Be very sure on what you want !

Chair adapted to stairs

Be very sure on what you want !

No matter how good the tech is, you have to think of the use-case. You have to see it. You have to notice something you spend a lot of time doing and realise that it could be automated with a tool. And when it is automated it can be improved. tweaked and changed!

With Salesforce, the out-of-the-box tool is more then rich and very adaptable. What I see is that people first see it as a replacement of something they previously had. I still remember the very adamant request for a very specific field on the Account object that one particular customer wanted. It had to be labeled “genautr” and the max field length was 7. Diving deeper in the reasoning behind why this specification, it came to light it was named like that in their previous German ERP. Turned out that field in ERP was also a custom field. The predecessor of that ERP was a mainframe application! We had a requirement of more then 30 years that survived two mergers, and three different implementations. Whole generations of people in the workforce had been trained on the content of that field. There was no discussion possible of either expanding the label or creating a standard picklist for these values.

To loop back on the image I used. Be sure on what you customize, it may be around for a long time.

But, perhaps, this is also the classic pattern for the adoption of any new technology. You start by making it fit the things you already do, where it’s easy and obvious to see that this is a use-case, if you have one, and then later, over time, you change the way you work to fit the new tool.

However, the other part of this pattern is that it’s not the user’s job to work out how a new tool is useful.

The hardest part of any new technology, GenAI or Salesforce is to get to the use case. And then customizing those parts because they bring value. Not because that is what we always do things around here.