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8 Salesforce Administration Mistakes to Avoid And Ensure Business Continuity

Salesforce is a powerful CRM tool. It has helped many organizations carry out business operations smoothly, and has helped businesses with increasing sales, efficient deal closure, and operational efficiencies. However, customization and administration of Salesforce can at times be challenging.  Moreover, common mistakes lead to increased and unnecessary costs, dragging work rate, and may eventually result in user dissatisfaction. There are several Salesforce administration mistakes to avoid in order to effectively use Salesforce.  A new Salesforce administrator will learn from the pitfalls experienced and become more efficient over a given duration. However, this learning period and accompanying costs can be minimized by seeking the guidance of an expert.  To keep CRM running and efficiently functioning, businesses sometimes seek the expert help of architects, consultants, and developers. The duties of Salesforce admins in advising, providing a fast response to changes, automating different processes, and enabling real-time updates are fundamental for maintaining an updated and fully optimized CRM. Nevertheless, onboarding admins is not a guarantee to perfect performance, since they are also subject to error. 

Salesforce Admins Mistakes to Avoid To Ensure Business Continuity

To eliminate these errors from occurring or leading to long-term effects on the entire organization, we have compiled a list of some Salesforce administration mistakes to avoid. 

Deletion of data without a backup.

Your organization can be subjected to a huge crisis should the organization lose sensitive business. The crisis is even worse when there is no backup available. This is why the need for a proper data backup is essential.  Since data merging and data deletion is a progressive day-to-day procedure, admins need to mitigate the risk of data loss by securing sold backup plans such as the use of cloud space or seeking third-party data backup services.  For data security, a reliable backup is a non-compromise within teams. Storing data without a backup is a Salesforce admin mistake to avoid in 2022.

Failure to deactivate Automations

Automation is very necessary for businesses. However, these automations need to be monitored and disabled at times. Failure to do so may easily crumble the business. This may harm customer relations efforts and greatly affect customers’ perception of the organization.  Ignorance of this simple action may lead to sending inappropriate messages to numerous clients which may not be necessary to any of them. Such messages may lead to a change of perception and a majority of these customers may not respond to any subsequent messages. Therefore, before any data load, any existing automation should be deactivated. To avoid any complications, admins ought to confirm the email settings regarding delivery and diligent workflow regulations.

Performing Tests in production

It is advisable to first create a sandbox. It allows for thorough testing and demo of an item before it is change-set or shipped into production. It also enables you to carry out testing without fear, without affecting business operations. This method helps you locate the bugs before production. Performing tests helps you to sort all problems before rolling them out.

Failure to fill out descriptions.

Salesforce is constituted of numerous fields with each field representing particular information upon which a pending action is to be taken. There is a specific description to be matched to the corresponding fields.  Many cases have been reported where admins ignore these descriptions, hence leading to inconclusiveness and confusion among new operators. To eliminate these confusions, each team should keep the descriptions filled out clearly and concisely. This helps subsequent users to easily understand the description without necessarily seeking the assistance of the original admins or applying guesswork.  The consistency will be beneficial in the future while scaling and determining whether the respective fields are useful for the organization. Filling out a description is a Salesforce admin mistake to avoid for efficient Salesforce use.

Custom objects

Many admins make mistakes while creating new custom objects. The majority do this just because it is a requirement. However, it is recommended that the admin should be aware of what they are asked to do and exactly how to go about it in Salesforce.  Businesses are also encouraged to have a comprehensive conversation with the stakeholders of interest so that they can make an informed decision on whether the object must be created and how the standard objects will affect them.  Standard objects are preferred to custom objects because they undergo an automatic update when releases are produced. 

Creating Unnecessary Profiles

Profiles are meant for limited access. Extended access is achieved via permission sets. Your objective as an admin is to attempt to keep the organization as clean as possible.  Minimizing the number of profiles and rather exploiting the permission set provision to extend the functional user access is advisable.  This is a better alternative that produces the same outcomes as opposed to the continuous creation of profiles upon every user’s request.  Admins make the above-discussed common mistakes in the daily running of this application.  Although this is a continuous learning course, these mistakes can develop into big and costly consequences if they are not closely monitored and eliminated as early as possible.  Proper training of new admins is very crucial in ensuring a seamless CRM operation as well as avoidance of performance gaps during the admin transition periods.  Creating unnecessary profiles is one of the Salesforce administration mistakes to avoid in your organization.

Salesforce Administration Mistakes to Avoid: Familiarize with DevOps

Some of the challenges encountered while using the system have a quick fix that does not require technical expertise. Admins should familiarize themselves with some simple DevOps.  This ensures that a quick fix is available in case of glitches, and the workflow continues. Some DevOps like Copado are easy to grasp. Failing to master some simple DevOps is among the Salesforce admin mistakes to avoid. 

Train your Team

The final Salesforce admin mistake to avoid is failing to train people within your team. Every Salesforce user should be well conversant with the system. All users must know how to use the platform for its intended purpose.  This eliminates reliance on one person or a group of people and ensures workflow and completion of tasks. Training your team is one of the Salesforce administration mistakes to avoid for a seamless operation. The Bottomline Operating Salesforce can sometimes be a complex task. The administration of the platform requires some level of expertise.  However, there are some outright Salesforce admin mistakes to avoid in order to operate the platform effectively. Upon training, the admins are well equipped with the necessary skill sets and experiences that they can apply while undertaking their roles, whether working on a full-time or part-time basis.  Apart from training, we propose that you get in touch with experts during the adoption of this software; from installation to configuration, in order to ensure proper and frictionless Salesforce CRM functioning.  Seeking expertise also helps extensively in avoiding mistakes that can easily transform into bigger complications over time.  Need some expert help with Salesforce? Get in touch and let us help you get it right with Salesforce.
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