Salesforce is highly known to be an adaptable platform. And whether you’re working on Salesforce customization to meet new business needs or you’ve found a new feature that you never knew existed, you should always make sure it is implemented safely. This is why it is important to be aware of the best practices for ensuring your Salesforce customizations stay supported by Salesforce.

Ensuring your Salesforce Customizations stay supported by Salesforce

For a new Salesforce instance, there will be a lot of features you might wish to customize to fit your business. And if you’re customizing the org, many parts of your Salesforce system may have already been adapted. So whatever you are going to customize, it is likely to affect other existing features in Salesforce. So, make sure that when you choose from the types of Salesforce customization to get it implemented, it won’t have any negative impact.

So, we have brought some of the best practices of Salesforce customization that you must consider before going for it.

1. Know the Right Way

When there is a request for Salesforce customization, there can be many ways to implement new customization. This is why sometimes you need some time to assess your options. There can be solutions that are more adaptable and manageable than others. 

Many Salesforce developers might find it tempting to code something instead of building out the same functionality through standard features. However, it’s always a better practice to configure as much as possible using the standard features and then move to Apex when there is no other option.

2. Focus on Great Planning for Great Execution

When you are set on how to customize Salesforce, you must get a plan on how you’re going to execute and deploy your development.

Making a plan can help you in many ways. Firstly, it gives you a chance to put down on paper what you are doing. This gives you a reference that you can verify again down the road. This will be helpful in both the case of developing and testing your customizations that can impact your organization.

Secondly, a plan helps organize and prioritize everything customization is going to do in the right order. This is important as a lot of features are interdependent, which means you will need to make some customizations before others. So proper planning will make your customization project efficient.

3. Always Use the Sandbox

Although it is tempting to make quick customizations, it isn’t worth the risk of potentially breaking your system without having the ability to roll back. A sandbox can create your Salesforce customizations in a safe environment and test, ensuring that without affecting other users or your system.

There are a few sandbox options, so here is a general brief on using these Salesforce sandboxes.

• Developer Sandbox – This sandbox is great for new customizations and testing them with fresh test data. It is possible as the developer sandbox is created without any data at all. This ultimately provides you a clean system without any mess of data that already exists.
• Partial Sandbox – With a partial sandbox, you get a sample data set added to your system. This attribute allows you to see the possible effect of customization on your data. 
• Full Sandbox – The ultimate sandbox is a full copy of your org and enables you to deploy your new customizations to see how it will look in your system. This sandbox is usually helpful for final testing before deploying the customization live.

4. Get the Expert Help

There are a huge array of Salesforce features, and it can be hard to master customizing them all without making any mistake. So if the customization you need is out of your depth, getting help from someone more qualified and experienced would be the right move.

Although it may seem expensive at first, hiring the right team will save you money in the long run. There can be situations when features might get implemented incorrectly and end up affecting other existing features in Salesforce. This means you will ultimately end up hiring a Salesforce expert to fix everything anyway!

5. Use the Right Tools

If the Salesforce customization you need for your business is complex, you may need some tools to help you feel more confident that you aren’t affecting any feature in the existing system. 

Having the right tools can prove to be a great support in the Salesforce customization process. It shows you the impact your customizations may have on other features. It also helps you release the new features safely and securely.

Winding Up

We have covered here the best practices that will help you customize Salesforce to fit your business needs. And with the support of an experienced Salesforce implementation service, you can also gain the confidence needed to implement other more complicated customizations.

We love to help make sure you can customize and deploy features safely to your Salesforce org, so be sure to check out our Salesforce blogs for some tips and tricks of the trade! You can also contact us to know more about Salesforce customization or avail an array of Salesforce-based services.

When a business plans to use a Salesforce solution, it is important to make sure that all the business requirements are met. The Salesforce platform can provide businesses the functionality they need because it is configurable as well as customizable. When the discussion is about Salesforce customization vs configuration, many businesses believe that these are the same. However, these are quite different from each other.

Salesforce Customization vs. Configuration

Both the concepts of Salesforce customization and configuration are popular but understood interchangeably. Many companies find it difficult to identify which one they need. Let us go into details of what each of these means and when to use which one.

