In today's digital age, businesses are increasingly reliant on data to drive decision-making, customer interactions, and operational efficiency. Salesforce, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, not only facilitates these functions but also plays a pivotal role in scaling and leveraging data as your business expands. This article explores strategies and best practices for harnessing Salesforce to manage and grow your data effectively.
Introduction
Data is the key when running, forecasting, and analyzing the health of a business. Data requirements can vary based on the nature of the company. Further data requirements can vary for different operations and departments in your organization.
In any database system, there are hard-coded limits. In addition to that when your dataset grows performance also decreases gradually. This is mainly due to the increased number of disk I/O, increased demand for memory usage, increased time to rebuild indexes, and complexity of overall transactions.
Salesforce, total cloud system, provides solutions on top of serverless multi-tenancy environments. It also includes this issue when business and data grow.
Data growth in Salesforce
Data growth is a good thing. More data means more transactions, more customers, and more revenue, also with more data more insights, personalization, and opportunities. However, with all these things there is a breaking point for Salesforce systems when data is not managed properly. Unmanaged data can cause the following issues.
Performance issues in critical business operations.
Increase deployment and sandbox refresh times.
Increase API latency and timeouts.
Reaching Salesforce storage limits.
Compliance and security risks
Increased complexity, deployments, and maintenance.
The main drawback is the compromise on the effectiveness of getting the right and required data for your business without any delay.
Data skew is another type of issue where a parent record contains a large number of child records. We call this Account Skew. Large or frequent customers having hundreds of thousands of account records and millions of invoices, which were within a custom object in a master-detail relationship is such an example. Each parent record takes a long time to display because the related Invoices list has a lengthy rendering time. Further, this can lead to issues such as record locking, and record sharing complexities.
Ownership skew is another issue where a large number of records are owned by a limited number of users. For example, when a single user owns more than 10000 records, this will create an Ownership Skew.
Solutions
Salesforce offers various diagnostic and monitoring tools for identifying performance issues. The Salesforce Optimizer is particularly useful for assessing the overall health of your Salesforce configuration.
Salesforce Big Objects offers a powerful solution for managing data growth within Salesforce, providing scalability, cost efficiency, and enhanced data management capabilities. By leveraging Big Objects for storing large volumes of data and offloading historical or less frequently accessed records, organizations can maintain optimal performance, comply with data retention policies, and derive valuable insights from their data assets. Also required data for analysis or forecasting can be retrieved based on business needs later.
Salesforce Connect and External Objects provide powerful capabilities for organizations looking to manage data growth effectively. By enabling real-time access to external data sources, reducing data replication, and enhancing integration flexibility, they empower businesses to leverage a unified data strategy across Salesforce and external systems. Implementing Salesforce Connect and External Objects strategically can optimize resource utilization, improve data quality, and support scalable growth in a data-driven environment.
There are many backup and recovery solutions available for Salesforce in Appexchange. Most of these solutions are cloud solutions. Those are robust compared to Salesforce's out-of-the-box solutions. Another advantage of a backup solution is to recover in case of data lost due to human errors.
For data skew enabling separate loading of related lists setting allows the parent detail to render while the child waits for the related list query to complete. This may ultimately increase the initial page load time.
When parents have a large number of child records we can design a way to uniform distribution of child records. This can be based on how your business operates. For ownership skew focus should be on distributing record ownership evenly among multiple users, rather than assigning all ownership to a single user. To improve performance, assign all inactive records to a single user without assigning any roles to that user. While this won't eliminate Data Skew entirely, it should help optimize performance.
Conclusion
As your business evolves and expands, Salesforce serves as a strategic partner in scaling and leveraging your data effectively. By adopting best practices in data management, governance, and integration, businesses can harness the full potential of Salesforce to drive growth, enhance customer experiences, and stay competitive in a dynamic marketplace.
Embrace Salesforce as more than just a CRM platform—view it as a transformative tool that empowers your organization to thrive in the digital era through scalable data management and strategic insights.
Incorporate these strategies into your Salesforce implementation roadmap to unlock new opportunities, streamline operations, and achieve sustainable growth in a data-driven world.
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