What you’ll find in this blog
- Practical Salesforce tasks that are ideal for quieter periods.
- Why reports, access and automation benefit from regular review.
- How small data and usability improvements can make Salesforce easier to use.
- Why reviewing your existing to-do list can be just as valuable as completing it.
August can be an unusual month for Salesforce teams.
For some organisations, things carry on exactly as normal. For others, annual leave, fewer meetings and slightly quieter customer activity create something that’s fairly rare during the rest of the year: a little breathing room.
It can be tempting to use that time to finally tackle some of the bigger items on the Salesforce roadmap, but there’s another opportunity that’s easily overlooked.
Look at the small things.
Most Salesforce environments accumulate them over time. They’re not broken enough to become urgent and they’re rarely exciting enough to become a project, so they simply sit there while more pressing work takes priority.
August can be a good opportunity to give some of them attention.
1. Take a Fresh Look at Your Reports and Dashboards
Reports have a habit of multiplying.
Someone needs a particular view for a meeting, another team creates their own version, somebody leaves the organisation and eventually you’re left with a reporting library that nobody entirely understands.
Rather than immediately building another report, use the opportunity to look at what already exists.
Which reports are genuinely being used? Are there several versions showing essentially the same information? Are your most important dashboards still answering the questions the business is asking today?
You don’t necessarily need to delete everything. Simply understanding what is useful and what has become noise can make Salesforce much easier to navigate.
2. Review Who Has Access to What
User access is another area that’s easy to overlook while everything is working.
People change roles, responsibilities move between teams and temporary permissions have a habit of becoming permanent.
A quieter period is a useful time to review users, profiles, permission sets and access levels and ask whether they still reflect the way your organisation operates today.
It’s not glamorous Salesforce work, but it’s important.
3. Revisit Your Automation
Automation is usually created for a good reason. The problem is that the business process behind it doesn’t necessarily stay the same.
Over time, organisations can accumulate Flows, alerts and automated processes that overlap, no longer add much value or make a relatively simple process far more complicated than it needs to be.
You don’t need to rebuild everything. Start by understanding what’s there and whether it’s still doing something useful.
You may uncover opportunities to simplify processes before the business gets busy again.
4. Look at Your Data Through a User’s Eyes
It’s easy to talk about data quality as though it’s purely a technical issue.
Often, it’s actually a usability issue.
Duplicate records, inconsistent naming, unnecessary fields and missing information all make Salesforce harder for people to trust and use.
Spend some time looking at the CRM as your users experience it. Are they being asked to enter information nobody uses? Is important information difficult to find? Are there obvious inconsistencies that have gradually crept in?
Small improvements here can make a surprisingly big difference.
5. Revisit the List You’ve Been Ignoring
Every Salesforce team has one.
The list of things everyone agrees would be useful but which never seem quite important enough to do today.
A quieter period is a good opportunity to revisit it, but don’t simply start at the top and work down.
Ask whether each item still matters.
Business priorities change, and something requested six months ago may no longer be relevant. Equally, something that once seemed minor may now solve a genuine problem.
You may find that the most valuable outcome isn’t completing the list at all. It’s making the list shorter by deciding what you no longer need to do.
Don’t Wait for Something to Break
Salesforce optimisation doesn’t always need to involve a major project.
Often, the greatest improvements come from regularly stepping back, reviewing what’s accumulated and making small changes that keep the platform aligned with the business.
If August gives you a little more breathing room, it’s worth using some of it to look at the things that don’t normally get your attention.
Because once September arrives, that to-do list probably isn’t going to get any shorter.
Patrik Antunes is Head of Managed Services at Xenogenix, leading the team that helps customers maintain, improve and maximise the value of their Salesforce and Certinia platforms.
With extensive experience in consulting, technical support and accounting solutions, Patrik combines strong platform knowledge with a practical understanding of business needs. He holds three Salesforce certifications and specialises in managed services, customer success and continuous platform improvement.
As an author for Xenogenix, Patrik shares practical guidance on Salesforce and Certinia support, system optimisation and getting greater long-term value from business technology.