Salesforce Customization

Salesforce customization relates to the custom development of code for creating tailored features and functionalities. These features can seamlessly integrate with business workflow and processes. Salesforce customize can help scale your business for better growth and improvement in ROI. Customization can be stated as a step ahead of Salesforce configuration. Customization is required for cases where configuration doesn’t serve the purpose. 

Here are some of the features of customizing a Salesforce instance:

• It helps develop features/functions that aren’t available as a part of the standard Salesforce solution.
• It helps the team achieve certain actions that aren’t covered with configuration and require some custom code.
• Customization allows the addition of triggers on the object to perform a few actions
• It is better to consider an expert Salesforce partner to get the customization done.
• Customization is required  for companies with a huge number of sales representatives and sales channels
• Salesforce customization can be considered complex and involves giving attention to user adoption.
• Once the configuration is done properly, then customization is used and brings fruitful results.

Salesforce Configuration

Salesforce configuration covers everything you can do, inside the system, using a lot of customized coding. Salesforce users can do most of the configuration work by themselves by using some external help. 

Salesforce configuration is configuring your needs to the system without changing much of the basic structure. Here are some of the features of Salesforce configuration:

• It provides different user-defined values for empowering certain features/modules to start operating.
• Companies can consider hiring expert Salesforce administrators to help set up initial settings to get the work done within time and budget.
• Configuration can allow you to work with the admin panel to alter switches and setups in the programs.
• Salesforce configuration helps add new fields, modules, workflows, surveys, and reports by altering settings in the Salesforce pane
• Customers can get what they expect by configuring and acquiring a pre-defined application of Salesforce.

Salesforce Customization vs. Configuration: Know What your Business Needs

Of course, there is more to Salesforce customization vs. configuration that you must know when considering extending your future services. But whatever you choose, make sure you get everything done with the help of a knowledgeable and experienced Salesforce implementation partner. 

For proper customization, make sure you evaluate the available resources accurately and talk to our Salesforce consultants to know everything before you get started. Reach us out with your queries and expectations at sales@360degreecloud.com.

Businesses should not close off any doors that can help with the expansion of any kind. Although coming out of the usual process and trying something new might seem risky, but sticking to where you are isn’t going to help you too. The same is with Salesforce. You might be doing alright with the standard Salesforce solution, but you need to look ahead to see how you can customize your Salesforce to scale better and improve the ROI. 

How to Customize your Salesforce for Better Output?

Many businesses take their first step with an out-of-the-box Salesforce solution. But as the business continues to grow, it invokes the need for a solution for increased lead tracking and customer support. This is where the need for customizations arises.

Here we have listed some ways you can customize your Salesforce to improve your business and scale better. 

1. Einstein and the AppExchange

Different customization options exist within the Salesforce ecosystem. When it is about organizations, there is no “one size fits all” customization approach. However, options companies can avail through AppExchange are growing continuously. 

Integration of Einstein can help to facilitate the creation of artificial intelligence-powered applications. These apps can allow teams to work with predictive lead scoring and automate parameter tuning and lead scoring.  This will free up your team so they can focus on utilizing the results to drive greater revenue.

2. Custom Settings and Metadata to Customize Salesforce

Apps on Salesforce are data-centric and follow a metadata-driven development model. Every Salesforce application is built around a structured database, which is considered a part of the development process.

This construct makes you can adapt applications to some of your business operations and processes with the help of Custom Metadata Types. When you create a Salesforce app, there will be objects created and set up to influence application flow. The objects that influence application flow are called Metadata Types.

Configuring metadata types can result in a variety of benefits like:

• Easily managing and extending custom rule engines
• Removing post-install data loading
• Eliminating the requirement to use Custom Objects as Metadata Objects

3. Integrating Salesforce with Existing Tools

Salesforce offers different ways to conduct integration with your existing solutions. Developers can use many REST and SOAP APIs to integrate third-party services into their applications. These APIs can be called from any programming language that supports web services.

Integrating Salesforce with other applications you use tears down information silos. It allows the team to make quick decisions based on reporting every needed information from all the applications. Integrating data will streamline reporting and make better-informed decisions, eliminating data entry burdens and reducing chances of errors.

