How to perform a Salesforce Audit

Struggling with inaccurate customer data, constant bugs, or unreliable integrations in your Salesforce platform? These issues can hold back your business and prevent you from fully benefiting from your Salesforce CRM investment. It’s a sign that it’s time to conduct a Salesforce audit.

What is a salesforce audit?

Salesforce audit is an activity that helps you track the areas for potential threats, root causes of redundant problems, and improvements. Salesforce is an incredible CRM platform that aligns your sales and marketing efforts by streamlining the activities along the customer journey. 

It enables your customer-facing teams to optimize their efforts and improve customer experience. This enhanced customer experience leads to brand loyalty, higher sales, and return buyers, helping your business flourish. 

Though this seems like a pretty straightforward activity, it’s highly complex. With Salesforce’s advanced features and capabilities, managing all the data from various touchpoints and streamlining all your workflows becomes quite a task. This exposes your data to inaccuracy, inefficiency or simply giving rise to potential security threats. 

With Salesforce audit you conduct a thorough audit of your organization and find loopholes in your operations, workflows, and security. So you can improve your workflows, leading to enhanced productivity. The question here is, how to conduct a salesforce audit and truly increase the CRM platform’s potential? Read more about Salesforce optimization audits here.

Steps to conduct a Salesforce audit:

The following are brief descriptions to guide you through all the steps in conducting an audit.

Determine your end goal:

Well, as any task begins with an end goal in mind, so does the Salesforce audit. Determine what answers you are looking for before diving into the audit. Do you want to know which workflow could be more efficient, where the sales automation needs to be optimized, where your support needs more support, or if your data is inaccurate and you are losing potential sales? 

There are so many goals that you can aim for, just sit down with your key stakeholders and determine what we are looking to achieve at the end of this audit.

Activate the salesforce trail feature:

Salesforce Audit Trail provides a broader view of user actions across your entire Salesforce environment, including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Like who logged in last, changed which setting to what, and how it affected your business. This report will highlight how certain activities affect your business positively and negatively. Your salesforce administrator can activate this feature for your platform. 

Make salesforce audit logs:

Next, you need to collect data from all the meta descriptions, dashboards, user profiles, settings, and configurations. You can collect data with automated tools, making your work faster. When you’re going through all of the trails you have to make a salesforce audit log where  you take notes of all the wrong things. 

Generate salesforce audit report:

Once you’re done with identifying all your gray areas, you need to generate an audit report. Seems simple? Well, it’s not. You have to go through all the salesforce back end, understand the workflows and detailed settings of all the features, and determine the exact nature of the problem. 

Detail is everything here. You also then need to suggest what changes to make to correct the discrepancies. These can be anything from weakening settings, improving data capture quality, or custom code modifications.

Finally, you’re done with the audit once you have gone through your project audit and review checklist. You need to go over the implementation and keep an eye on the maintenance of the Salesforce platform. Continue tracking how efficient your suggestions are.

Enabling Salesforce Audit trail:

Activating this feature will offer real-time insights into your organization’s Salesforce use. As mentioned previously, Salesforce Audit Trail is a core feature that applies to most Salesforce products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and others. It allows you to track user activity, data changes, and other platform actions across these applications.

Here’s a breakdown of its functionality in the Salesforce Clouds:

• Sales Cloud: In Sales Cloud, the audit trail can track activities like lead creation and modification, opportunity creation and updates, and changes to quotes and contracts. This helps sales managers monitor user activity, identify potential data integrity issues, and ensure compliance with sales methodologies.
• Service Cloud: Similarly, in Service Cloud, the audit trail can track activities like case creation and updates, communication with customers (e.g., emails, chats), and changes to service entitlements. This helps service managers monitor agent activity, ensure consistent customer service delivery and track resolution times.
• Marketing Cloud: This is a specific type of audit trail within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It focuses on tracking activities related to marketing campaigns, email sends, and marketing automation workflows within Marketing Cloud.

With this information on agents and workflows, you can track the operational inefficiency and include automation where required. Such basic audits can be done without developers. However, for complex data analysis or extensive report customization, you will benefit from the Salesforce developer’s expertise. 

Additionally, if you want to set a specific data retention policy for archived audit trail data, a developer or someone familiar with Salesforce configurations can assist you.

Conclusion:

A Salesforce audit offers a powerful opportunity to use the full potential of your CRM platform. By identifying areas for improvement in data accuracy, workflows, and security, you can optimize your Salesforce environment for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. While this blog provides a foundational overview, a professional Salesforce audit conducted by experienced experts can deliver a comprehensive analysis and actionable recommendations tailored to your specific needs. 

Considering an audit to transform Salesforce into a strategic asset that drives business growth? Contact us today to learn how our expert team can help you achieve optimal performance through a comprehensive Salesforce audit.