Is your Salesforce org running slowly, cluttered with old reports, or buried in technical debt?

You aren’t alone!

In this video, Sam Teele, Account Executive at Cloud Adoption Solutions, takes you behind the scenes of a real (but completely anonymized) Salesforce Metadata Performance Analysis conducted for a 500–1,000 employee Life Sciences firm. Whether you are a Salesforce Administrator, a RevOps leader, or an executive looking at the bottom line, Sam breaks down exactly how to audit your system health and turn technical clutter into measurable business ROI. 

If you want to maximize your user adoption, tighten your system security, and streamline your Salesforce instance, this deep dive is for you!  Ready to uncover the hidden ROI in your Salesforce org? Let’s connect! We can run this exact performance analysis for your business. It’s a secure, straightforward process, and we are always happy to help!

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video! 

Watch now!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, everybody! It’s Sam Teele from Cloud Adoption Solutions, where I’m an account executive. You may have gotten a cold call, a LinkedIn message, or an email from me talking about our Salesforce metadata performance analysis.

On today’s video, I’m going to be walking you through an anonymized version of an analysis I put together for a life sciences firm of 500 to 1,000 employees. I will also share an anonymized qualitative ROI analysis that I made as a supplemental resource to that performance analysis. At the end, we will talk about how you can go about having us do the same for your team. Without further ado, let’s get right into it.

The Salesforce Performance Analysis

The Salesforce performance analysis that we’re going to be reviewing today is for a fictional company I made up called “Life Sciences Anonymous.” However, this is a real analysis that has simply been anonymized to give you a sense of what one of these looks like when we run it for your team.

Org at a Glance

Every analysis starts with an “Org at a Glance” slide. This gives you a quick snapshot of the overall health of your org. It looks at the types of data and automation you have. For example, are your automations at risk of being sunset by Salesforce? As many of you know, Salesforce is ending support for Process Builder and workflow rules, moving everything to Flows. We also look at whether you have a lot of heavy code and Apex-triggered automations that add complexity to the org, and we review your objects to see if they are utilizing too many custom fields.

For today’s video, I’m going to fly through these slides a little faster than I normally would just to give you a sense of the information available. Should we ever do this for your team, it is a very thorough process that can take up to half an hour just to review the deck.

Interface Technology and Permissions

Next, we take a look at your interface technology, mapping out the breakdown between Classic pages and Lightning pages. One very important item at the bottom of this slide is permissions. We look at how many different profiles and permission sets you have.

On the following slide, we go into further detail to analyze the breakdown. One metric we always assess is the ratio of admins to standard users, as well as the ratio of users to different types of permission sets. For 90% of the teams we work with, the core recommendation here is simply to standardize and reduce redundancy. We frequently see teams constantly adding new permission sets while neglecting their regular housecleaning. As a result, they end up with hundreds of permission sets for fewer than 100 users. That is a major takeaway from this section.

Automations and Tech Debt

We then dive deeper into the different types of automations. Again, we provide clear recommendations for improvement. In this specific case, the recommendations included consolidating legacy automations, strengthening governance, and optimizing data quality.

We also look at technical debt to determine how much you have and how severe it is. Like every slide in the deck, this comes with a tailored recommendation.

Field Impact and Reporting

Next, we look at your field impact. Are your custom fields actually doing something critical to your automation or business processes, or are they just sitting there because someone created them once and abandoned them? Often, the recommendation here is a field rationalization. This is a process where we go through the different custom fields to ask: “Do we need this? Don’t we need this? Why do we need this?” From there, we ensure that people are actually using the fields you do need.

We also look at your reporting, which highlights a very common issue. Almost every Salesforce org I have ever seen has a massive collection of reports that have either never been run or haven’t been run in a very long time. This is generally a maintenance issue. People create different types of reports exactly when they need them. However, a challenge arises when there are hundreds of reports in the system. When users go in to find a specific report, they can’t find it because of the clutter. Consequently, they just create a new one, compounding the problem. In these instances, we recommend a report rationalization and consolidation so that people can find what they are looking for more easily.

