Let’s assume everything goes according to plan. Your application is:
- built to your exact specifications,
- delivered within budget and on time,
- through Salesforce Security Review, passing with flying colors.
Congratulations are in order, and you’re off to the halls of victory to down copious amounts of celebratory toasts.
Fast forward three months…
Sales and marketing have been at a fever pitch trying to get rapid adoption of your application. However, they’re running into resistance. Users are quick to install your application, but the reviews are mediocre at best, and many are abandoning your application entirely. The successes surrounding launch are no longer mentioned. Instead, everyone’s concerned with money wasted on a product flop. What went wrong?
Admittedly, this is a dire scenario; which is why I started it off with a cheery beginning. Who doesn’t like being the hero of the story? Reality is far less forgiving. No doubt we’ve all been in some experience similar to, if not exactly like, what was described above. And, no doubt many of us who learned from those experiences, swore that something like it wouldn’t happen again.
The problem is, building an application on Salesforce isn’t the same as releasing a new product to market. There are special considerations that need to be baked into your plans in order to better ensure your success.
Two Critical Issues
I’ve been building applications for Salesforce for nearly four years. While that’s certainly not a long time compared to some, it’s long enough to develop a sense of the market I operate within. Across the board, I see applications failing in two categories:
- failure to play well with others
- failure to play well with customers
I’m writing this blog series because it’s my fervent belief that if we all labor to address these two issues, the Salesforce ecosystem will only prosper – and your application along with it. Allow me to shed some additional light.
Failure to Play Well With Other Applications
Building apps isn’t just about getting your product into the hands of your users. Unlike building a web application, where the browser-based system is scarcely customizable by your end users, the Salesforce Org that your end users operate within doesn’t mirror any other Salesforce Org. Custom operations, permissions, and other applications are arrayed in such a fashion that every Org is like a snowflake – equally unique and fragile.
Failure to Play Well With Customers
In all things business, if you’re deaf to your customers you’ll fail to survive. And yet, many applications I encounter are precisely that. The issue I see is that Salesforce users expect a certain level of engagement, certainly more than you’d expect from a conventional web-application.
What To Do?
No doubt your mind is swimming with conflicting ideas and demands. Stakeholders and developers are at each other’s throat in your head as you try to manage a complex build in record time while on a shoestring budget. Who wants to waste time thinking about life after security review, when the only way to alleviate the pain of today is getting through security review? It’s all about “throw something against the wall and let’s see what sticks,” right? Not anymore.
Rather than just complain, I thought the more proactive thing to do would be to share with you what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned, in the hopes that you can get ahead of these issues before you bring your application to market. You have to consider the long-term solution for your application. The decisions you make today, before security review, will determine your success tomorrow. Taking the time to assess your surroundings, to learn more about the environment you are about to approach, is never a waste of time.
Course Correction
This blog series will include three more installments, taking an in-depth look at these two critical issues. Think of it like this. I’m honestly confessing to mistakes I’ve made. Take this as my course correction: learning from my mistakes and passing these learnings on to you. In the end, if we all did this, the Salesforce ecosystem will be far better for it. And who doesn’t want that?!
Check out the next installment of this series here.
