If you have been running a custom Salesforce instance for a few years, you know that it is not cheap. Even a mid-sized instance can easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and larger ones get into the millions if you include subscriptions, add-ons, and employee costs for the team responsible for Salesforce implementation and maintenance.
Of course, Salesforce gives you tremendous value for the dollar. Not having to maintain physical infrastructure for example. Enforced unit testing that improves quality. Not to mention the built-in features, security, scalability, customizable entities, reports, product-specific features and so much more.
Is that good enough? Is that all? Can you do better?
Let’s find out.
Call your doctor if you experience these symptoms…
We put together a list of indicators that suggest you are not getting full value out of your Salesforce instance. Take a look – does any of this sound familiar?
- Slowing productivity: Features requests that used to take days are taking weeks
- High volume of APEX code: There are hundreds of apex classes and/or tens of thousands lines of code that is starting to get unmanageable especially with talent churn over the years
- Hitting API limits: Code that used to work is now running into Salesforce Platform governor limits that are either forcing awkward work-arounds or completely blocking business processes
- Unreliable integrations: Salesforce is important to you and it needs to talk to other systems. But how? Custom integrations are notoriously fragile – are you seeing data inconsistencies and silent failures?
- Excessively complex business rules: So your team embedded complex business logic in APEX code and now it is a nightmare because you are never sure if its doing what its supposed to. That may have been your only choice back in the day but not anymore.
- Poor customer experience: Still dealing with the clunky old Classic interfaces? Let me tell you about Salesforce Lightning.
Get a professional opinion
At Informulate, when we work with organizations who want to get the most out of their Salesforce instance – we begin with a design and architecture review. Typically, feature growth and customization have gradually accumulated over time, leading to shorter-term decisions being made that are now causing sub-optimal outcomes that can be resolved by taking a big picture view.
Complexity is a choice – it reflects a lack of intentionality.
High-quality, deeply experienced Salesforce architects are hard to come by and chances are you don’t need to hire a full-time one because of a major. What an architecture review does is provide a clear separation between the current state and what a modern Salesforce instance would look like. Don’t forget that Salesforce is not a dumb database or just a CRM or even just infrastructure. It is constantly evolving and rapidly and disrupting itself constantly with major quarterly releases. An experienced architect knows what Salesforce is doing and what they will do next. Architects drink coffee and know things like:
- What new features deliver immediate value and how to move to them right away for maximum value
- What patterns of enterprise development to look for that are already handled/will soon be handled by the Salesforce roadmap
- What typical patterns of Salesforce development are no longer the best practice
- What new products Salesforce is delivering that completely obviates the need for external integrations e.g. case management, email, scheduling apps etc.
- What features probably aren’t fully baked yet and maybe best to wait just a little longer 😉
Take two of these and call me in the morning
Fear not. Most likely, you don’t need major surgery – an architecture review will provide you with the gaps and actionable recommendations. Then you can derive a roadmap based on the current capacity that could give 30%+ savings and a future-ready design that does the following:
- Migrate to modern architecture that reduces tech debt and increase productivity – Lightning
- Leverage a more declarative instead of code-based development approach – learn know when NOT to use APEX
- Simplify business workflows and integrations using Salesforce Flow and Platform Events
- Fully leverage high value Salesforce products and features like Einstein, PATH, predictive analytics, email automation, lead merging and so many things you didn’t know you didn’t know
Hope that helps. Reach out to us at [email protected] to learn how you can radically cut costs and improve productivity for your Salesforce instance!
