Salesforce Insurance

With this article, learn about the risks associated with customizing Salesforce and how to protect your investment in the platform. You will also learn about Blue Canvas, a tool that provides real-time backups and collaboration for Salesforce customization.

Here are our 5 Key Takeaways:

1. Salesforce customization carries inherent risks, including downtime and lost work.

2. Most companies lack a process for making Salesforce changes, leading to chaos and increased risk.

3. Blue Canvas provides real-time backups and collaboration for Salesforce customization, reducing the risk of downtime and issues.

4. Using Git-based backup tools is a no-brainer for engineering departments, and should be considered for Salesforce customization as well.

5. Protecting your investment in Salesforce is crucial, and tools like Blue Canvas can help ensure that your customizations are backed up and recoverable.

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How much are you spending on Salesforce? Judging by the $150/user/month license cost and looking at the new Salesforce Tower in San Francisco I’m going to guess it’s a lot. Almost certainly tens of thousands of dollars a year and quite likely a few hundred thousand or even a few million a year.

Then you have staffing and additional software licenses. Maybe you have a small to medium sized staff of Salesforce admins and developers. Each of them getting paid an average of $115,000. You probably also spend money on custom software licenses on top of Salesforce. Over $5B are spent annually on additional software licenses for Salesforce alone (IDC 2017).

And what about Salesforce consultants? That same IDC report estimates that some $20B are spent on professional services for Salesforce every year.

Which begs the question: how are you maximizing and protecting that investment?

Salesforce Metadata Risks

Has Salesforce ever gone down at the end of the quarter for you? Are you afraid it might? What is the cost of downtime for your sales team?

For most companies, Salesforce is the central hub for the entire business. It’s where you report on sales and revenue and forecast future pipeline. Given this importance, Salesforce is heavily customized and leveraged to your business. There are third party apps that connect to other third party apps. There are custom flows. Thousands of hours of custom code and configurations go on every year.

This complexity carries with it a few inherent risks:

1. At any given time you have lots of different people: admins, developers, sales ops people, marketing professionals, project managers, consultants making continuous changes to Salesforce and risking downtime
2. Salesforce refreshes or faulty deployments can cause work to be lost
3. Large numbers of connected apps heighten the complexity and risk

Despite all of this activity, most executives and IT professionals have no process for making Salesforce changes. I was recently talking to a Sales Executive and I asked him about his process for changing Salesforce configuration and processes. “What process?” he asked wryly. Another used the word “chaos”.

Do you really want a word like “chaos” associated with such an important part of your revenue funnel?

Salesforce is your main dashboard into the health of your business, but what kind of dashboard to you have about how your team is updating Salesforce? Who is making which changes?

You have an admin changing things. You ask your Sales Ops person to make a change really quickly because you had a great idea. You hire consultants to implement CPQ or a new app. And pretty quickly you have all these different people poking around in your Salesforce system. Wouldn’t you sleep better at night:

1. Being able to see what is going on in there?
2. Knowing that everything is backed up in case of emergency and fully recoverable

How to Protect Your Salesforce Instance

Blue Canvas provides insurance against your Salesforce instance going down when you need it most. The tool backups all of your Salesforce Metadata and customizations in real time. If someone pushes a change that shouldn’t be or your metadata is wiped out in a faulty deployment, you can always recover.

Better than an insurance policy though, it makes downtime and issues even less likely because it will help your Salesforce devs and admins collaborate and manage releases. This means higher quality features delivered faster.

You can ask your Salesforce admin, developer or business ops person to try Blue Canvas in just a few clicks. Have them sign up for an account here or reach out to team@bluecanvas.io to learn more.

When I was responsible for sales at my last company, I used to look at other departments and see what they were doing well. I prided myself on stealing smart ideas from smart people.

Using these kind of Git based backup tools is a no brainer for engineering departments. Ask any developer or manager on your engineering team and they are using tools like this. Shouldn’t you?

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