Inactive Metadata and Change History

We also look at inactive metadata and your change history. Have your system changes been made in large batches over short timeframes, or have they been deployed in a controlled, drip-fashion? Generally speaking, we recommend making changes slowly over time. This introduces far less risk to the environment. It also allows you to isolate variables more easily when troubleshooting, which is much harder to do if you deploy 50 changes all in a single night once a year.

Finally, we look at your utilization of standard and custom objects. Are people actually filling these in, and how often? This data speaks directly to your user adoption.

The Synthesis Slide

As I mentioned, these reports can take a long time to go through. After I provide them to a client, they often pass them around internally. I always tell them that if someone is very busy, they can fast-forward straight to slide number 13. The exact slide number can change depending on what is pertinent to the deck, but I always include a synthesis slide that provides an executive summary of the entire presentation.

This slide outlines:

• The strengths existing in your org: I always look for these. I don’t just hunt for problems to tell you that you need to work with us; I provide an unbiased assessment.

• The opportunities for improvement: Where we see room to optimize those existing setups.

• The recommended course of action: The steps that will actually drive those improvements.

If a leadership team member is short on time, they can skip straight to this slide. From there, we talk about next steps and ways we can work together, whether that is a project-based engagement with a fixed scope or a bucket of hours.

Supplemental Resource: Qualitative ROI Analysis

Throughout the process of creating these performance analyses, I learned that they are highly technical presentations. They are deeply appreciated by people with hands-on system knowledge, like admins, business operations, and revenue operations teams. However, sales leaders or business development leaders often want something a bit more straightforward.

As an addendum to the performance analysis, I recently created a new document called a Qualitative ROI Analysis, which I can generate for your team as well. Essentially, this document pulls the most important areas for optimization from the technical analysis, cites the exact page it came from, estimates how long the change will take to implement, and outlines the specific business case for doing it.

Some business leaders don’t necessarily care about duplicate fields, unused objects, or poor field utilization on a technical level. They want to know how it affects the business in terms of dollars and cents. This add-on piece streamlines that technical data and clearly articulates the business ROI of making those changes.

The document outlines the most critical adjustments. Typically, the heaviest lift for most organizations lies in streamlining profiles and permission sets. This is critically important for system security and for the ease of onboarding new employees in the future.

Just like the synthesis slide in the performance analysis, the ROI analysis concludes with an overview of the total organizational benefit of making these optimizations, alongside a recommended course of action. For example, in the case we are looking at today, the estimated effort added up to 66 to 80 hours. We suggested that a 100-hour bucket would cover almost all of these optimizations while securing a slightly better hourly rate. Obviously, however you would like to work with us is totally fine, and you are not obligated to do so by any means.

How to Get Started

Hopefully, this has given you a good overview of the real value-add of this performance analysis and the benefits it can bring to your company. If you would like to talk about having us run one for you, it is a very straightforward process.

To run the analysis, all we need is a temporary user account created in your org with system admin access. Generally speaking, we only need access for a couple of days. We connect your org to a tool that performs the metadata analysis. The tool does not store any of your data, so there are no security issues. We are completely happy to sign your standard NDA, or we can use our own mutual NDA to establish trust before being granted access.

Once we get the necessary documentation signed and receive access, it takes us about a KPI or a couple of days to put the presentation together. From there, we hop on a review call to go over all of the findings in real time with you. This allows us to answer any questions and gather context from your team to explain what the data is telling us, because you will always know internal business nuances that we wouldn’t know just from looking inside the org. After that, we deliver our final recommendations.

If you would like to reach out to me, you can contact me via the details below:

• Email: sam@cloudadoption.solutions

• Phone: 412-968-6099

I would be happy to talk to you about how one of these analyses can benefit your company by identifying the current health of your Salesforce instance, as well as the low-hanging fruit you can target for some quick wins.

Thank you, everybody, for joining me today. I hope you got some great value out of this, and I hope to hear from you soon!