As an aspiring developer, you must continuously upgrade your skills to align with the latest developments in the software and IT fields to have an edge and fulfill essential business requirements. In this context, having a clear understanding of cloud-based software like Salesforce that provides CRM solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service can prove quite useful. The increased utility of Salesforce CRM has led to its adoption by over 1,50,000 companies across the globe. Experts anticipate that there will be 3.3 million jobs focused on this field itself by 2022. Hence, it makes sense to delve deeper into it so that you can acclimatize faster.

As such, you get different types of features in this system to cater to varying enterprise demands. Being a developer, you have to know how to apply them best.

How to use Salesforce development features?

You can either configure or customize the features of the software to suit your business model. Although many developers choose the latter, you can opt for configuration, too, based on the nature of the job. When integrating a Salesforce development setup, you can optimize the CRM functions with user interface without any coding. You can build tables, fields, objects, and relationships between components through this. Also, you can implement the automation of the process through specific guidelines.

The need to customize Salesforce tools can arise when they don’t match your business needs the way you desire. To meet the demands of the task, you include them in website, social media, ERP, and others; you create dashboards and reports or automate the complex business systems. In essence, customization implies:

• Extending the functionality of an application tool or feature.
• Adding custom code to complete some parts of the actions that could not be achieved even after configuration.
• Adding trigger points to the object to enable it to perform a particular duty.

On the other side, configuration refers to adding user-defined values to a module to help it perform the desired role. Some of the examples of configuration include email setting, adding extra tabs for customer support for enhanced functioning, adding a field to an object, and so on.

Best customization and configuration practices

Customization

If you decide to customize, you have to take a well laid-out path to ensure success. It includes planning, organizing, and prioritizing the customization, using the sandbox to avoid disruption, following the advice of the experts from this field, using tools that smoothen this task, and testing the feature until successful and then only deploying it, etc. Other important things include:

• Adhering to disciplined and straightforward naming conventions for easy understanding.
• Defining the elements so that other developers have clarity about it and can avoid duplication or modification.
• Adding help texts to help others use the customized feature.

Some of the things that you must customize include custom portal, dashboards, views, etc. All these can come in handy in increasing the performance of your business. However, undertaking this process is most justifiable when you face the following situations:

• Configuration doesn’t solve your problem.
• Need additional interactive reports and dashboards for procuring information.
• Demand to integrate a third-party application for enhanced performance of the business process.
• Difficulty in acclimatizing to the newly configured platform for end-users.

Configuration

As discussed earlier, this activity happens inside the CRM platform, where you provide a new field that works on a specific formula to generate the intended outcome. A Salesforce administrator can do this task quickly compared to anyone else. Whether you have to change workflows, modify fields, add reports, customize the user interface, or alter page layouts, you can choose to configure the Salesforce features. However, during the time of configuration, you have to remember a few things:

• Check the fields’ use and remove anything that has been persistently blank for about 30% of the time. However, you should not delete it from CRM.
• Deactivate all the non-active users to increase the efficiency of the software.
• Look for errors in the log from time-to-time and debug them to prevent last-minute hassles.
• Keep an eye on login errors.
• Conduct all APEX tests to find out errors triggered by data clean up or changed validation rules.
• Document and annotate all the audits you did for ease of tracking.

You can configure the interface layout and theme to make it interactive and exciting. You can add your company logo in Salesforce and display it wherever you want. Besides, you can create a streamlined workflow, fields, and objects for better performance. However, before you opt for configuration, you need to check and ensure a few things:

• Use of the existing tools, modules, and functions to simplify the business process.
• The built-in Salesforce features are suitable for your business processes.
• Some users will work on this platform for an extended time.
• The limited budget and time can be impediments.

Skills required of a developer working with Salesforce

When working with this CRM platform, you need to have a certain competency level to have an easy go at it. For instance, you need to possess an excellent analytical understanding to develop tools as per the business needs. Your communication power also matters as you have to think about end-users, the internal team, and superiors. If you are not clear in communication, you may fail to guide users and the team about its usage. In the area of technical skills, it would help if you focused on problem-solving when monitoring the different software development stages to discover any challenges before it is too late.

As a Salesforce developer, you need to have an attention-to-detail and innovative mind. Your solutions need to be out-of-the-box. Since software development can have multiple small and larger layers, you have to notice each of them. Even a minor error can cause massive issues. You cannot afford to let your guards down.

Salesforce is a revolutionary CRM platform that is benefitting many businesses across the horizon. Since it gives you the power to customize and configure its functions, you need to be thorough with this software a bit more to use it to its optimum capacity.