Common Salesforce Development Challenges and Their Solutions

A significant number of companies using Salesforce build custom apps, customizations, or integrations to expand the platform’s out-of-the-box capabilities, better tailor it to their unique business needs, and eventually maximize their CRM’s ROI. But while Salesforce development can be highly advantageous from the business perspective, these types of projects are often fraught with challenges.

Over-customization, deployment complexities, and user adoption issues are some of the most significant challenges commonly faced by companies investing in Salesforce development. Thus, to ensure project success and guarantee that the solution delivers tangible business outcomes, companies need to address these challenges timely and proactively during project planning and execution.

In this article, experts from Itransition, a company that provides Salesforce developers for hire and delivers custom Salesforce solutions for 10+ years, highlight the most common Salesforce development challenges and offer best practices for addressing them.

Over-customization

Salesforce development projects often involve customizing the platform’s out-of-the-box functionality, such as custom objects, fields, page layouts, dashboards, and automated workflows. While these modifications enable companies to adjust the platform to their specific needs, excessive or uncontrolled changes (often called over-customization) can cause a range of operational and financial issues for businesses:

• For instance, page layouts overloaded with custom fields, excessive process automations, or heavily customized business logic can slow down a Salesforce solution’s performance, which can negatively affect employee experience and productivity.
• Salesforce customizations can also conflict with each other, and as a company adds changes, the likelihood of these conflicts increases, alongside the risk of system errors, data inaccuracies, and operational disruptions.
• Since customizations, particularly code-based ones, require continuous maintenance, overly-customized Salesforce solutions can also become too complex and costly to support.

Recommendations

1. Developers need to document all customizations, covering their specifications, as well as dependencies between them and other functionalities, to simplify Salesforce maintenance in the long term.
2. Before implementing new modifications to the out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality, it is vital to test them thoroughly to ensure that they do not interfere with any existing customizations.
3. Technical teams should periodically audit corporate Salesforce solutions to identify and deprecate unused or outdated customizations and reduce the overall customizations amount.
4. Companies need to establish a structured change request management process to prevent the accumulation of excessive customizations and avoid over-customization in the long run.

Deployment complexities

Many companies encounter technical and operational roadblocks when deploying the developed Salesforce apps, customizations, and integrations from one environment to another – for example, from Sandbox to Production – especially as their environments grow and become more complex.

• Common problems include dependency management failures, which can lead to an immediate halt in the deployment process or cause post-deployment issues, such as system errors, inoperability of custom apps, or data corruption.
• Another common problem is deployment validation errors, which can make the entire deployment process fail or roll back, expanding deployment timelines.
• Deployments also can slow Salesforce solutions down due to code compilation or re-compilation processes, which can cause user inconveniences, ranging from minor frustrations to complete interruptions of their work.

Recommendations:

1. Since dependency management failures occur when custom components like fields or UI elements are deployed without the related components they depend on, developers need to be strategic about the deployment sequence and deploy customizations in a specific order. A recommended sequence is to deploy custom objects and fields first and only then proceed to custom business logic, UI elements, and automations.
2. To avoid deployment validation errors, which happen when source and target environments have incompatible settings or configurations, developers should regularly audit Salesforce environments to ensure they are aligned. Automating environment syncing with the help of Salesforce-native tools like Salesforce DevOps Center or Flosum can also come in handy.
3. Additionally, to minimize potential user inconveniences and operational disruptions, developers should plan Salesforce deployments outside business hours, with weekends, evenings, or early mornings often considered the best times for deployment execution.

User adoption issues

Salesforce apps, customizations, and integrations can disrupt the work processes and work habits of end-users, which can lead to a broad range of adoption concerns.

• For instance, adding a large number of custom fields and objects can complicate user navigation, which can cause their frustration, make it more difficult to find the information they need quickly, and eventually reduce their productivity.
• Even if a custom functionality (a custom report, specialized data table, etc.) is designed to facilitate and improve end-users’ daily workflows, failing to clearly communicate “What’s in it for you?” to them can lead to the underutilization of this functionality.
• Users can also lack the competencies and skills to leverage new Salesforce apps, workflows, and automations efficiently, which can increase task completion time, cause significant productivity decline, and lead to “adoption fatigue.”

Recommendations:

1. While user acceptance testing (UAT) is traditionally performed at the end of projects, teams who build custom apps, customizations, or integrations for Salesforce should rather run such tests after major project milestones. This way, they can identify UI and UX flaws earlier, prevent their accumulation, and reduce future costly rework.
2. When adding custom functionalities, companies need to clearly highlight how they can solve real pain points of users and what benefits they can contribute to (reduced manual work, improved usability, etc.). Internal email newsletters, demo sessions, and peer-led validation are the most practical ways of doing it.
3. Companies also need to provide users with role-based, hands-on training programs to help them learn how to efficiently use new custom Salesforce functionalities. Additionally, they should introduce in-app guidance capabilities to the Salesforce system to help users efficiently learn newly-implemented features while using the solution.

Final thoughts

Salesforce development, which involves building custom apps, customizations, or integrations on top of the Salesforce platform, is rightfully considered a complex process associated with many challenges and pitfalls. Over-customization, deployment complexities, and user adoption issues are just a few examples of challenges companies can face throughout these types of projects. Addressing them is vital for successful project execution, and recommendations from this article can be useful in this regard.

Additionally, if you feel that your company lacks in-house expertise to address Salesforce development challenges efficiently, you can consider turning to professional Salesforce developers. A Salesforce development company can provide experienced developers to close talent gaps or even implement your project end-to-end to build necessary custom apps, customizations, or integrations end-to-end based on your project requirements.