For organizations looking to become customer-centric, implementing Salesforce is probably one of the best ways to begin. By helping create a unified, holistic customer experience, Salesforce helps create a 360-degree view of customers, detect trends, and align value proposition with customer needs. However, for the enterprise system to deliver on the promise of seamless customer experience, organizations must take the right approach to Salesforce Development.
Download our free resource to unlock answer to achieving better business results through transforming your IT.
Read on to explore best practices for Salesforce development and how these actionable steps can benefit your company:
Salesforce Development
Salesforce, through its out-of-the-box capabilities, delivers a host of modern features that help modern organizations meet their business needs with ease. Although many organizations can drive value with these features, many others need to develop and customize the solution further, so it can better meet their specific business objectives.
Salesforce development, when done correctly, can enable organizations to build certain features, services, and applications into the Salesforce platform while meeting business goals with ease and speed. Leveraging the multi-tenant architecture and integration capabilities, organizations can tweak the solution to create outstanding elements useful for the business. They can:
- Build user-friendly applications and modules that allows technical and non-technical users to easily navigate through the platform using simple drag-and-drop features
- Integrate different features and capabilities to suit the different needs of different teams and departments
- Develop calendars, dashboards, custom reports, email features, and more to carry out day-to-day activities and enhance workforce productivity
- Use the Salesforce Collaboration Cloud enhance communication and collaboration through frequent conversations on updates, projects, and bottlenecks
- Develop features to deal with customer queries, needs, feedback, and deliveries to strengthen customer relations
- Make the most of built-in analytics capabilities to create predictive reports across organization development, competitor or market status, and brand reputation
- Develop or customize different mobile and web apps to meet specific needs of different departments with ease
- Enable Salesforce integration with existing or upcoming enterprise systems and applications for better business performance
10 Best Practices for Salesforce Development
When it comes to Salesforce development, many organizations are quick to jump to a solution and implement it. Although such an approach might be seemingly quick, poor planning can lead to several risks that can impact the ROI in a large way. Take time to understand your goals, plan a roadmap, and determine which features you need to get the most out of your Salesforce investment. Here are some Salesforce development best practices to keep in mind:
1. Build a Robust Plan for Salesforce Development
Before embarking on the Salesforce development journey, it is worth getting a plan together on how you’re going to develop and deploy your solution. Planning not only gives you a chance to understand where you are today, but also where you want to reach, and what you need to do to reach there.
2. Understand Salesforce’s Underlying Architecture
Once you have a roadmap in place, it is a good idea to understand Salesforce architecture – the different layers, the interactions between them, the different components, APIs, and databases. It is also important to understand the difference between the core platform and the packaged apps running on it as well as the communication and data flow between the different servers.
3. Leverage the Sandbox for Salesforce Development
Although Salesforce does give the option of developing modules and customizing features in a live environment, it is advisable to use the sandbox for development – without impacting the performance of your system. You can choose from the developer sandbox to create new features, partial sandbox to see the affect development might have on your system, or full sandbox to deploy customizations and see how they will function in your system.
4. Follow a Consistent Coding Style
It is natural for several different developers to work on your Salesforce development project; therefore, following a consistent coding style can help ease the development process to a large extent. Adhering to common coding conventions can not only set the stage for common guidelines, they also add consistency, so everyone in the team agrees on standards and patterns and adheres to the same principles.
5. Use Trigger Frameworks within Salesforce
Using trigger frameworks can help in significantly bringing down development effort – especially as your needs grow. They allow you to remove logic and enforce consistency across the platform – thus making unit testing, integrating changes, and maintenance much easier. Once standardized, you can be sure all your triggers work in a consistent manner, giving you full control over order of execution.
6. Keep It Simple
Like any enterprise platform, Salesforce offers a plethora of modern and exciting features. But don’t give in to the excitement; develop features you actually need. Sidestep complicated patterns, frameworks, and packages /libraries that are not going to be used and are not relevant to your business.
7. Get Modular with Salesforce Development
One of the best advantages of Salesforce development is the ability to develop functions or modules independent of others. Using a modular approach, you can design the system in a way that different functions can be optimized independently – without causing failure of one function to impact others.
8. Use the Right Tools
In addition to choosing the right features, it is also important to use the right tools for development – so you can immediately start developing and testing your Salesforce platform. Based on your requirement, conduct a proper evaluation of the tools available and choose those that will help you meet your needs – quickly and easily.
9. Test Thoroughly
The Salesforce solution you develop is only as good as your testing efforts. Since the platform will be used day-in and day-out by your entire workforce, you need to make sure it works properly. Ensure testing every functionality and every feature you’ve developed – so it works as intended in all situations.
10. Focus on Documentation
When developing your Salesforce solution, it is also a good practice to document everything that programmers are working on. Such a practice of logging every development effort can help other admins and developers understand the developments that have been made – and prevent them from duplicated or changed when they shouldn’t be.
Invest in a Salesforce CRM
The Salesforce platform, when implemented properly, can take organizations to great heights. Following these 10 Salesforce development best practices is a great way to ensure successful implementation. However, given the huge array of features, mastering the ability to develop or customize features and modules – without anything going wrong – is not easy.
Getting a qualified Salesforce implementation partner on board can bring a lot to the table: the partner can carefully understand your specific business needs, suggest features and capabilities you need, and make sure every aspect of the platform has been developed and implemented correctly.
Invest in Salesforce CRM today by scheduling a call with one of our experts.
