How to Navigate your CRM through Salesforce’s Iceberg
The article is focused on SMBs who are always in dilemma whether to use custom coding or configurations in Salesforce and attempts to give them a suitable approach for the issue.
“Penn” is the IT Director at Bann Associates and “Andy” is the Sales Director at Bann Associates.
Bann Associates have moved to Salesforce CRM over the course of last one year.
It’s a hot summer day and the emotions are running high as both of them discuss the ROI of their CRM System.
To add fuel to the fire, the Sales Team is facing performance issues, broken workflows after the last weekend deployment of code on the CRM platform.
This has been a common sight over the last few months where there have been a lot of finger pointing over the CRM system.
Penn and Andy are pondering over what their future course of action should be?
Is this a common sight at your company? Is your Sales Team not able to effectively use your Salesforce CRM implementation because of too much custom coding and the perils associated with it?
Is your Business & Technology leadership team constantly facing any of the below pain points with your CRM system, then read on.
Don’t worry, you are not alone if you are facing any of the above pain points.
A lot of companies in the SMB segment are dealing with the same set of emotions. The underlying issue which comes out of the discussion with these companies is the amount of customization’s or custom coding they have done on their Salesforce platform and they are left with a very fragile system with a lot of pain points.
Before we dig deeper into the problem and the solutions around it, let us first understand what is Configuration and Customization in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Customization v/s Configuration
Customization
It stands for extending the feature set which are not available OOTB in Salesforce using custom coding viz Apex, Visualforce, Lightning Component, Javascript, etc.
Configuration
It stands for the out of the box (OOTB) features, functions, modules which can be defined, configured or enabled as per the user requirements.
Now that we know the difference between Customization & Configuration, lets move back to the basis of Salesforce Platform; it is Low Code Development.
What is Low Code Development?
A low-code application platform (LCAP) is an application platform that supports rapid application development, one-step deployment, execution and management using declarative, high-level programming abstractions, such as model-driven and metadata-based programming languages. - Gartner
The whole Salesforce ecosystem is build on the above rule, i.e. to let their customers focus on Business and leave the Technology Debt to them. The platform is optimized for a given set of parameters, server space, threads, etc. after taking into consideration the needs of the business.
Now, consider your CRM as a Ship on a business journey, then the tip of the iceberg that you can view represents the Salesforce Configuration viz a viz the hidden part is the Salesforce Customization.
Until and unless you have the resources to look at the hidden part of the Iceberg, you will be compromising the following parameters of your implementation if you go ahead with Customization:
If you don’t want your CRM go the Titanic way, the rule of thumb is to follow the below steps sequentially for any new business requirement that needs to be implemented.
Steps to follow for implementing any new requirement
- Use Point & Click Features: Salesforce keeps on adding a set of features every quarter. You can keep a lot customization at bay if you go through the OOTB configurations. For example, a lot of Apex Triggers functionality can be replaced with Process Builder or Flow applications which is a OOTB functionality.
- Use Appexchange Lighting Components: This is a curated list of front end components tested for all the performance parameters which can be utilized directly on your Lightning pages. Before creating any new component for your UI, go over this list to make sure you are reinventing the wheel.
- Use Appexchange Apps: There are more than 5000+ business apps for each and every business case you can think of. Try to map your requirements with these Free and Paid apps.
If the above points don’t cater to your needs and you have the resources on your side, then only take the bumpy ride of customizations. We are not against customizations model but you need to fully understand the bigger picture (Let’s save this topic for another day) before jumping into it.
We at Tecnita are firm believers of Low Code movement and want to help our customers realize their full potential by focusing on Business and not getting bogged down by Technology.
