Last month, we covered what to do if your Salesforce is a mess. Now, your system is organized and optimized, but your work doesn’t stop there. How do you keep it organized and optimized long-term? The answer is staying up to date with Salesforce maintenance on a regular basis.
The goal of this regular maintenance is to prevent your organization from incurring Technical Debt.
This type of maintenance is provided through a managed services agreement with your Salesforce Admin provider.
What is Technical Debt?
In his book, The Architect Mindset: Six Skills to Make You a Stronger Salesforce Professional, Chris Gardner defines technical debt as code, customizations, or configurations that require maintenance, adjustments, or rework as your Salesforce org grows and changes with new releases.
As a practical comparison, think about your car. If you never change the oil in your car or if you never change the tires, the car will run for a while, but at some point it will break.
The same is true for systems. Technology changes, and the systems evolve with it.
In the context of Salesforce, here are a couple of practical examples of technical debt:
- if your organization is still using Salesforce Classic UI, you have technical debt. You will address this technical debt with an upgrade to Lightning UI.
- if you have custom configurations in your Salesforce org that no one is using, you have technical debt.
Salesforce Maintenance
Performing Salesforce Maintenance on a regular basis is a great way to avoid increasing technical debt over time. You may be tempted to stay on top of this maintenance yourself. Some of the essential steps we cover may seem easy enough to handle in house, but we often suggest using a dedicated Salesforce Resource to ensure the job is done correctly.
They can optimize your system regularly through system updates, user and data management, security, and analytics that your in-house staff may not be trained to handle.
Salesforce Release Cycle
Salesforce has 3 releases a year. Each release comes with new features and retires some old features. Before updating your production org, the new releases are available for testing in a Sandbox.
It is better to be aware of impending changes that will impact your team than to deal with problems later. That’s why it’s important to evaluate how the new release is going to work with your Salesforce unique configuration and customizations. Your Salesforce Admin can review the release notes and test the new releases in a sandbox environment ahead of time.
This will give your Salesforce admin a chance to plan and execute a course of action to make sure that your users productivity is not impaired when the new release is updated in your production org.
User Management
Regular maintenance of user management can optimize the user experience. This is accomplished through several avenues, some of which your Salesforce admin can complete entirely within your Salesforce system, but others will require you and your team to collaborate with your admin.
- Add or Remove Users
- set up a clear process to onboard new users and a process to remove users from the system.
- Communicate with users and provide training for new users
- Without adequate training, users get frustrated. Adult learners don't like to make mistakes.
- When your Salesforce system gets updated, your team will most likely need some training to learn the new updates.
- We recommend at least 3 training sessions:
- Basic Salesforce training to help them to understand the system.
- Role focused training to cover all the ways each specific user is expected to use the system.
- Follow up session for accountability.
- As users spend more time in the system and learn more about it, they start having ideas of how to improve the system for them to use.
Data Management
Salesforce is most useful if the data within it is accurate and up to date. At this day and age most organizations have some level of integration with other systems that are sending data to Salesforce. That's why it is important to have a strategy in place for managing your data.
Data management in Salesforce includes:
- adjust your configuration to detect duplicate records.
- review your data for duplicates.
- delete data that is not relevant.
- maintain your data dictionary to ensure the contents of your data set is being reported and represented consistently throughout your database.
- refresh sandboxes to reflect the new updates.
Security
It is important to stay on top of your system’s security. Your clients rely on you keeping their data secure.
This is done through:
- reviewing login history.
- review roles, profiles, and permissions of all users to make sure they are up to date.
- Re-align your system with other technology system updates, like MFA that enforced earlier this year
- run system health checks.
- We like to do these once a quarter.
Analytics
Once your system maintenance is complete, your analytics reports will be most accurate.
This will allow you to:
- Meet with business leaders with accurate data
- Evaluate report usage
- Check custom reporting features
- Update business performance metrics
Need Help Staying Up to Date?
We are aware this topic can be a little dry, but that is why we are here to help! We understand that most Salesforce users do not look forward to the Salesforce Maintenance that is crucial for your organization. The good news is that you don’t need to do it yourself.
If you need assistance staying on top of your regular Salesforce maintenance, reach out to CRM Growth Strategy. Having a dedicated Salesforce Admin can save you from falling into technical debt in the long run.
CRM Growth Strategy explains how outsourcing services at any stage of CRM implementation can help to design a better workflow, develop customized processes, and deliver an efficient CRM system that can keep up with your evolving company. Our engineers are certified to work with today’s robust and complex Salesforce CRM features to help your sales, marketing, and customer service teams work more efficiently together.
CRM Growth Strategy is focused on working with small to mid-sized businesses with 10-50 team members. If you have questions about how we work, feel free to contact us to learn more. Depending on your situation, we either serve as your outsourced Salesforce Admin or combine our services to best support your in-house staff.