As a technology leader using Salesforce, it’s critical that you get the most out of your investment. While many companies have the core software in place, some don’t use it to their fullest potential.

So, how can you maximize your company’s Salesforce platform to create more efficiencies and monetize your investment? This blog will review five best practices to ensure your Salesforce platform is maximized to its potential.

1) Don’t Overload Your pages

Your business operations require the appropriate amount of information from your clients. Beyond the initial set of “contact information,” there are many “custom fields” you may consider collecting to further understand your target audiences, the common problems they’re experiencing, and how you can best serve their needs.

When it comes to using Salesforce, these custom fields must be kept orderly and used correctly. Here are a couple of best practices for using Salesforce custom forms:

  1. Limit custom fields: While custom fields help you understand new and specific data, too many of these fields will deter your customers from completing the forms in the first place.
  2. Ask yourself why: When customizing your forms, think about “why” you’re asking for this new information in the first place. If you don’t have an apparent reason to have the field, maybe you don’t need it.
  3. Keep your data organized: Unorganized data will be detrimental to the success of how your organization uses Salesforce.

2) Continuously Educate Yourself on the Platform

Salesforce is a robust platform and one that should be re-learned continuously. If nothing else, this ongoing commitment to education will help you better understand the uses, the best practices, and the unique ways you can get the most out of your license.

A couple of ways for you to keep up with the necessary education required to get the most out of Salesforce include the following:

  1. Directly From Salesforce: This seems obvious, but Salesforce has quite a robust database of information for your team to utilize. You can find articles, insights, and much more here. Additionally, Trailhead and Trailblazer Community are two fantastic Salesforce resources (and processes) to best learn the platform.
  2. Outsourced Through Salesforce Professionals: There are many individuals and companies that teach about the Salesforce platform or assist with implementation. A few more resources can be found here. Additionally, our team at Coherent Solutions can help provide comprehensive, integrated business solutions designed to help you get the most out of your Salesforce investment.

3) Collect Feedback from Your Team and Clients

Feedback can be what powers innovation when it comes to your Salesforce platform. Thus, collecting feedback from your team and your clients is essential.

Team feedback matters because it helps organizations understand how well Salesforce is meeting the needs of their internal teams (and, more importantly, accomplishing their internal goals). By listening to your team’s experience with the platform, technology leaders are more in tune with the overall frustrations and pain points and better prepared to help set their teams up to succeed.

Client feedback matters because it helps organizations understand how well the platform works according to the audiences it’s supposed to be working on. This provides invaluable insights into what features they find most valuable and where they are experiencing challenges. Additionally, you’re building trust and credibility with your clients by asking for client feedback.

Ultimately, collecting feedback is a way to further inject the human element of your sales process into the Salesforce software.

4) Build With a Professional Developer

One of the absolute best ways to maximize your Salesforce technology is to hire a professional development team. While we’re a little biased in this recommendation, the reality is that, as we mentioned above, the platform is quite robust.

Here are a few ways to utilize a custom development team for Salesforce:

  1. AppExchange App Development: Build custom software for Force.com and distribute through AppExchange or as an OEM.
  2. Migration: Migrate data from 3rd party systems to Salesforce and between Salesforce environments. Perform migration of your business processes from a legacy system to Salesforce
  3. Security Model Improvements: Strengthen the security of your Salesforce solutions by implementing robust approval processes, login policies, sharing models, role hierarchy, monitoring, and more.
  4. Customization: Develop modules/portals/integrations and configure AppExchange packages to deliver cost-effective solutions.
  5. Platform Configuration: Configure Salesforce Clouds to fit your business needs and requirements.

While you may understand what you want the platform to do for your business, there’s often a disconnect between that understanding and the platform’s ability (or a non-development- focused team’s ability to utilize the platform). So, the best solution is to hire an expert and take away the guesswork and compromise involved in maximizing your software.

5) Integrate With Your Current Systems

Salesforce provides many ways to integrate with your current systems. Force.com offers a variety of APIs so that programmers can incorporate services from third parties into their projects (again, you may need a developer to set these connections up). These API connections allow organizations to access and edit Salesforce data from other applications or by updating data in those applications from Salesforce).

The critical thing to note here is this: Salesforce doesn’t have to be the “be-all and end-all” for your organization. It can be a piece of the software puzzle you use to accomplish your goals. So, as you’re either vetting out Salesforce or looking at ways to improve upon your existing license, consider how your other software systems may interact with Salesforce; how you want them to interact with Salesforce.

  1. A few of the benefits to your business will be as follows:
  2. Get reports and universal data insights faster.
  3. Feel more confident in your ability to make strategic decisions.
  4. Lessen the effort of data entry.
  5. Limit the number of errors in your data.

Do You Need Help with Salesforce?

Salesforce is a powerful tool, but there can be a significant learning curve. If you know how to customize Salesforce to fit your specific needs, you’ll unlock a tool that can change your business forever. Why build custom software from scratch when you can save money by building on top of the high-quality platform Salesforce already has? Whether you need a mobile app or web app or want to automate business processes, our developers can help you leverage the power of Salesforce.

Coherent Solutions is here to help you get the best out of this CRM software. Contact us today for more information about how we can help.