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Raise Value of Using Salesforce

• Date: July 2026 •
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Dmitri Leichik
CEO and co-founder at Twistellar
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As a Salesforce Summit Consulting partner, since 2017 we've worked with companies using Salesforce across various industries, at different stages of their business lifecycle, with different business models and ways of working. One question comes up again and again:
How can we get more business value from Salesforce?
Dmitri Leichik, the co-founder of Twistellar and the business executive with 20-year experience of managing mid-sized companies, shares Salesforce best practices that consistently help companies maximize their investments.
Salesforce is a scalable, flexible and innovative platform. The selection of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, MuleSoft, Commerce Cloud, and other products for business automation helps businesses choose the right direction. Yet, this platform requires organizational alignment, discipline, and consistency to produce maximum results for the business.
So, here are a few typical levels of improvement of your Salesforce value.
salesforce agentic marketing solution

The roadmap outlines the key stages of maximizing Salesforce value, from data readiness and automation to AI implementation and continuous optimization.

The Basis: Data Consistency, Process Governance, and Data-Driven Decision-Making

In this section, areas of improvement are targeted at ensuring that the data you have in Salesforce is complete, consistent and up-to-date. These improvements also ensure that internal policies and processes are defined to use this data for decision-making. This is a prerequisite for company-wide alignment, opening the door to new ways of working and successful AI implementation.

Ensure Your Data Is Clean and Structured for Analysis

  • Hide unnecessary fields from page layouts if they are never used
  • Use validation rules (business rules applied to fields) to ensure that required fields are populated and that data formats are validated
  • Use picklists rather than free text fields to simplify reporting
  • Configure or refine duplicate management rules
Required Salesforce products:

Build Customer 360 View for Segmentation and Prioritization

  • Check that all customer data that impacts the way you work with customers is available in Salesforce. If needed, build or enable integrations. This may include customer inquiries, orders (purchases), marketing data, invoices, and payments.
  • Define customer segments and use them to prioritize proactive customer outreach and interactions. This approach also improves the customer experience by enabling more personalized interactions.
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud)
  • Advanced setup – Data 360 for Customer 360 and segmentation, MuleSoft for integrations

Define Metrics and Establish Regular Reviews

  • Define the key business process metrics that can be measured in the system. Quantitative KPIs include the amount of work completed and recorded in Salesforce (e.g., number of leads, customer interactions, etc.). Qualitative KPIs include commercial outcomes such as conversion rates, sales volume, and customer satisfaction.
  • Ensure alignment with middle management (team leaders and department heads). Help them become believers in and advocates of a performance-driven approach to team management.
  • Build reporting dashboards, distribute reports to accountable stakeholders, align them with corporate goals and strategy, track performance over time, and make decisions that support business objectives.
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud) and basic reporting
  • Advanced setup – Tableau

New Ways of Working: Increase of Sales and Reduction of Costs

The greatest value from Salesforce comes when it goes beyond serving as a system of record for sales pipeline management or service request resolution. It becomes a proactive assistant that handles tasks people often forget because of shifting priorities or avoid because they are time-consuming.
Organizations can unlock even greater value by automating business-specific processes with industry solutions or process-focused applications. They can also extend self-service capabilities and provide more interactive experiences for customers and partners.

Provide Interactive Collaboration Capabilities for Your Partners and Customers

  • Set up web-based forms or portals for customer and partner interactions
  • Allow your customers to place orders, check the status of their orders and service requests, and self-schedule appointments
  • Allow your partners to evaluate cooperation metrics and interact on mutual opportunities
  • Encourage your customers and partners to further strengthen their relationship with your company
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition) with public authenticated forms or an Experience Cloud portal, and custom automations
  • Advanced setup – Scheduler, Partner Relations Management, and Loyalty Management

Turn on Automated Marketing and Promotional Flows Across Different Channels

  • Utilize granular segmentation capabilities and personalization to improve the customer experience across every communication channel
  • Set up lead welcome and nurturing campaigns
  • Engage broader audiences to increase brand awareness
  • Connect additional channels, such as WhatsApp and SMS
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition) for basic triggered automations or Marketing Cloud for full-scale Marketing Suite, and Digital Engagement for additional communication channels
  • Advanced setup – Marketing Personalization, Marketing Intelligence, and Social Media integrations (partner solution: Sprout Social)

Collect Feedback and Activate Re-engagement

  • Configure re-engagement flows to maximize retention
  • Collect user experience data with automated surveys
  • Send transactional post-sales messages with upsell offers
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud) and Salesforce Surveys
  • Advanced setup – Marketing Cloud

Define and Enforce Priority-Based Actions

  • Automate task assignment or escalations based on important events, such as an unattended lead, an engaged lead or customer, an unhappy customer, or an important customer who has not received enough attention
  • Ensure regular reviews of the related metrics and completed actions, then make and implement managerial decisions based on identified gaps
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud), basic reporting, and automations
  • Advanced setup – Tableau and automations

Automate Business-Specific Processes

  • Identify business processes that are not yet covered by automation (for example, those tracked and managed in spreadsheets) or are managed in disconnected systems that require significant manual effort to maintain
  • Consider automating them with specialized Salesforce products, ensuring ongoing Salesforce optimization and improving operational efficiency
  • Consider building additional integrations
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud), custom objects, and automations
  • Advanced setup – MuleSoft for integrations, Salesforce Industry Clouds (Automotive, Communications, Consumer Goods, Education, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Nonprofit, etc.), Field Service, Revenue Cloud, Commerce Cloud, etc.

AI Implementation: Higher Productivity and Better Customer Experience

Adopting AI brings business operations to the next level. AI is not a magic wand. However, when it is built on a solid foundation of accurate and complete data, well-defined metrics and processes, and an aligned strategy and execution, it becomes an invaluable assistant. It can increase productivity and deliver outstanding customer experiences across all channels, around the clock. It can also serve as an internal contributor that helps monitor and streamline business processes while reducing repetitive manual work.

AI-Based Case Resolution

  • Connect AI agents to respond to your customers across all channels around the clock
  • Build a corporate knowledge base to handle typical FAQs and common customer questions
  • Build automations and connect business processes to enable fully AI-driven case resolution

AI-Assisted Promotion and Sales

  • Leverage AI to build customer segments and campaigns
  • Refine and create compelling sales pitches with AI assistance
  • Build AI-based customer journeys with maximum relevance and personalization
  • Fully automate repetitive, scenario-based sales processes from lead registration to payment reconciliation

AI-Based Document Processing

  • Recognize and parse all types of incoming documents
  • Prepare summaries and classifications
  • Score submissions and prepare preliminary decisions for business processes

AI-Based Internal Coaching

  • Connect an AI coach to all recorded customer interactions to provide a consistent view across the entire company
  • Evaluate and score customer interaction outcomes, provide feedback, and coach users to improve performance and expertise
  • Recommend materials for self-learning and escalate cases that require management attention
Required Salesforce products:
  • Basic setup – Knowledge, Data 360, and Agentforce
  • Advanced setup – MuleSoft IDP

Next Best Steps

  • Align internally on what you would like to achieve with automation
  • Define a project owner — a person with authority who is empowered to make decisions and allocate resources to drive the project internally
  • Schedule a discussion with Twistellar’s Salesforce consulting experts to get honest advice and an estimate for your project
  • Make your choice on moving your company to the next level

FAQ: Salesforce Best Practices

Salesforce best practices include keeping data clean and structured, defining business processes, setting measurable KPIs, using automation to reduce manual work, and continuously improving Salesforce based on business needs.
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