Overcustomizing Salesforce is a Silent Killer

A silent killer for Salesforce Customers is OVER customization of the platform.

There are a variety of factors that cause this to happen within an organization, so we'll dive into the most common mistakes made, the impact those have on your Salesforce instance over time, and what you can do to avoid it.

How do you end up with an over-engineered Salesforce instance?

A quick look at the ways this happens as companies start to scale their use of Salesforce and slowly invest in an in-house team.

• Giving too many people Admin access

• Allocating Developers to poorly defined solutions

• Deploying solutions without thinking about the future state

• Letting business stakeholders be in charge and not empowering the Salesforce team

What is the impact?

Salesforce is designed to be a scalable and highly customizable tool in a company's internal technology stack; however, overcustomizing it can back an organization into a corner and make future changes in the application significantly harder.

Some of the most common ways this happens:

• Technical debt makes releasing new features or changes increasingly difficult

• Workflows, automation rules, and triggers start to break, ticket volume increases

• Poorly defined and built solutions decrease user adoption over time

• Ramping new Admins/Developers takes too long because they need to make sense of the mess

How do you avoid overcustomizing your Salesforce instance?

The answer is truly this same: Invest in dedicated Salesforce resources EARLY. The entire situation is avoidable if you allocate some headcount from the start. This doesn't mean hiring expensive Administrators and Developers on staff at the start.

If you’re a smaller company, you really only need a part-time Salesforce Administrator helping out for 10-15 hours per week. They are recommending solutions, thinking about how those changes will impact the roadmap, and building with best practices in mind.

And as you scale, you need to be prepared to continue making this investment in Salesforce, hiring dedicated team members responsible for continuous audits of your Salesforce (and overall GTM Systems environment), creating a long-term feature roadmap, and building with best practices in mind.