For most (read: all) companies, off-the-shelf CRM tends to fall short of meeting specific business needs. Even with a tool as powerful as Salesforce, it’s all too easy to end up with siloed data, unused features, and disjointed processes.
The key to unlocking Salesforce's full potential lies in customization—tailoring a CRM to your unique operational processes and workflows so that it works for (you guessed it) your team and business goals. Without customization, even the best software might just slow you down when its exact purpose was to speed things up.
This is where a Salesforce customization consultant can help. By delving into the intricacies of your operations, consultants identify areas where Salesforce can be optimized to better support your team and serve your customers.
Are they worth the investment? While it depends on your business’s specific needs, the right consultant can definitely change the game and give you back some valuable time (not to mention save you a headache).
Understanding the role of a Salesforce customization consultant
A good Salesforce customization consultant should make things quick and simple while achieving the results you need.
Their approach generally follows these five steps:
Discovery – Consultants take a deep dive into your business needs and existing processes, identifying how Salesforce can work seamlessly with the rest of your operations.
Architecting – With a grasp of your business landscape, consultants next outline the necessary changes and enhancements to make Salesforce a better fit for your business.
Building – At this stage, the plan comes to life. Consultants implement the tailored changes, ensuring Salesforce functions exactly as needed to support—not distract or derail—your business.
Deploying – Good consultants don't just deliver the modified system; they also ensure your team is fully equipped to use its new features and make a smooth transition.
Iterating – Quality Salesforce customization consultants remain engaged even after initial work, monitoring the CRM's performance and making any necessary tweaks.
While that gives us a general overview, what does this look like in practice, especially in terms of enhancing the user experience? What does a Salesforce consulting service specifically entail?
Enhancing user experiences through interface customization
Highly impactful but sometimes overlooked, the organization of information plays a huge role in how easy it is for users to glean immediate insights or perform their daily tasks—to operate efficiently, that is. Consultants will often use the Salesforce Lightning App Builder to strategically present the most relevant information across mobile, desktop, and tablet views.
Then, they can further refine the experience using conditional visibility, showing or hiding fields based on custom criteria. This ensures that users have a streamlined experience no matter what device they’re using and only deal with information and tasks relevant to their roles.
Streamlining operations with automation
Consultants often bring expertise in Salesforce Flow (a low-coding tool) and Apex (Salesforce’s proprietary programming language) to create sophisticated automation solutions.
For instance, these tools can be used to:
Auto-assign leads to sales reps based on geographic location or product interest, ensuring leads are quickly and efficiently managed
Automate contract renewals, triggering a process to remind account managers and clients ahead of time and streamline the sales cycle
Through automation, Salesforce consultants ensure that your team can focus on high-value activities rather than manual administrative tasks.
Expanding functionality by integrating third-party tools
Salesforce becomes even more powerful when it works hand-in-hand with the other tools your business relies on.
By integrating Salesforce with a range of external platforms—from marketing automation tools like HubSpot to financial software such as QuickBooks—consultants ensure that data moves smoothly between systems, enhancing visibility across all aspects of your business operations.
Gaining insights with custom reports and dashboards
Custom reports and dashboards are vital for monitoring the health of your business and making data-driven decisions. Consultants can craft bespoke reporting tools within Salesforce, providing real-time insights into sales performance, customer engagement, and other key metrics—all tailored to the specific needs of your business.
Going beyond basics with additional customizations
Delving deeper into Salesforce's capabilities, consultants employ additional customizations to elevate your CRM's functionality and security, such as:
Validation rules – These rules are set to verify that all required fields are filled out correctly before any record can be saved, reducing the likelihood of errors damaging your data quality.
Permissions – By carefully configuring access permissions, consultants ensure that team members can only view and interact with data and tools that are relevant to their specific roles.
Such in-depth customizations make up another layer of security, vital for protecting your data and improving user experiences.
Measuring the success of Salesforce customization
The value of your customization efforts depends on multiple key performance indicators:
Have user adoption rates increased, indicating that the platform is more user-friendly?
Have sale cycle durations decreased? Automation and similar customizations should ideally result in faster deal closures.
Is there a change in lead conversion rates? Customizations targeted towards lead management should result in more conversions.
Ultimately, the true value of Salesforce customization lies beyond pure ROI, which is often overpromised but difficult to truly quantify. Rather, customizations are about creating a system that works for you, not a system you have to work around.
The goal is to develop a Salesforce environment that empowers your team, delights your customers, and supports continued growth.
Choose Skydog Ops for superior Salesforce customization
Customizing Salesforce is not as simple as tweaking a few preferences in a dropdown menu. It requires specialized knowledge in Apex, Visualforce, Lightning Web Components, and integrating third-party systems such as an ERP or marketing automation tools.
When it comes to tailoring Salesforce—or any other CRM—to perfectly match your business needs, Skydog stands out. Our team of experts focuses on creating a Salesforce environment that’s intuitive, efficient, and fully aligned with your operational goals.
Book a strategy session with us today to see which of our Salesforce customization and integration services can help drive your business forward.