4. Extend Salesforce Services with Heroku

Organizations these days are implementing Heroku to extend the capabilities of Salesforce to match business needs. Companies are mostly going for Heroku for their e-commerce to achieve high-fidelity and highly bespoke e-commerce experiences.

One of the major advantages of leveraging Heroku to extend Salesforce is that Salesforce bulk API calls made by Heroku Connect are free. It means that the bulk API calls do not count against your Salesforce API limit. That’s how organizations are leveraging Heroku Connect to make intelligent decisions about interacting with Salesforce APIs.

Customize your Salesforce and Achieve Increase in Returns

Ignoring the power of Salesforce customization will only limit the future growth of your organization. Keep extending Salesforce capabilities through customization and scale better for growth.

There’s a lot to Salesforce customization that you should know before you consider it for your business. Contact us, and our expert Salesforce consultants will guide you through it.

Salesforce has got everything for every business. You should know the right way to extract the most out of its capabilities. Most companies strive to go beyond boundaries to serve customers, and for that, the off-the-shelf Salesforce solution won’t be enough. That is why there are many common questions about Salesforce customizations which they usually ask to get a customize platform that could suit their business goals. 

When you are looking to extend your Salesforce platform, there is nothing better than Salesforce customization. It will help you get a tailored platform that aligns well with your business objectives and goals. But before you hire a Salesforce service, make sure you come up with the common questions about Salesforce customizations and get the answers for it.

Common Question About Salesforce Customization You Must Ask

Sometimes even different types of Salesforce support plans won’t work for you. You need something that is tailored for you. That’s where Salesforce customization is what you need. To get all prepared for customizing your Salesforce platform, you must know what exactly you are getting yourself in. For that, you need to put forward all the important questions to the service provider and get answers to them. 

Here are some of the common questions about Salesforce customizations you must consider asking before getting starting.

1. Will the customized platform fit your core business needs?

Ask the Salesforce customization service you hire about how the system will be handling processes that are key to your organization. For instance, if you have a process for intensive client intake, you need to understand how the customized system matches your process. 

2. Are there any companies that are using this kind of Salesforce customization?

If you are the first company to try out the specific Salesforce customization, you are more likely to experience the pain. This is because the team you hired would be going through a learning curve on Salesforce customization. 

You need to make sure that you are hiring an experienced team of Salesforce professionals who know their way through customizing Salesforce CRM.

3. What is the roadmap to perform customization?

Understanding how the Salesforce experts plan to go with the customization helps you understand how much they are invested in the job. The roadmap will present the features you will be able to take advantage of once your Salesforce platform is customized according to your business needs. Along with this, the roadmap for the customization process will also expose current shortcomings.

4. What will be done for user adoption?

Sadly, many services center on completing the customization while not considering user adoption for the updated Salesforce platform. This is why documentation and training resources are often the last things that get any attention till customization is done.  

Ask your Salesforce partners what documentation or training you and your team would be getting to make sure they are well-versed with all the new features.

5. How much support will you get after Salesforce customization?

Some Salesforce services might consider the work done once the Salesforce platform is customized and won’t think of the support needed later. 

For successful customization, you need to find a service that will guide you through the onboarding process and even provide needed support with the customized platform and its functionalities. So, make sure you ask if you are getting support after the work is done.

Customize Salesforce for Better Experience and Delivery

Salesforce customization is a viable way to make your Salesforce CRM efficient for the sales team and curb poor user adoption issues. You must get a Salesforce consulting partner involved to ensure a successful customization process.

Talk to our experts and know what is best for your Salesforce according to your business. Reach out to us at sales@360degreecloud.com.

Businesses using Salesforce would always wish to have a crystal ball, so they could divine the Salesforce future and how they can use it in their business. You might always look to walk parallel with the Salesforce updates so you can extend your Salesforce platform for future services. But you might not know what exactly you need to work on.

Many companies consider different types of Salesforce customization to extend the capabilities of the platform. But along with that, you need to concentrate on how Salesforce is evolving the platform.

Trends to Consider to Extend Your Salesforce Platform

You should start with tracking the strategic moves made by the industry leader in the worldwide CRM market, Salesforce. That’s how you’ll be ready to predict what CRM clients can hope to expect from providers.

On that note, let’s take a deep dive into the major Salesforce future trends that you need to consider when planning to extend your Salesforce platform for future services. 

