Common Salesforce Administration Mistakes and How to Avoid Them From the Beginning

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.

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.

On the other hand, there are more frequent Salesforce administration mistakes that never fail to surface daily. These include:

• 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

How to avoid Salesforce Admin Mistakes

Although human is to error, there are certain precautions that can be installed to help alleviate the burden of administration mistakes. Some of these include:

Implementation

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.

Invest in your admin

You should invest in your Salesforce admin so that Salesforce administration mistakes are avoided. Successful Salesforce solutions invariably have a well-equipped Salesforce admin. This person is the internal team member who will defend and advocate for you in your Salesforce endeavors. They will supervise the daily activities and maintenance of the org and ensure the success required to be secure in the field.

They should be adequately trained and continue their education throughout the working process, so they are always up to date with market trends and new IT developments. Investing in Salesforce Premier Support is investing in your admin, with access to vital training modules.

A supportive executive team

The executive is of principal importance, and you need it to be supportive. You will not be able to execute a successful business plan without them. Your executive body needs to be engaged throughout the entire implementation process, as their leadership is essential. They set the expectation level of unification on the team.

Move data carefully

Salesforce has the essentials to pull all your data into one centralized dashboard. But pulling all your data requires expertise. So, document all your sources of data and integrate this with a data structuring software, ensuring that they are all in one usable format. You are making sure all the raw data you are pulling is in the same format, so you will not lose out on a unified result.

Knowing these Salesforce administration mistakes is the first step on the success ladder. Understanding the team and what to look for with mistakes will take you far.

With this knowledge in your hands, you now have the power to implement the measures necessary to propel your business to the top with Salesforce’s philosophy and systems designed to make you succeed in your implementation process.

Using a reliable Salesforce consulting partner like Plumlogix can help you avoid these costly Salesforce administration mistakes and propel your Salesforce investment to higher levels of efficiency. Signing up for our Managed Services is one sure way of getting the right Salesforce expertise readily available when you need it most for a low cost.