10 Signs Your Salesforce Implementation Has Issues

As the old saying goes, more haste, less speed. How well you implement Salesforce products, will determine how effectively you can use them. How effectively you can use them, will directly impact the return on investment you can deliver.

In short, a rushed Salesforce implementation is never a good idea.

As Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants, we regularly see poor implementations holding clients back. Once upon a time, their setup worked smoothly, driving campaigns and urgent lead handoffs. But without best practices, they soon hit limits, system headaches, low productivity, and struggle to scale. Not to mention, in-house implementations still cost the business time and money! Finding workarounds and spending hours searching for solutions to common problems drives up long-term costs. 

All of this can be avoided by prioritising an excellent implementation versus a fast one.

Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) customers at the start of their Salesforce journey can avoid troubles down the track by following our implementation checklist.

Those with established accounts can anticipate problems early by checking for signs of a low-quality Salesforce implementation.

Signs your Salesforce implementation has issues

1. Poor user adoption

• Employees avoid using Salesforce platforms or prefer legacy systems.

• Data entry is inconsistent or incomplete.

2. Data quality problems

• Duplicate records are common.

• Data is outdated, inaccurate, or inconsistent.

• Reports and dashboards produce unreliable insights.

3. Ineffective workflows & automations

• Processes that should be automated still require manual work.

• Workflows don’t trigger as expected.

• Users create workarounds due to broken automation.

5. Integration failures

• Salesforce doesn’t sync properly with other tools (Salesforce & third-party).

• Data silos exist between Salesforce and other systems.

• Custom integrations frequently break after updates.

6. Security & compliance gaps

• Users have excessive or insufficient access permissions.

• Sensitive data is exposed due to misconfigured sharing rules.

• Compliance requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) aren’t met.

7. Reporting & analytics challenges

• Dashboards are underutilised or fail to provide actionable insights.

• Custom reports take too long to generate or don’t match expectations.

• Decision-makers don’t trust the data in reports.

8. Frequent customisation issues

• Too many custom fields, objects, or code-based solutions make it hard to maintain.

• Out-of-the-box features are underutilised.

• Custom development frequently breaks during Salesforce updates.

10. Business goals aren’t being met

• The system doesn’t align with current business processes.

• Salesforce fails to deliver the expected ROI, or you struggle to prove it.

• Teams rely on external spreadsheets or other tools instead of Salesforce.

If any of these sound familiar, it’s best to find and fix the problem sooner, rather than later. While your to-do list may be as long as your arm and sorting a data sync or creating a folder hierarchy might be at the bottom of it, the longer you ignore implementation issues, the more unruly your account can become. 

Plus, a smooth implementation means:

• Better marketing efficiency.

• Higher (and enthusiastic!) user adoption.

• Alignment between marketing and sales.

• Higher volume of qualified leads.

• Greater revenue and ROI.

• Stress-free reporting.

• Increased marketing budgets.

• Ability to scale your strategy.

How to fix implementation issues

Suspicious your implementation isn’t up to scratch? Whether you’re using Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Data Cloud, or all of the above, the best place to start is with an account audit.

Review every aspect of your account, gaining a big-picture view of the problems and actions to take. A great Salesforce account audit considers:

• Integration and technical setup.

• Folder structure and organisation.

• Customer journey and automation.

• Lead management process. 

• Scoring and grading models.

• Data hygiene.

• Compliance.

• Use of AI features.

You can run the audit in-house if you have the technical expertise and capacity in your team. Or, you can enlist the support of a Salesforce Partner who has been there, done that. Naturally, we suggest the latter because you don’t know what you don’t know!

Once you’ve completed your checks, pull your audit into a list of priority tasks (spoiler, this can be overwhelming - especially if you’re an Account Engagement customer using multiple Business Units). Then it’s a matter of solving each challenge…

Then again, your time is better spent doing the marketing, right? Being creative and finding ways to boost ROI, not tinkering with Salesforce architecture. That’s where MarCloud comes in. We simplify Salesforce using our MarCloud ROI Framework, so you can get back to what you do best. Arrange a call with our team and let’s solve your Salesforce challenges.