Salesforce Challenges and Solutions for Beginners
Salesforce provides a powerful platform for customer relationship management, but implementing and maintaining it poses some special challenges. Companies may face problems with data migration, user adoption, and intricate customization. Conquering these obstacles is key to unlocking the complete potential of your Salesforce investment.
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Salesforce Challenges and Solutions
Here are the common Salesforce challenges and solutions:
Low User Adoption
Challenge: This is a major issue in which users will not or cannot effectively use the Salesforce system, typically resulting in unreliable data and poor return on investment (ROI). It is a “people problem” that technology cannot solve.
Solution:
- Emphasize change management.
- Engage users early, give in-depth and role-based training, and implement an open communications plan.
- Ensure the Salesforce user interface is minimal and easy to use by eliminating unnecessary fields and automating routine tasks.
- Leverage Salesforce’s Adoption Dashboards to track usage and assign a “champion” or power user in each department to help inspire others.
Example: A sales team won’t log calls and update opportunities in Salesforce, instead using their antiquated spreadsheets. The fix is not simply to require use, but to illustrate how Salesforce automation will free them from administrative drudgery, such as creating follow-up tasks, so that they can spend their time selling.
Poor Data Quality
Challenge: Dirty data filled with duplicates, inconsistencies, and incomplete records can translate into erroneous reports, poor decisions, and erosion of user trust. This is usually caused by an absence of data validation rules and emphasizing quantity over quality.
Solution:
- Sanitize the data prior to migration and have stringent data governance policies in place afterwards.
- Employ Salesforce’s out-of-box duplicate rules and validation rules to block bad data from coming into the system.
- Periodically execute data quality reports and utilize tools on the AppExchange to detect and eliminate duplicates.
Example: A business has several duplicate records of the same customer with slightly variant names and telephone numbers. They enforce a duplicate rule on the contact object to prevent new records from being created if they have an existing match based on email address.
Code Application (Apex Trigger for Data Validation): This illustrates how an Apex trigger can be used to validate a contact’s email address so that it is always in lowercase prior to saving. This helps avoid “dirty” data from entering the system because of formatting inconsistencies.
trigger ContactEmailCleaner on Contact (before insert, before update) {
for (Contact c : Trigger.new) {
if (c.Email != null) {
c.Email = c.Email.toLowerCase();
}
}
}
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Complex Customization & Technical Debt
Challenge: Too much customizing the platform with intricate code (Apex) and automation (Flows) can create a cluttered, difficult-to-maintain org. This is technically referred to as technical debt and it becomes cumbersome and costly to maintain in the future.
Solution:
- Follow the clicks, not code philosophy first.
- Use declarative tools like Flow Builder and standard configurations whenever possible. If custom code is necessary, ensure it is well-documented, follows best practices (e.g., bulkification), and is reviewed by other developers.
- Implement a Center of Excellence (CoE) to govern all customizations.
Example: A business has a straightforward flow to set an account field when a contact is created. Rather than composing difficult Apex code, they utilize a record-triggered flow, which is simpler to develop, test, and maintain.
Integration with Legacy Systems
Challenge: Most companies have older, on-premise-based systems (such as ERP or finance systems) with no contemporary APIs, thus the integration with Salesforce is challenging. This may lead to data silos and redundant data entry.
Solution:
- Utilize middleware or a dedicated integration platform such as Mulesoft (Salesforce offering) as an intermediary between the systems.
- In the more involved scenarios, employ custom APIs (Apex REST/SOAP) in order to create a custom integration layer.
Example: On-premise ERP system of a manufacturing firm must synchronize order information with Salesforce. They integrate the two systems using Mulesoft, pushing new orders automatically from Salesforce into the ERP for processing and subsequently updating Salesforce with the shipping information.
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Performance & Governor Limits
Challenge: Salesforce imposes strict governor limits to guarantee equal use of resources on its multi-tenant servers. Exceeding these limits (e.g., too many SOQL queries per transaction) will result in failed code and slow-loading pages.
Solution:
- Code efficiently by “bulkifying” your Apex.
- This refers to coding that can process a list of records in batches, as opposed to looping through them one at a time.
- This is the most crucial idea for Apex developers.
