Salesforce is often thought of as an organization’s “single source of truth”. Full of information from various business units, your CRM provides a 360-degree view of everything that is happening across each stage of the customer journey.
Salesforce is the most powerful CRM in the world, in large part because of how diverse the ecosystem of tools that can be integrated with it is. Organizations have long seen the benefits of expanding the value they get out of Salesforce by integrating their marketing automation, data enrichment, collaboration, and productivity tools with their instance.
However, leveraging those integrations comes at a cost. The more integrations, the more data, and hands involved in the process. Which cumulates to an increased chance that something will break or go wrong.
How to Ensure your Salesforce Ecosystem is Stable:
Organizations have to continually monitor their Salesforce instance to ensure that all systems are functioning optimally. Here are three key areas that every organization should constantly monitor within their Salesforce ecosystem:
Installed Packages
With 3,000+ packages available for download on the Salesforce AppExchange, there are more platforms available than ever before to help you optimize and extend the power of your Salesforce instance. Whether the installed package is a free or paid solution, maintaining the performance of these integrations is key to your Salesforce ecosystem’s health.
Many installed packages sync with Salesforce to pass data back and forth. Often what we see causes a sync to break between Salesforce and a third party platform is a seemingly inconsequential change. For example, an employee updates their password generating a new security token, which causes any integrations using that login to fail. Â
Most of the time, what we see with these types of errors is they take a while to flag internally. For example, it could be three days before someone realizes the Marketing Automation platform and Salesforce are no longer syncing. This means days worth of leads aren’t being nurtured and are now cold – causing your company to miss out on valuable sales opportunities and ultimately revenue.
User OAuth
As the number of platforms we use daily to do our jobs is on the rise so are the number of platforms employing User Authentication (User OAuth). This makes for a seamless and easy experience for the employee – they use their Salesforce login credentials to gain access to platforms like Slack, SalesLoft, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and others.
However, this opens your organization and Salesforce instance up to risk. Each third-party vendor granted access to Salesforce via one of your employee’s login credentials immediately introduces risk and liability of a data breach(es).
This is a particularly important concern for publicly traded companies and organizations that are HIPAA compliant, and companies that have exposure to regulations like GDPR. Ensuring only third-party vendors who have properly been vetted is key to managing the integrity of your Salesforce system.
API Call Limits
In today’s world, we’re data rich and information poor. The average B2B SaaS company has a lot of data that’s being passed between Salesforce and third-party applications. This means, managing your instance’s daily API call limit is key.
As more packages are installed in your Salesforce instance, the strain on your daily API limits increases. This is especially true for integrations like Marketing Automation and data enrichment platforms – which are both examples of high API call intensity platforms. Those systems, are continually exchanging large amounts of data back and forth with your Salesforce instance and using API calls to do so.
It’s critical to continually monitor how close you are to hitting your daily API call limit. Once you’ve hit that daily API limit every other platform integrated with Salesforce stops syncing. Meaning, one spike of API calls in one system could potentially knock your entire MarTech stack off sync. Which, for a lot of companies, means revenue impacting consequences.
Continuous monitoring of these levels is key to ensure if something does arise that puts your daily limit at risk of maxing out, that you can step in with a solution to keep them under control and make sure all your third-party Apps continue to run smoothly and not have revenue impacting consequences.
Wrap Up
Have questions about this blog post? Reach out today. Salesforce optimization is a passion of ours and we love hearing from you on how you’ve solved your security challenges.
If you’re curious about how to automate this Salesforce monitoring Check out our CloudKettle SafeGuard services.