1. System and Data Integration

Customers nowadays expect seamless and connected experiences related to the information they share at various touchpoints. But according to the latest report by Salesforce Connected Customer, only 50% of companies are working on customizing their customer engagement according to past interactions.

This is because customer data resides on multiple clouds and off-platform systems. Thus sales, service, and marketing teams have to spend a lot of time and effort scrambling through information when required. To work on this data-driven approach, Salesforce allows integration with different third-party applications to maintain a unified view and data access. 

Be active enough to understand which are applications that you already use can be integrated with Salesforce. You can consider hiring a Salesforce integration service to get the work done.

2. AI and Data-Driven Intelligence

The AI-powered Einstein has been successfully delivering data-driven predictions, insights, and recommendations to make better sales decisions. Using the feature for future services can help promote saving time, resources, and opportunity costs. Here are some of the other developments to show that Salesforce is quite serious about AI and data analytics and the technology will dominate the future:

• Tableau: An interesting and celebrated move made by Salesforce was its acquisition of Tableau, which will take business intelligence (BI) and analytics to the next level.  This will prove to be helpful when one thinks about the future of data analytics to improve sales targets.
• Voice-enabled analytics: Using the technology, natural language processing (voice commands), users can instruct Einstein AI for updating Salesforce records.

3. More Focus on Enterprise Mobility

Salesforce has been on top of the mobile revolution, launching CRM to mobile devices. To lay a solid foundation for the future, Salesforce has been encouraging a lot to use the mobile interface via upgrades like:

• Building native apps: In 2018, Salesforce partnered with Apple to redesign the native Salesforce app. The idea is to utilize iOS capabilities such as Siri Shortcuts, Face ID, and Business Chat for improving user experience.
• Democratizing Salesforce app development: Salesforce is also known to deliver very intuitive point-and-click app development tools. Salesforce has empowered Salesforce developers by providing a “low-code development environment” with pre-built JavaScript components to simplify development.

Stay Updated to Extend Your Salesforce Platform to Deliver Better in Future

To make sure your Salesforce helps you deliver the best to your customer, make sure you are right on track with everything that’s trending. Every customer seeks service that is best in the industry, and to deliver that you need to keep yourself and your CRM updated.

Want to know what more you can do with your Salesforce to extend its capabilities and power? Talk to our Salesforce consultants to know what exactly your business needs. Contact us with any query or support, and we’ll get back to you.

We always call Salesforce an incredible CRM, but the truth is that the off-the-shelf version is nothing compared to the power of Salesforce once you customize it. Different types of Salesforce customization can help you better serve your business and your sales team. 

Whether you consider Salesforce customization yourself or hire a Salesforce implementation partner to do so for you, the best thing to remember is that you can bend Salesforce to your will. Customizing Salesforce can allow you to perform functions like:

• Enable process automation to save time with data entry
• Create validation logic for protecting the data integrity
• Migrate legacy data over to Salesforce
• Integrate external systems with Salesforce, along with a lot more such features.

Three Types of Salesforce Customization 

Although the type of your business and goals will determine the right customization you need, you must be aware of what kind of Salesforce customizations are available to choose from. There are three main types of Salesforce customizations- declarative, integration, and custom code. 

Declarative

When you plan to move from standard Salesforce support to customization considering how it looks and responds to users, it’s all covered in declarative customization. This type of customization refers to setting up and using the native functionality of Salesforce or its declarative development features. In other words, it will cover clicking the right boxes to turn features on and off within the program according to the requirement. 

Always consider giving preference to clicks than code since Salesforce configuration requires zero programmings. Declarative work doesn’t just affect the Salesforce dashboards but also helps configure back-end system resources. However, conducting this kind of customization can be fairly complex. Figuring out the right way to adjust Salesforce’s native settings properly can be hard to master, and you might need to consider a Salesforce consulting service to get this done.

Integration

You might be using various other enterprise applications to help you manage various aspects of your business before you implemented Salesforce. Many major enterprise applications offer apps for integration with Salesforce. The app categories could be:

• Sales
• Customer Service
• IT & Administration
• Marketing
• Finance
• Collaboration

Instead of having a disjointed process that forces your team to re-enter data, you can consider Salesforce customization to integrate the CRM with those applications. This will enable the data to flow smoothly from one program to the other without affecting the workload.

