Designing Salesforce for the future - Isn't it obvious? Maybe not...

"We need to redesign our Service cloud, Salesforce data model which means we must redesign processes, reload data, potentially re-write integrations and re-train our existing users in order to enable Sales cloud or enable Community cloud." Doesn't it sound familiar, am sure for most of you it does. In fact, this is true even if you've started off your Salesforce journey with Sales cloud or Community cloud.

While there are many reasons why most Salesforce implementations end up this way. Here are the top 5 based on my Experience with dealing with such requests -

1) Limited scope and vision at the beginning of the project - Most Salesforce projects (unless it is a complete transformation program across Sales, Service and Communities) are designed to meet the most immediate needs without much thought in to the future scalability, cross organizational needs that may follow and mergers & acquisitions. With the limited time and budget allocated for the project, it often seems natural to take the easy path only to realize significant redesign effort needed later to integrate other business units into the existing Salesforce Org.

2) Account/Contact Model - The Account/Contact design is a delicate balance between how the organizations manage their books of business vs. all the rich out of the box functionality that Salesforce provides to ensuring all security, reporting and future community needs are met without significant duplication, redesign, data redundancy and security. Many Salesforce clients undergo significant overhauls due to not focusing on the Account/contact model from the beginning.

3) Not investing on development standards - Salesforce offers a variety of powerful tools to automate your CRM processes/functions ranging from workflow rules, flows, process builder, Apex, etc. Most of these tools have overlap a significant overlap in what can be achieved using one vs. the other. It is extremely important to have a set of standards that define the tool of choice based on the scenario. Not having a solid devops strategy creates significant issues as multiple teams start working on the same org.

4) Extreme Customization - Keeping it simple has great benefits when it comes to Salesforce. Not having a good build vs. buy strategy can quickly end up in a maintenance nightmare and significantly slow your ability to implement new features/enhancements. With too much customization organizations may not be able to fully leverage the innovative features that Salesforce provides with each release.

5) Performance Optimization & LDV - Designing to account for performance and large data volumes is almost a reactive measure for most projects which end up requiring significant redesign/rewrite.

Our unique engagement model addresses these and many more challenges upfront which greatly maximizes your ROI, lower maintenance costs and allows you to scale the platform in the future. Our expert Salesforce team will be happy to provide you with more information as to how you can design for the future! If you are interested to learn more please free to contact us.