Example: A developer must bulk update 50 accounts by their associated contacts. One of the pitfalls is to place a SOQL query or DML statement within a for loop, and soon governor thresholds will be reached. The right thing to do is put all contact IDs into a list and subsequently execute one SOQL query.
Code Application (Bulkified Apex): A basic bulkification example, which is an important concept in Salesforce development to avoid governor limit exceptions. Rather than query within the loop, we gather IDs and then query in one go.
// Bad example (Non-bulkified – will hit governor limits)
// This will fail if you try to process more than 100 accounts.
for (Account acc : Trigger.new) {
Contact c = [SELECT Id FROM Contact WHERE AccountId = :acc.Id LIMIT 1];
// Do something with the contact
}
// Good example (Bulkified)
Set<Id> accountIds = new Set<Id>();
for (Account acc : Trigger.new) {
accountIds.add(acc.Id);
}
// Now, query all related contacts in a single statement
List<Contact> contactsToProcess = [SELECT Id, AccountId FROM Contact WHERE AccountId IN :accountIds];
// Process contacts efficiently here
Security & Access Control
Challenge: Misconfigured security options may leave sensitive information open to the wrong users or, on the other hand, deny the right access, which is needed for productivity.
Solution:
- Enforce the Principle of Least Privilege, which is assigning users the least set of permissions necessary to perform their work.
- Use Profiles, Permission Sets, Role Hierarchy, and Sharing Rules in combination to restrict access to data.
- Employ Field-Level Security (FLS) to suppress sensitive fields.
Example: The sales team must be able to see all opportunities, but the finance team alone sees the “Credit Score” field. This is done by making the FLS for the “Credit Score” field “Hidden” for the Sales Profile and “Visible” for the Finance Profile.
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Inefficient Deployment Process
Challenge: Without a defined process, deploying changes between a sandbox and production is disorganized, and more likely to result in bugs, broken features, and downtime. This can be especially challenging in large teams.
Solution:
- Have a formal Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) plan with well-defined phases:
- Development, Testing, UAT (User Acceptance Testing), and Production.
- Employ sandboxes for development and testing, and a powerful deployment tool (e.g., Salesforce DX, Change Sets) to transfer changes between environments.
Example: A development team employs a full sandbox to create a new feature. They roll the changes to a UAT sandbox to be tested by business users. It is only after UAT is finished that they roll out the changes into the production environment, reducing risk.
Absence of a Governance Framework
Challenge: In an expanding company, there is no central control, which can result in an unorganized, badly-handled Salesforce org. Various departments may create their own solutions, with resulting fragmentation and redundant effort.
Solution:
- Create a Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE).
- This is a cross-functional group that dictates the standards, priorities, and roadmap for Salesforce.
- It is the single center of authority for all changes and new initiatives, with alignment against business objectives.
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Governing a Sophisticated Record Sharing Model
Challenge: For large organizations, it can be extremely complex to manage who gets to view what data, with an intricate web of sharing rules, profiles, and permission sets.
Solution:
- Apply the Role Hierarchy to share access to data “up” the line of authority.
- Apply Sharing Rules for data access laterally (e.g., a sales representative in one district must view records for another).
- For infrequent exceptions, apply Manual Sharing.
Example: A firm has a shared “Account” object, yet sales managers should be able to view their team members’ accounts. The role hierarchy makes them see the accounts of their subordinates. A sharing rule is then established so that marketing specialists can view accounts in the region they belong to, even if they are not in the same role hierarchy as the owner of the account.
Maintaining and Optimizing Performance
Challenge: As an org gets bigger, so does its data, which slows down page loads and report running. Customers will be frustrated if Salesforce performs slowly.
Solution:
- Monitor and tune code and declarative automation regularly.
- Leverage the Salesforce Query Optimizer and validate that SOQL queries are selective using indexed fields.
- For large, complicated reports, explore the use of a data warehouse or analytics platform such as Tableau.
Example: An administrator notices that a Visualforce page with a large table of records is loading slowly. They implement pagination to limit the number of records displayed at once, significantly improving the page’s performance.
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Conclusion
The full potential of Salesforce can only be achieved through forward-looking planning and extensive knowledge about its pitfalls. Addressing issues such as data quality and adoption, and using best-practice approaches to customization, enables organizations to leverage their CRM as a major business enabler.
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