5 Ways to Customize Salesforce Development for Record Breaking ROI

The wise use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to manage every aspect of clients, their experience within your organization, and the process of bringing in new sales leads is vital to business growth. As online and mobile enterprise increases, the avenues through which customer and sales information can enter the business are increasing. In this environment, CRMs are used to record and track any interaction with your customers; this includes every step of the client’s journey from lead generation to product support. According to Gartner, the worldwide use of CRM software will top $36.5B by 2017, leading “all enterprise software categories in projected growth.” Custom Salesforce development has become more important to organizational success because of the vast Salesforce eco-system enabling almost endless possibilities.

Salesforce is the Go-To CRM for Enterprise

Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM company, and Gartner designated Leader in App Cloud Solutions, is the go-to choice for most mid and enterprise level businesses. Why? Salesforce provides more than just a CRM; it is a vast ecosystem of products that allow you to manage and optimize every aspect of your business.

“Executives that identify new initiatives only to roll out a new spreadsheet for tracking information only hinder their teams’ success. New processes should be tracked entirely in Salesforce by leveraging the platform and creating a single tool for the sales and service teams.”~ Matthew Cleaver, SMB Help Desk

Right out of the box, Salesforce is a “feature rich application…that is generally more than sufficient for most businesses and their CRM requirements. However, there are almost limitless opportunities to build upon the standard functionality or extend the system to other business units and tasks to create an entirely bespoke solution, well beyond the capabilities of most other CRM systems.”

Salesforce’s ROI increases when used to automate data capture and funnel management. Leverage Salesforce to automatically capture leads based on forms completed on your site and then forward those leads to the right people. Automating and tracking this process in Salesforce results in high-quality leads that are never “lost” in the process by pushing leads through your predefined workflow and capturing data at every phase for use in future support and campaigns.

When implemented correctly, the ROI for Salesforce is 60% across all industries; resulting in a 37% increase in revenue, 44% increase in productivity, and 42% reduction in technology spend. “Correct implementation” requires the support of the entire organization, including the executive team and it requires that the entire organization accept the platform as “the single source of truth.” When Salesforce is accepted as the one location for all data, the entire organization works together to ensure its integrity.

How to Increase Salesforce ROI

Many businesses start with an out of the box Salesforce solution. Then, as their business grows, in response to the increased lead tracking and customer support, the need for customizations to the platform arises.

When customizing Salesforce, it is usually best to involve an expert; one that can guide you through the “when to buy, when to click, when to code” questions. The Salesforce App Exchange provides thousands of bolt-on solutions that can eliminate the need for deep customization in many cases. When there isn’t ‘an app for that,’ the Lightning Design System gives developers point and click driven development opportunities.

Finally, when supporting complex integrations or high-quality platform features through Force.com, custom code may be required. TechTarget notes that “custom code always runs the risk of degradation over time, especially when the platform upgrades regularly, which Salesforce does three times a year.” While this is true, it is important to note that Salesforce has done a tremendous job at mitigating this risk through the use of its concurrent runtime model.

Every version of Apex is available and is backwards compatible. Generally, development need only occur based on the the latest and greatest version. The runtime engine will piece together code built in previous versions from years ago, run them in the appropriate version, then step back up to the current version of the API when needed.

This provides tremendous stability within the Force.com platform. Salesforce makes sure that your code stands the test of time. When deciding what to code, rely on experts that understand business development needs, Salesforce customization, and custom software development to ensure the best possible results.

When utilizing Salesforce strictly as a CRM, the declarative tools provided by Salesforce can eliminate the need for custom development. However, when extending Salesforce using high-quality platform features through Force.com, a developer with knowledge of Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning is required.

What Are My Salesforce Customization Options?

Customizing your Salesforce experience to match business needs maximizes Salesforce ROI in many enterprise cases. “Tailored Salesforce.com solutions, configured to fit an organization’s specific business processes, will produce the greatest ROI,” according to Deb Martin ofWestMonroe Partners. She goes on to note, “customization not only improves current sales management processes, [but] it also simplifies future system integrations.”

Creating customized, automated processes within Salesforce can reduce data-entry burdens for your sales team, improve data quality, and prepare your Salesforce instance for future integrations. Your sales team is great at selling and at building relationships. However, they are not data-entry or IT experts. Automating processes within Salesforce allows you to maximize the strengths of your sales team and maintain the integrity of your enterprise data.

Einstein and the AppExchange

Several options for customization exist within the Salesforce ecosystem. There is no “one size fits all” customization approach. However, options available through the AppExchange continue to grow. Recently, Salesforce announced the integration of Einstein to facilitate the building of artificial intelligence-powered applications. These apps can leverage predictive lead scoring and automate parameter tuning and lead scoring, freeing up your team to focus on utilizing the results to drive greater revenue.

An article released by Yahoo Finance, notes that “Salesforce Einstein empowers citizen and professional developers who, using clicks or code, can now build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction.”

AI-powered applications are available through custom development options and within the wider Salesforce AppExchange (App Cloud). “Home to more than 5.5 million apps, the Salesforce Platform is helping businesses reinvent themselves and connect with their customers in a whole new way,” said John Wookey, EVP of Platform at Salesforce. “With new Einstein features empowering developers of all skill levels to build AI-powered apps, App Cloud ranks among the most complete development platforms in the world for both citizen and professional developers.”

