieve the most with the investment. It takes a lot of resources to implement a properly customized Salesforce solution, but you should not forget that Salesforce provides training, communities, and MVPs. To think that you can do it all by yourself is one of the first Salesforce administration mistakes.
You will need to devote a significant amount of time to the implementation process, even if you need to hire someone to help. Beyond setting up the software, you need a strategic plan, to document your business processes and train your staff.
You will need to set a realistic time frame for this, so that you don’t rush and miss the critical training skills-set required for your business’s successful progression. You want to start on the correct trajectory to avoid headaches and pitfalls later.
If you plan to hire someone to help with implementation, you should do due diligence and research to get value for your resources. Knowing how to use Salesforce does not make someone the right partner for your Salesforce project.
Common Salesforce Administration mistakes Inexperienced Administrators
- Configuring changes in the live production environment instead of using a sandbox
- Failing to perform enough testing to cover processing and routine needs
- Building and deploying inadequate security models, for example- profiles, sharing rules, roles, and hierarchies.
- Failing to make scalable customizations capable of growing with the user base
- Not keeping track of new and retired functionalities
- The lack of mastery of capabilities in reporting
- Changes made to systems in day-to-day activities failing to be documented.
- Failure to verify that changes made work with different profile configurations. These changes often need to be tested using several user profiles logged in.
- Failing to verify automations so they never interfere with validation rules
- Failing to deactivate and create new users and instead, overwriting them altogether
- Failing to perform routine audits to remove unused, redundant fields
- Not keeping clean layouts of pages with a focus on the target users
- Failing to use permission sets for better control of user permissions
- Failing to effectively minimize costs on data storage usage
Implementation
