Salesforce CRM provides a holistic view of your organization’s performance and progress at any given point in time. It has various cloud services that businesses can use for workflow creation, contact management, customer engagement, opportunity tracking, task management, etc.
When developed, customized, and implemented in the right manner, Salesforce can bring many benefits like enhanced lead conversion and high customer engagement. Businesses can avail of Salesforce development services and reap these benefits effortlessly.
However, knowing the best development and implementation practices will come in handy for businesses as well. They can learn what’s needed to make their business run more smoothly and achieve greater results.
Best Salesforce Development Practices 2022
Whether it is businesses that need best Salesforce CRM or developers, these best development practices should help all. Let’s check out.
- Leverage the Sandbox feature
If you have used Salesforce in the past or are even slightly aware of the CRM, chances are you may already have heard of Sandbox. It is a different environment of your product created by coping the metadata for various purposes like testing, development, customization, etc.
Having this separate environment for testing ensures businesses don’t end up making awful changes to the original product. Now, there are multiple sandbox types offered by Salesforce. Businesses can choose the best option depending on their needs and project budget.
Let’s check out the following table to learn more about the types –
| Sandbox Types | Use | Cost | Refresh interval | Storage limit | What’s copied | Template support |
| Developer Sandbox | Individual development environment. | Free | 1 day | 200 MB | Only metadata | No |
| Developer Pro Sandbox | Collaborative space for developers. | 5% of net spend | 1 day | 1 GB | Only metadata | No |
| Partial copy Sandbox | Testing environment. | 20% of net spend | 5 days | 5 GB | Metadata & sample data | Required |
| Full Sandbox | Replica of the production organization (including metadata, customer data) | 30% of net spend | 29 days | Same as production | Metadata & all data | Yes |
This table has all the basic information you need for the different Sandbox types. It is best to utilize these Sandbox environments for development and testing purposes.
How does it help?
- Sandbox can help prevent any data loss or redundancy as all the changes are done in a separate environment.
- It is useful for training employees in a new environment without having to change anything in the production organization.
- Never start implementation without planning
Whether it is Salesforce development, customization, or deployment, a business should never start the process without proper planning. When you plan properly, you not only have a complete understanding of where your company stands but also get to set goals for your organization.
There are plenty of tasks that you need to plan and perform in this stage, such as –
- Resource planning.
- Creating team structure.
- Decide project method.
- Creating project roadmap.
- Establish project timeline.
- Cost planning.
- Defining success metrics.
These are some fundamental tasks that every Salesforce development company has to plan ahead in time. Whether it is data migration, consultation, user training, deployment, or support, a well-thought-out plan is a key to success for every Salesforce project.
- Adopt consistent coding practices
When a business implements Salesforce CRM solutions in their organization, they usually plan it for the long term. And it is not necessary that the salesforce service providers or implementation partners you use today will be the same you use in the coming years.
Thus, having an inconsistent coding style can cause much confusion and havoc in the future. The next developer you hire will have a difficult time interpreting the codes and working with them.
It is best to follow consistent coding practices from the beginning itself so that there is less to no confusion. This eases the development process significantly and the entire organization works seamlessly on the same principles adhering to common guidelines.
- Thorough testing goes a long way
When you avail of Salesforce development services and implement it, your entire organization uses the software on a daily basis. They use it every day for connecting with other colleagues, communicating with clients, designing workflows, managing tasks, and more.
Since the software is used all across the organization by different levels of employees, even minute errors and ambiguities can cause severe problems. Thus, developers have to test it thoroughly before and after implementation.
Regular tests should be conducted on each feature, functionality, and Salesforce cloud to ensure that the entire system works as it should. Besides the various methods of testing like unit testing, functionality testing, etc., developers should also manage and assess the data health of the organization.
- Use trigger frameworks
When your business needs increase, the use of trigger frameworks can simplify your development efforts substantially. These trigger frameworks are created so that one can perform special tasks that aren’t possible with drag and drop features or point and click tools.
It is an Apex script that runs whenever (before/after) any events of data manipulation take place. For instance, data update, insert, delete, etc. Utilizing trigger frameworks has multiple benefits and is highly encouraged because of numerous reasons, like –
- Performing unit and maintenance testing becomes easy when you remove the trigger logic from the trigger framework.
- You have complete control over the execution order when you apply one trigger for every object.
- When you standardize triggers, it all works consistently.
- Documentation focus
When you have implemented Salesforce in your production organization, documenting every step becomes a must. You may have to customize and integrate different tools and the lack if documentation may make it difficult for you to manage the software.
Logging all the customization and development efforts will ensure your developers and admins are all on the same page. They can understand what the entire structure is to prevent the system to have any redundancy or duplicity.
Mentioned above are a few Salesforce development practices that every developer should follow. It can help businesses improve their business processes, get more leads, and achieve higher conversion rates.
Subsequently, businesses should be careful at the time of offshore Salesforce development and ensure these practices are followed during the development process. It can elevate your business productivity.
About Author:-
Maulik Shah is the CEO of BiztechCS, a development company. He often takes the front seat in the company’s development projects, because he enjoys solving problems through technology. When it comes to writing for any blog, his contribution is priceless. Maulik ensures that his interaction with development is frequent enough, and his industry knowledge ever evolving, that he can share it. Despite his packed days, Maulik’s door is always open and he is generous with sharing this knowledge and experience.