What does or must it take for businesses to embed an optimization culture, WRT Salesforce?
Updated: Jan 23, 2021
You have read various blogs and posts from the Salesforce ecosystem talking about why businesses need to optimize their Salesforce org in order to leverage the benefits that come with it, but, what does it really take for businesses to shift towards an optimization culture when it comes to Salesforce?
What we often get told and read about is, what the end results will be if we make this shift towards an optimization culture, however, what we often don't get to dive deeper into is, what is involved in making this shift, here are our advice on the first three steps your Salesforce team can take to get started on this journey.
A few critical benefits that we already know get unlocked with optimization:
🔑allowing businesses to scale up without hindering important project go-lives and system performance
🔑allowing businesses to transform their customer experiences
🔑improvement in user adoption -> leading to improved productivity of your revenue engines (a.k.a sales & marketing teams) which eventually has a positive impact on your business revenue
So, what does or must it take for businesses to make this shift? What is the effort behind making this happen?
Let's dive into the three main areas critical to success, to help you get started towards this shift.
1. As a business, if you have invested in Salesforce but your teams are not really using it as it should be, the investment you made is a bit worthless, so getting your stakeholders to champion the use of Salesforce across the business (across relevant teams) is an absolute must, as a first step.
Find your champions at the SMT level
Find your champions at the team level
These are your colleagues who will play a significant role in helping the business make the first successful step towards this shift
2. Ask the most important question and analyze your org set up to find out the answer (if you haven't already)
How many Salesforce admins does your org have, and how many out of those users, are accidental admins?
Every Salesforce org small, medium, or enterprise-level, should develop clear standards around their Salesforce Admin framework that clearly lays out which users can/cannot have system administrator access. Review the list of super admin powers that can be provisioned via profiles & permission sets and identify the high-risk access and limit it to the users who truly require this access.
❓Do you have Salesforce developers or external consultants with indefinite system admin access in your production environment?
❓Do any of your end users have system admin access via the profile/permission sets they're on?
❓Do end-users (outside of your Salesforce team) have system admin access because they require access to create and share list views?
❓Or is it because they need to be able to create dashboards and reports?
The list can be never-ending... Take a step back and conduct the necessary reviews!
And while you're at it, also useful to review all the profile's system permissions, and don't be surprised if, in this process, you identify end-user profiles that have all the admin superpowers!
This is now a project in itself that needs attention, however, once resolved, you have made a successful second step towards this shift, whilst also reducing the security risks by eliminating any accidental admins!
3. Split your releases into business as usual and project releases, define what business as usual changes mean for your business and what fits within a project release (the latter being self-explanatory).
This approach will help manage the kind of changes that can be implemented without making the business wait for weeks and avoid any blockers for daily processes that need to progress to keep your revenue engines going on a day to day basis.
Another important point worth noting, if your users need to wait for weeks or months for something as simple as page layout changes, additional values to an existing picklist field (provided it makes sense to add and has been agreed with the stakeholders), or lead assignment rules, this can negatively impact how well your users adopt the use of Salesforce and this is where splitting the approach between "business as usual" and "project release" helps. Here's your third successful step towards this shift.
That's all for the part one of Four-part blog series ... we hope to have got your thinking hats activated to start making this shift for your respective Salesforce orgs. If you're interested in learning more about how you can make the shift for your org, do sign up to stay in the loop for part two where we publish the next 3 steps.
As thoughtfully discussed in our previous blog Making your investment in Salesforce Platform Impactful, optimizing your Salesforce platform is an ongoing process, needs to be embedded in your day-to-day processes and management of your org. Most often, it will involve multiple steps, few at a time, before you can achieve long-term success and ROI from Salesforce.
To find out more about how Advisedly Optimize can help your business take the required steps to embed a culture of optimization and technical hygiene for your Salesforce platform, reach out to us and have a chat!
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