Custom Code

When you are done with your declarative options and still need more from Salesforce, then it’s time to look at your custom code options for enhanced customizes. Custom code centers on preparing code for new modules within the Salesforce framework.

These modules with custom codes can be used for business logic and front-end components. You can create custom dashboards and custom functions with APEX within Salesforce to perform activities like automatically updating fields, performing calculations, or creating records.

Stick to What You Need When Considering Salesforce Customization

When you are considering Salesforce customization, you should tread lightly. Businesses often make the mistake of coming up with lists of customizations for Salesforce that aren’t necessary. The best practice is to customize Salesforce is to do it in a way that meets the business needs. 

Properly pacing and rolling out enhancements with the right support and training is the right approach. Get the support of our experienced Salesforce partners at 360 Degree Cloud to customize your CRM. To know more about our services, reach out at sales@360degreecloud.com.

Salesforce implementation has become a tactical business decision. But implementing basic Salesforce CRM might not be the right solution to the unique and complex business problems of organizations. This is where you need to consider Salesforce customization as a preference for your business.

Why Choose Salesforce Customization?

Businesses can consider upgrading their Salesforce platform by customizing it in various situations. Some of these are:

• For better performance of third-party integration with external systems.
• When more detailed reports and dashboards are required.
• When the end-users are facing difficulty to adapt to the platform.
• When it is difficult to cover large amounts of complex business data with the default functionality of Salesforce.

When to Consider Salesforce Customization for your Business?

There can be many signs that you might pick in your business that will be a clear indication that it’s time to move on to Salesforce customization.

1. The System not Imitating your Business Processes

Each business is unique and has its specific business requirements. Likely, the standard Salesforce implementation might not be able to match it. For unique business issues, you need a platform tailored to suit your business processes. This is where the idea to go for Salesforce customization can be a great decision for your business.

2. Need to Derive a Single View of Customers

Having distorted information of customers might consume a lot of time of sales team to find relevant information quickly when required. You must have a consolidated view of all customers to get an idea from where you are getting the business. 

Customized Salesforce platform matches your requirements to track activities, from beginning to closing the deal, while managing ongoing client communications. It thus makes it easier for representatives to get a single view of customers anytime they need, improving interactions which can add on to customer retention in the long term,

3. Irregularities in Reports

The appropriate generated reports can help drive good behaviors to increase deal closure and promote sales. Manually preparing reports on Salesforce can leave scope for errors and inconsistency. It will also take a lot of time that might get the potential customer frustrated.

Once a query turns up, the CRM should be able to track the number of times a representative reaches a potential customer by any communication medium. Customizing Salesforce enables tracking all attributes related to customers and communication with them. This ultimately speeds up the reporting processes.

4. Need to Optimize the Platform Usability

While using Salesforce, you might start feeling that its usability becomes an issue for user adoption and retention. Also, when the team members start facing difficulties with Salesforce, the chances are stronger the business may eventually start losing its money. With usability issues in sales teams, the team might end up using additional unnecessary steps that can delay the deal closure.

Salesforce customization optimizes the system to make it pretty easy to use by the teams. It will thus improve the usability, making it easier for the team to understand and work on each functionality in the right way. You can consider hiring Salesforce consulting service for platform adoption to increase usability.

5. Simplifying Salesforce Integration with Other Systems

The efficiency of the team will increase when it can use the data and have the functionality of other applications integrated with Salesforce. This will also ensure a rise in the productivity of the team members and improve operations by speeding up the process to close deals. 

A customized Salesforce platform would make it easier and efficient to integrate the Salesforce platform with other existing systems. For instance, customization can enable the Salesforce systems to work with applications like Google Apps, MailChimp, or HubSpot.

Salesforce Customization to Benefit from the Best CRM Capabilities

While the standard Salesforce functionalities can support businesses to improve processes like sales and marketing, appropriate customizations in Salesforce will allow more efficient use of the CRM. This will help businesses gain more revenue and increase the ROI.

All you need the right team for Salesforce customization that can handle it all for you. If you want to know more or considering customizing your Salesforce, feel free to contact us.