Salesforce CRM is brilliant with its wide range of customisation options to fit the unique needs of businesses. But let’s be honest, overdoing it with customisation for a SaaS company can lead to a whole heap of trouble, demanding loads of effort to build and maintain. In this blog, we’ll dive into the downsides of customisation and the challenges it brings for SaaS companies.
The Temptation of Customisation
Salesforce offers a powerful set of tools and features that let businesses tweak the platform to their specific needs. SaaS companies, in particular, might be tempted to heavily customise Salesforce to match their unique business processes, workflows, and customer interactions. While customisation can bring short-term wins, it’s crucial to think about the long-term implications. This is especially true for those organisations needing loads of customisation to set up and maintain their partnerships and ecosystems go-to-market motions.
Problems with Customisation: Speed vs Scale
Increased Complexity: Going overboard with customising Salesforce beyond its built-in capabilities can create a complex system with tricky dependencies. This complexity makes it harder to understand and maintain as time goes on, increasing the risk of errors and conflicts between custom parts.
Cost and Time Overruns: Customisation is a time-consuming and pricey process. The initial development needs significant resources, including skilled developers and system admins. Ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and compatibility testing add to the long-term costs, pulling resources away from other important areas.
Upgrades and Compatibility Challenges: Salesforce regularly rolls out updates and new features to improve its functionality and security. Extensive customisations can complicate the upgrade process, leading to compatibility issues and potential downtime. Constant effort is needed to keep customisations compatible with future Salesforce versions.
Dependence on Skilled Resources: Customisation often requires specialised expertise in Salesforce development. Companies relying heavily on custom solutions might struggle to find qualified personnel to manage and support these customisations effectively. The dependency on specific individuals can be risky if they leave the company or become unavailable.
Efforts in Building and Maintaining Customisation: Where It Can Go Wrong
Investing significant time and effort in gathering and documenting comprehensive requirements is crucial before diving into customisation. This becomes even tougher if an organisation doesn’t have a solid partner process or playbook. Building a successful Salesforce customisation needs a skilled development team, often diverting focus from other critical tasks. This is particularly challenging since the main users of Salesforce are usually the direct sales team, with partners or alliances being secondary users.
Customisations need continuous support, bug fixes, and updates to stay functional and aligned with evolving business needs. Allocating dedicated resources for ongoing support and maintenance is necessary to tackle issues promptly and minimise potential disruptions.
Even if you manage to overcome these hurdles, there’s still a high chance of facing issues with regular testing and documentation. Regular testing and documentation help identify problems early on, but many organisations lack the capacity to integrate this into their customisation efforts.
The Bottom Line
Customising Salesforce to meet the unique needs of a SaaS company can be tempting, but it’s essential to weigh the potential downsides against the short-term benefits. The increased complexity, cost and time overruns, upgrade challenges, and dependence on skilled resources can present significant challenges in the long run.
To mitigate these challenges, consider using existing capabilities available on the market today – like Partnerswell. With Partnerswell, you can leverage the required functionalities within your existing Salesforce deployment to drive your alliances team, reducing the cost and complexity of your ongoing customisations needed for an effective partner team.