Whether leveraging a bolt-on application or building your own, businesses are seeing dramatic results when incorporating Einstein-powered applications. John Ball, senior VP and general manager of Einstein, notes that “one of our pilot customers flipped the switch [on Einstein Predictive Lead Scoring] and got a 25 percent lift in sales.”

This is an impressive number, especially when you consider that AI-powered solutions only get better with time. Not only does this increase long-term ROI, but it also builds a system that bothscales the business and scales with the business. According to Salesforce, their Einstein-powered system is a “data management and machine learning pipeline that is already delivering as many as 300 million predictions/recommendations/scored leads per day.” Salesforce goes on to note that the “system can scale because all of the data collection, data prep, features selection, model building, hyper-parameter tuning, and scoring is handled automatically.”

Salesforce Lightning Experience

When done correctly, customizing Salesforce improves the user experience which raises adoption rates and increases Salesforce ROI. “An app needs to look good and deliver a good user experience,” said Christophe Coenraets, Salesforce’s principal developer evangelist. “Very few people used to hear about user experience. Now, it’s where all the focus is. All the other stuff is just assumed to work.”

There are currently more than 90,000 users of Salesforce Lightning. Lightning is a development framework that requires “fewer clicks and builds applications with a mobile-first approach creating apps that are engaging for users without requiring a lot of code. The mantra of Lightning is modern app design for developers and admins, without requiring coding experience.” Developers and Salesforce admins can leverage Lightning to build-in features that generate custom reports, custom consoles, and personalized user experiences for access from desktop and mobile devices.

To demonstrate this capability, Salesforce points to SteelBrick CPQ which was built on top of Sales Cloud. The applications can “share data and enable a single, consistent user experience, rather than a fragmented one.”

Using Custom Settings and Metadata to Customize Salesforce

On Force.com “apps are data-centric and adhere to a metadata-driven development model. Each app is built around a structured database, which is defined as part of the development process.” Because of this construct, it is possible to adapt applications to some of your business processes using Custom Metadata Types. When creating a Salesforce app, there are objects created for use by business users and objects set up to influence the applications flow. The objects that influence the applications flow are “Metadata Types.”

Scott Glassman provides an excellent article on configuring metadata types to result in a variety of benefits including:

• Eliminating post-install data loading (or copy/paste of Custom Settings)
• Easily managing and extending custom rule engines
• Eliminating the need to use Custom Objects as Metadata Objects

The multitenant architecture of Salesforce means that all users and their apps share a single architecture and code base. Adapting applications using custom metadata types allows users to optimize processes within your Salesforce ecosystem.

Integrating Salesforce with Existing Tools

Salesforce offers several paths for integration with your existing solutions. “Force.com provides a number of REST and SOAP APIs to allow developers to integrate third-party services into their applications. The APIs can be called from any programming language that supports web services-including [but not limited to] C#, Java, Ruby, and PHP- so that third-party programs can access and manipulate Force.com apps from other server locations.”

Integrating Salesforce across your organization tears down information silos and allows the executive team to make decisions based on reporting that includes all aspects of the business. When decision-making tools are limited to a particular segment of the business, it’s hard to see how a change will affect the organization. Integrating data allows you to streamline reporting and make better-informed decisions while reducing data entry burdens, reducing errors, and preparing for future integration needs.

Extending Salesforce with Heroku

In many cases, it is necessary to implement Heroku to extend the capabilities of Salesforce to match the needs of the organization. In fact, e-commerce giants like Soylent and Macy’s currently utilize Heroku with their Salesforce experiences. According to the Heroku.com blog, “Companies choose Heroku for their e-commerce runtime environment because they: Need high-fidelity, highly bespoke e-commerce experiences, prefer using the languages/technologies they already know (Node, PHP, Ruby, etc.), want to deliver a mix of desktop and mobile browser/app experiences via a single PaaS, and want to get started fast, on a service with proven scale in production.”

One of the distinct advantages of leveraging Heroku to extend Salesforce is that Salesforce bulk API calls made by Heroku Connect are free — meaning that they do not count against your Salesforce API limit. This allows organizations to leverage Heroku Connect to make intelligent decisions about how to interact with Salesforce APIs.

Because Heroku Connect provides data synchronization between Heroku Postgres databases and Salesforce organizations, it is possible to sync hundreds of millions of Salesforce records in near real time using a simple point and click user interface.

Heroku-based integrations allow e-commerce businesses to extend payment gateways, messaging providers, and fulfillment vendors in sample applications to connect with Salesforce. With this capability, orders are attached to contact records, service reps can cancel orders from within Salesforce, and the marketing team can update product descriptions inside Salesforce to automatically push to users.

Bringing Salesforce ROI Home

CRM experts agree that optimizing your CRM instance is not enough to guarantee increased ROI. According to Barton J. Goldberg, author of CRM in Real Time,

“80% of CRM success is unrelated to technology.” ~ Barton J. Goldberg

Matthew Cleaver notes that “User adoption is directly correlated based on the expectations and examples set by senior leadership and organizational executives. If these key individuals aren’t using the system why would the sales team adopt Salesforce?”

Customizing Salesforce Development to integrate across your organization, match your business needs, and create dynamic and user-centered experiences will result in increased Salesforce ROI if the entire team is onboard. The team at RadialSpark is uniquely skilled to evaluate your current business structure and recommend the best CRM fit to ensure that your implementation and customization of Salesforce result in the largest ROI possible.

Michael Rockford, CEO and Founder of Radialspark, a registered Salesforce partner and leader in custom software development and implementations.

Originally published on www.radialspark.com