What you’ll find in this blog
- Why small Salesforce frustrations can have a bigger impact than you think.
- How everyday workarounds and inefficiencies gradually add complexity to your org.
- Why these problems often stay stuck on the Salesforce to-do list.
- How a fresh pair of expert eyes can help, without turning every issue into a major project.
There’s an interesting middle ground in Salesforce.
At one end, you have the big projects. A new implementation, a major integration, a significant piece of development or a wider transformation programme. They have budgets, timelines and people assigned to them.
At the other end are the everyday tasks your Salesforce team deals with as part of keeping the platform running.
But somewhere in between sit all those other problems.
They’re not business-critical. Salesforce still works. Nobody is raising a major incident. But something isn’t quite right.
Perhaps a report has never given you exactly what you need. A process takes six steps when it feels like it should take three. There’s a Flow nobody particularly wants to touch because the person who built it left two years ago.
Individually, these things don’t feel important enough to become a project.
So they stay on the list.
When “not broken” becomes the problem
It’s very easy to prioritise Salesforce work according to what’s broken.
If users can’t do their jobs or a critical process stops working, it naturally moves straight to the top of the list.
The harder decisions are around the things that technically work, but could work considerably better.
Over time, small inefficiencies become normal. Users develop workarounds. Someone exports data into Excel every Friday because that’s simply how the report gets produced. Extra clicks become part of a process because nobody has had time to investigate why they’re needed.
Eventually, people stop questioning them.
That’s when “not broken” can become quite an expensive standard to work to.
Small Salesforce frustrations rarely stay small
One unnecessary step in a process doesn’t sound particularly concerning.
But if 20 people complete that process several times a day, it starts to look rather different.
The same applies to poor data quality, unreliable reporting, duplicate records, underused automation and manual workarounds. The individual problem can seem insignificant while the cumulative effect is anything but.
There’s another consequence too.
A Salesforce environment gradually becomes harder to manage when these little compromises accumulate. New automation gets built around old processes. New fields get added rather than existing ones reviewed. Another workaround is introduced because fixing the underlying issue feels too difficult.
Five years later, everyone knows Salesforce is more complicated than it needs to be, but nobody can point to the single decision that made it that way.
Usually, there wasn’t one.
Why these jobs keep getting pushed down the Salesforce to-do list
The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of willingness to fix them.
Often, it’s capacity.
Salesforce Admins and CRM Managers have plenty competing for their attention. There will always be a more urgent user request, another report needed for a meeting, a new business requirement or a larger project demanding time.
Sometimes it’s also expertise. An internal team may know what isn’t working but be less certain about the best way to solve it.
And occasionally, the biggest barrier is simply confidence.
When you’re looking at an automation or configuration that’s been in place for years and you’re not entirely sure what else depends on it, “leave it alone for now” can feel like the safest option.
That’s understandable.
But it does mean the same problems can sit on a Salesforce to-do list month after month.
Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes
Not every Salesforce problem needs a consultancy project.
Sometimes what you really need is someone who hasn’t been staring at the same org for years to look at the problem and ask a few different questions.
Why does the process work this way?
Does it still need to?
Is Salesforce already capable of doing this differently?
Is there a simpler approach?
What would we do if we were building it today?
Even if the answer is something your internal team can implement themselves, getting an outside perspective can help you get past the point where a problem has simply become part of the furniture.
And that’s the thinking behind something we’re trying this summer.
Introducing the Salesforce Summer Surgery
For the remainder of the summer, we’re opening a limited number of free 30-minute Salesforce Summer Surgery sessions.
The idea is deliberately simple.
Bring us one Salesforce problem.
It could be a reporting frustration, an awkward process, troublesome automation, an integration question, a growing Admin backlog, a data issue or something else entirely.
We’ll give you 30 minutes with one of our Salesforce experts to talk it through and give you our perspective on what we’d do next.
There won’t be a presentation or a generic Salesforce demo, and you don’t need to turn it into a project afterwards.
One problem. One expert. 30 minutes.
No sales pitch. Just practical advice.
What’s been sitting on your Salesforce list?
If there’s something in your org that isn’t technically broken but you know could work better, this might be a good opportunity to finally take another look at it.
Bring it to the Salesforce Summer Surgery.
Book your call here.
Vickie Balsini is a Project Manager at Xenogenix, guiding Salesforce and Certinia projects from initial planning through to successful delivery.
A Chartered Management Accountant and qualified Scrum Master, Vickie also holds PRINCE2 Agile Foundation and Practitioner qualifications. She combines strong project governance with valuable financial and commercial expertise, helping customers navigate complex implementations with clarity and confidence.
As an author for Xenogenix, Vickie shares practical guidance on project delivery, implementation readiness, stakeholder engagement, governance and risk management.