How to Get More Value from Salesforce: Best Practices to Maximize Your Investment

• Date: July 2026 •
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

CEO and co-founder at Twistellar

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As a Salesforce Summit Consulting partner, over the years, 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 more than 20 years of leadership experience, 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.

While Salesforce provides a powerful technology foundation, the highest returns come when companies continuously improve how they use the CRM. Salesforce optimization is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process of improving data quality, processes, automation, and user adoption to maximize long-term success.

This article focuses on three areas that consistently allow for more Salesforce value: building a strong data foundation, automating business processes, and adopting AI effectively.

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

The Basis: Salesforce Best Practices for 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.

Here are some Salesforce best practices for building a strong Salesforce foundation: improving data quality, creating a unified customer view, and establishing clear metrics for data-driven decision-making.

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:

Core platform (Sales Cloud or Service Cloud)

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, allowing companies to measure Salesforce business value and make data-driven decisions.

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: Salesforce Automation to Increase Sales and Reduce Costs

A strong Salesforce foundation is what allows organizations to move from simply storing information to actively using data as a business asset. Clean data, consistent processes, and measurable performance indicators create the conditions where automation becomes more effective, reporting becomes more reliable, and future Salesforce capabilities can deliver real business value instead of adding complexity.

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.

Salesforce automation eliminates repetitive manual work, increases operational efficiency, and allows teams to focus on higher-value activities.

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.

The following Salesforce best practices focus on the key areas where automation can create measurable business impact: improving collaboration with customers and partners, enhancing engagement through personalized communication, enabling proactive actions, and streamlining business-specific processes.

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, 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.

Salesforce automation creates value not simply by reducing the number of manual tasks, but by changing the way organizations operate. When routine activities are handled consistently by the platform, employees can spend more time on customer relationships, strategic decisions, and business growth. This shift allows Salesforce to become an active business enabler rather than just a system for tracking information.

AI Implementation: Higher Productivity and Better Customer Experience

Adopting AI brings business operations to the next level. According to Salesforce's 2026 State of Service report, 79% of service leaders consider investment in AI agents critical to addressing today's business challenges. Organizations also expect AI agents to reduce service costs and case resolution times by approximately 20%.

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.

Here are some Salesforce best practices for successful Al implementation.

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

AI creates the most value when it is introduced as an extension of well-designed business processes rather than as a standalone technology initiative. Organizations that first establish reliable data, clear workflows, and measurable objectives are better positioned to use AI effectively, improve productivity, and deliver a more consistent customer experience.

In this way, AI becomes not just an automation tool, but a capability that helps companies continuously improve how they operate.

Next Steps to Maximize Your Salesforce Value

Maximizing Salesforce value is not about implementing every available feature or adding more technology without a clear purpose.

The organizations that achieve the strongest results treat Salesforce as an evolving business platform: they continuously improve their processes, optimize their use of data, automate where it creates measurable impact, and adopt new capabilities when they support business goals.

By following these Salesforce best practices, companies can unlock sustainable business value over time. Whether you are looking to optimize an existing Salesforce environment or planning the next stage of your Salesforce journey, the key is to approach improvement as an ongoing process rather than a one-time project.

To turn these recommendations into practical actions, we recommend the following next 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

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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