Published February 7, 2025 by David Hecht
Here at CloudAmp we love Salesforce, it’s all we’ve been doing since 2011. But it’s fun to make a snarky list of all the classic blunders organizations and Salesforce admins make!
(And of course, I have never made any of these mistakes personally.)
Let’s dive into the top 13 missteps, shall we?
Why bother creating leads when you have a magic process that qualifies an astounding 100% of your prospects, so they go into Salesforce as Contacts.
By not using leads you are missing out on one of the most basic parts of Salesforce’s data model – the conversion of leads to Accounts with Contacts and Opportunities. Missing these conversion events from your database means a lot of Salesforce’s built in functionality around sales cycles, seeing what lead sources don’t convert, and the Opportunity pipeline won’t be available for reporting in your org.
Why use standard features when you can create a labyrinth of customizations? Maintenance nightmares and upgrade headaches, here we come!
Be sure when you are trying to customize Salesforce that the field or feature does not already exist — or there isn’t a pretty good substitute where you could update the picklist values or use an existing object. New team members who know Salesforce, and any poor new Salesforce admin are going to have a rough onboarding experience.
Google, AI, and Salesforce Trailhead are your friends so you don’t reinvent the wheel.
Who cares if the data is outdated, duplicated, or incomplete? It’s not like Salesforce is your company’s system of record, and decisions are based on accurate information or anything.
While every Salesforce Org has dirty data, it’s easy to let it get out of hand. Going back in 5 years and trying to clean it up is going to be harder than putting some duplicate rules in place, or implementing some of the many tools available to help with this universal problem. And training your team on some data input standards can be helpful in some cases too.
Why not create a validation rule for every conceivable scenario? Users love being bombarded with error messages for the slightest misstep.
Like most powerful features in Salesforce, Validation rules should be used sparingly — really only when necessary. For those things that are important to your business to validate, craft clear error messages so your users know how to fix their input errors. And be sure to TEST, since Validation rules are an excellent way to block automated processes elsewhere in Salesforce.
Nothing says efficiency like forcing users to fill out every single field, even when it’s irrelevant to their task.
Is a field required because someone thought it was important five years ago? If it doesn’t matter to a current process or business need, let it go. And before making a field required that was not required before, make sure that requiring a value in a field that may currently be blank in 1000s of records does not break some existing integration or process inside Salesforce.
Cram every possible field and related list onto a single page. Users enjoy scrolling through endless information to find what they need.
We’ve all seen the endless scrolling Salesforce screens, with hundreds of fields, sometimes without clear section groupings. Create different page layouts for different roles in your organization, so they see just the data that is important to them. Periodically evaluate fields, and remove the unused ones from page layouts.
Oh, you deactivated a user without checking if they own reports, automations, or records? Enjoy the treasure hunt to fix all the broken things!
When people leave your organization, their Salesforce logins should be disabled immediately. But before doing so, make sure to check their user is not running any important scheduled jobs, or assigned a critical system function like being the Default Case Owner or Default Lead Owner.
Why keep it simple when you can design flows that no one can decipher? Overloading flows with hard-coded logic and skipping subflows ensures updating can be a nightmare.
Flow are amazing tools in Salesforce, but are already complicated, so try to remove as much complexity from your flow designs as possible. When you need to tweak the logic in future, or diagnose a conflict between two flows, you’ll be glad you strove for simplicity initially.
Create a record type for every minor variation, turning simple processes into a maze of confusion.
Record types are a powerful tool, but their ability to create complexity means they should be used sparingly. Use record types to show different picklist values, and page layouts for record creation, to different users. Consider whether a simple page layout would handle what you are trying to achieve.
Why waste time testing when you can let your users be the beta testers… in production… during a critical sales period?
Testing can be a pain, but even having a basic plan in a spreadsheet for putting some new implementation or feature live can really save you a lot of headache. Make sure you at least run through some basic user testing, to make sure Salesforce is working as expected, and no data is missing or incorrectly updated.
And if you are moving from a separate system to Salesforce, a great idea is to run Salesforce in “test mode” for a bit, and compare results from the two systems to make sure they match before going live with Salesforce.
Who needs a safe testing environment when you can unleash chaos directly in production? Nothing says “living on the edge” like breaking your live org in real-time!
Related to testing, Salesforce Sandboxes give you a safe space to install new apps or try new configurations. While approximating your production environment can be challenging, Salesforce Partial and Full Sandboxes do a pretty good job if you have access to them.
Not everything can be approximated in a Sandbox. CloudAmp for example works fine in a sandbox but test data is a poor substitute for understanding how it works compared to real tracking data in your leads. Still, no one is ever sad they started in a sandbox.
Assuming everyone will magically know how to use Salesforce without any guidance? Brilliant strategy for ensuring confusion and low adoption rates.
Nowadays it is easier than ever to supplement your internal Salesforce process documentation with self-guided Trailhead Trails, where you have pre-selected relevant Trailhead modules for the team to learn about the parts of Salesforce that are important to them. Investing in some training and orientation can go a long way, especially with users new to Salesforce.
Introducing a new system without careful planning, testing, and communicating changes and benefits to your team? Fantastic way to breed resistance and confusion.
Change management sounds like a scary compliance topic, but it could be as simple as having a short written policy on updating Salesforce, and sending emails to your team with an overview each time changes are made. More involved plans and testing in Sandbox can be helpful for larger projects, where you want to be sure you don’t break any Salesforce existing functionality.
Avoid these pitfalls, and your Salesforce experience might just be a tad less chaotic.
If you are using Leads (see #1) and want to know which marketing campaigns or sources your best leads come from, then check out the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker.
It will help you understand which keywords convert to opportunities, add valuable utm parameters to your leads and contacts, and even show you which pages of your website a lead viewed before filling out the form. There’s a 30 day trial and we help you get it set up.
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David Hecht Founder, CloudAmp |
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CloudAmp Apps for Salesforce |
Know where your best Salesforce leads come from, and track marketing ROI more easily.
