5 Best practices for successful Salesforce development
Many organizations have chosen Salesforce as their CRM solution of choice. Salesforce has seen a rapid increase in adoption over the last several years, making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise software vendors today.
As an organization grows and its business needs change, it means changing your Salesforce implementation for the best results. There are several considerations to take into account when developing new functionality or customizing existing features in Salesforce.
Another important aspect is selecting the right Salesforce partner for the project. Some of the Salesforce CRM partners in India have been busy supporting nascent Salesforce users to familiarise themselves with the scope and impact of the Salesforce system.
Salesforce CRM Partners in India
You can initiate your development project with your in-house resources or else you can always call for expertise in the form of established and proven Salesforce partners. You have a choice of leading Salesforce partners in India who can help you with your development and integrate your CRM needs with ease.
The onus of course is on making the right selection of the Salesforce partner who is going to provide the services. In addition to numerous selection parameters, the official Salesforce ranking and the tier of your Salesforce partner are important. Salesforce partners in India fall into various tiers, for smaller businesses the best choice would be a Silver Salesforce Partner.
Who is a Silver Salesforce Partner?
When a registered Salesforce partner tiers up, they are first placed as Silver Salesforce Partner. The tiering is based on a complex algorithm that considers elements such as customer satisfaction scores, certifications, projects completed, and so on. Silver Salesforce partners focus mainly on dealing with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and emerging small businesses, at times they also take up projects for the larger businesses.
WHAT ARE THE 5 BEST SALESFORCE DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES?
5 ‘Best Practices for Salesforce Development’ that will help you succeed:
#1. Define Your Customization Criteria
Before you begin developing on a platform, you need to determine what types of customizations you want to implement. Best examine: “Where do you want to take your business with this implementation and what are your goals?” Look at the implementation and ask: “What are the changes possible?” and “What is to be added?”. Whatever features are added to your platform, it will take time and resources to complete. Therefore, it’s essential to prioritize and choose wisely.
When choosing features, it’s important to keep your business goals and user cases in mind. For example, if your organization focuses on B2B sales, then you need to consider how your customers buy and how to best support them throughout the buying process.
Therefore, you may want to implement functionality like sales stages, account stages, forecast track, lead source tracking, or opportunities.
#2. Use Registered API Tools
There are several tools available that make it easier to develop on top of the Salesforce platform. At the same time, Salesforce offers several open-source libraries that can help to speed up development, like Apex Code and Lightning Components.
Furthermore, Salesforce Apex is a full-featured programming language that makes it possible to create custom functionality while leveraging existing data and functionality within the platform. It can be used to create simple scripts or full-fledged applications and is fully integrated with the Salesforce platform. Apex makes it possible to create custom APIs, triggers and Visualforce pages.
#3. Have a Governance Process
It’s not uncommon for organizations to have multiple teams working on various features and functionality on their Salesforce platform. To ensure that everyone is working together and following best practices, it’s important to establish a governance process.
A well-established Governance Process will help to ensure that everyone is following the same standards, working from the same template, and communicating with one another. This will also help to prevent miscommunications and reduce the risk of duplicating efforts.
A good governance process should take into consideration the type of platform you’re working on (i.e. cloud or on-premises), the type of features being built, the type of developer building it, and the type of organization you work for.
At a minimum, you should be documenting: – What features are being built by whom? – What priority level each feature is being built at? – What is the expected completion date for each feature? – Who needs to sign off on each feature?
#4. Define Developer Skillsets and Rotations
Depending on the organization, it may make sense to have a team of full-time developers working on the Salesforce platform. However, many businesses prefer to hire a team of consultants or Salesforce partners who can be brought on as needed.
When defining your team structure and skillsets, it’s important to take into consideration the type of work that is being done, the type of organization you work for, and the type of project being implemented. For example, at the beginning of a project, it may make sense to have your senior developers working on the most important functionality.
#5. Do Test, Test, and Re-test
Whatever functionality or customization that you build, it’s important to ensure that it’s tested and working as expected. This will ensure that your users are receiving the best customer experience possible while using your Salesforce platform.
When creating new functionality, it’s important to test it both manually and programmatically. This will ensure that everything is working as expected and that you have all of the correct data and calculations.
It’s also recommended to run regression tests that check for broken functionality, regressions or other problems that may have been introduced during your development process. Having continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) testing in place will help to expedite this process, while also keeping your final output clean.
Wrapping Up
When developing on a platform, there are many considerations and factors to take into account. One of the most important is to choose the right platform and implementation for your business, which is preceded only by the choice of the right Salesforce partner / Salesforce partner in India.
Ultimately, Salesforce is the leading CRM platform in the world, so it makes sense that many businesses choose to build on top of it. With its many features and customizations available, it’s possible to build a solution that fits the unique needs of each organization.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that every new feature that you add to your platform takes time and resources to complete. Therefore, it’s essential to prioritize and choose wisely.