How to Increase ROI with Streamlined Salesforce Test Automation

This blog is co-written with Jeff Pigatto, Vice President and Global Head, Salesforce Practice at Apexon as they draw on their joint experience optimizing Salesforce environments. 

Salesforce sits at the center of more than 150,000 organizations. As the undisputed global leader in CRM, Salesforce’s own capabilities help businesses put customers at the heart of their operations. Together with the many partner applications it supports, these strengths result in increased sales, better engagement, omnichannel customer service and mutually aligned sales and marketing channels 

Moreover, as organizations look to rapidly evolve their digital transformation, Salesforce’s powerful platform can be customized to support digital growth and deliver valuable insights for smarter sales and marketing.  

Testing the Limits of CRM 

The key to Salesforce’s popularity is the wide range of applications that integrate with the platform to create infinitely customizable solutions no matter the size of the business or the sector in which it operates.  

Extensions like nCino, Tier1 Financial Solutions, Conga, MapAnything, and many more combine with powerful data integration tools like Heroku, Snowflake, Boomi, Informatica, and Ab Initio to not only map onto current sales needs but also forge a path towards innovating new revenue streams.  

All this comes at a cost, however.  

Salesforce’s extensibility and customizable integrations create a complex, demanding QA and testing environment. Thanks to the business-critical nature of CRM systems, optimizing the test environment must also be a priority. After all, a seamless customer experience with end-to-end visibility can be a crucial competitive differentiator. And when customer relationships and sales are at stake, organizations can’t afford to have components that misfire.  

Optimizing Automation – a Strategic Priority 

Defining and implementing intelligent test automation for Salesforce environments takes considerable expertise.  

Enterprises that are serious about Salesforce testing should expect frequent code deployments, complex code management and versioning, high frequency regression cycles and a fluid computing environment. Over time, enterprises will find there is an increased need for automation to tackle these defined challenges.  

Apart from the immediate advantage of cutting down on time-intensive manual test processes, Salesforce test automation brings benefits that can be felt across the whole business.  

The streamlining initiatives undertaken by one Apexon customer, a billion-dollar modular space leasing company, serve as a good example. Streamlining its Salesforce environment enabled the company to speed up its sales and quote cycle by 20 percent and decrease the time taken to launch mass marketing email campaigns by 50 percent.  

Operational Benefits from Test Automation 

Test automation is the stepping stone that helps enterprises transition from piecemeal, manual processes to a system of intelligent, continuous testing.  

It’s a noticeable shift that modern digital businesses need to perfect if they are to capitalize on the benefits of digital evolution. Generally, the benefits of test automation also apply to Salesforce test automation. In practice, however, traditional test scripts need to be handled a little differently within Salesforce.  

In order to streamline Salesforce test automation into the wider DevOps process, enterprises need to integrate updates from Salesforce and its partners alongside the testing cadence for the organization’s other connected apps, systems and cloud environments.  

When done successfully, Salesforce automation speeds up release cycles and improves end-to-end business performance, leading to a smarter, faster sales cycle. In addition (and even more so than other forms of test automation), Salesforce testing assures the way that businesses connect their employees with their customer base. The stakes couldn’t be higher.  

Increased Productivity 

From a digital engineering perspective, the shift from predominantly manual Salesforce testing to streamlined, intelligent automation is really gratifying to witness.  

At first, teams are amazed at how much time they can save when they are not lumbered with manual, repetitive testing. Next, they are usually stunned at the further productivity gains possible when automation tools are finished with sanitizing, optimizing and de-duplicating their test scripts. 

Quite simply, test automation enables teams to focus on the strategic “big picture” goals.  

For example, Apexon’s work with a 60-year-old retail industry company was focused on the best ways to evolve and update the processes and customer experience enabled by Salesforce solutions. By reducing over 250,000 inaccurate or duplicate records, the company increased productivity by a staggering 33 percent, an improvement that can be directly linked to the reliability of the data.  

Driving Value through Intelligent Integration 

Apexon and Apexon combine extensive digital engineering expertise to save our customers hundreds of hours in test case creation and maintenance. Thanks to our end-to-end Salesforce test automation capabilities, we focus on improving business performance across the board through intelligent, continuous testing.  

One of the values common to both of our companies is our determination to meet the customer wherever they are on their digital transformation path. By helping them evolve their Salesforce maturity from strategic planning support through to continuous test frameworks, integration and test management best practices, our customers can easily access and analyze the data they need to power their business decision-making. 

To learn more about how test automation can assure high performance and increased ROI in your organization’s Salesforce environment, contact Apexon using the form below.