Simplify Salesforce Change Management: Best Practices for 2025

Salesforce is popular for its flexibility and scalability, but many businesses find implementing and managing changes in Salesforce overwhelming. Teams struggle with user resistance, lack of direction or clear goals, deployment challenges, and workflow disruptions.

Without the right structures, strategies, and tools to plan and manage these changes, Salesforce updates can lead to broken automation, frustrated users, and lost productivity. To make things worse, poor or lackluster, change management can also cost you time and money, with no end in sight.

Although change management strategies for Salesforce can help, they need to be enabled with best practices for efficiency and ease of management.

This blog post discusses seven best practices for improving your Salesforce change management process and strategy.

What Is Salesforce Change Management?

Salesforce change management refers to a strategic communication and execution plan a business adopts when it implements a new Salesforce implementation, adds new features to its Salesforce platform, or changes user experience.

More than ensuring efficient and accurate implementation of change, a change management plan enables a business to prepare its employees, users, and customers for the changes in the pipeline.

It also helps understand the need for further training and development within the organization to effectively utilize the changes being implemented.

Benefits of Salesforce change management

Here are some of the benefits of Salesforce change management:

1. Determine whether new changes are necessary and what their impact is on the business.
2. Clearly identify the stakeholders of the project and make them accountable.
3. Reduce the time taken to implement the changes in your organization.
4. Understand and manage the risk of implementing new changes.
5. Help optimize resource usage when implementing changes.
6. Help the employees and end users throughout the process.
7. Ensure successful implementation of new changes.

Salesforce Change Management Process

When implementing Salesforce change management, check seven steps:

Step #1: Understand if you need the change at all

Several reasons could exist for making changes in Salesforce, such as infrastructural changes, business changes, problem fixing, and more.

However, the platform may not need extensive changes every single time. For example, if a process can be optimized through training or configuration tweaks instead of major changes, a full-fledged update may be unnecessary

But once a serious change is necessary, no matter what, you must analyze it and measure its impact before implementing it. Once you understand these changes, you can start discussing them with your developers and other stakeholders.

It is also vital to bring in all department heads to listen to and address their concerns.

Step #2: Define the change strategy

Once you have finalized the changes you want to implement, work with the Salesforce development team to build a suitable, clear, actionable strategy.

Here is how to do it:

• Outline clear objectives: Identify what you want to achieve with the change, such as improving data accuracy, enhancing workflows, boosting user experience, etc.
• Assess risks and dependencies: Examine potential risks, such as data loss, downtime or challenges, such as employee training. It is also vital to identify dependencies that could impact the implementation.
• Create a phased rollout plan: Divide the change into manageable phases to reduce risk and operational impact. You may start with a pilot group and gather feedback; based on the input, you can expand.
• Assign roles and responsibilities: The project will involve senior managers, tech architects, developers, consultants, and admins. Define who handles development, testing, deployment, and user training to ensure smooth implementation and adoption.
• Set success metrics: Define how you will measure the effectiveness of the change, such as reduced errors, improved productivity, or user satisfaction scores. It will help you identify areas of improvement and work on them.

A clearly defined strategy will ensure your changes are necessary and can be implemented efficiently with operational disruption. 

Step #3: Prioritize your change requirements

When executing changes in Salesforce, you often have a long list of tasks. To ensure efficient implementation of these changes, you must prioritize each task.

For example, structural and transformational changes need to be implemented faster, as other changes may need these structural changes to work. Missed priorities may lead to delayed deployments, especially in the case of dependencies.

So, depending on the project, rank the tasks. 

Step #4: Execute the changes

After the tasks are prioritized, the development team has a considerable role. They take over the tasks and begin carefully integrating each of these changes into the system.

Remember that all changes may not be executed within the expected timeline as there may be delays, and some tasks may need to be handled specially.

Also, if the changes cannot integrate or be executed in run time due to any challenges, you can move on to the next task unless the changes are critical or place other dependencies on hold.

Step #5: Conduct QA testing

After completing the development phase, you can move to the QA testing stage. In QA, the software is tested to ensure it is free of bugs or errors.

Often, there are four types of QA testing in the Salesforce change management process:

• Integration Testing: This type of testing software modules, developed by different developers, are grouped and tested to find any defects after the integration
• Functional Testing: This testing helps validate the application against the functional needs and specifications of the business to determine its impact on the Salesforce workflows
• Load Testing: It checks how the system performs under a specific load. After integrating the new changes, the QA team assesses how the platform works with different users accessing it.
• Security Testing: This testing helps businesses find any security vulnerabilities, threats, and risks when executing changes in Salesforce

Step #6: Conduct User Acceptance testing

User Acceptance testing is another vital part of the Salesforce change management process since end users of the changes are involved in testing the changes being rolled out.

To conduct an effective User Acceptance testing, follow the steps below:

• Define and create test scenarios and cases to identify common user workflows that the change will impact.
• Select a representative test group from different departments to use the updated system.
• Use a partial sandbox environment that mirrors the production environment to test changes and assess performance.
• Collect feedback from testers and document the issues, suggestions, and usability concerns.
• Refine and retest the change based on the feedback from the users and how the system responded to the change

Return to the initial stage and address the fundamental issues with the change management process. Run the test again and roll out the changes only after you have addressed all major issues.

Step #7: Deployment and training

Lastly, the team must prepare to transfer the changes to the platform.

Often, the development team carries out transfers using change sets or third-party tools like Flosum for more control and deployment efficiency. Tools like Flosummake the deployment process easier and more streamlined.

Before adopting these changes business-wide, you must train your end users and other stakeholders to use them efficiently. You can hire Salesforce experts to help with this or create internal up-skilling programs for employees.

7 Salesforce Change Management Best Practices

Despite the best efforts to plan and manage change in Salesforce, many businesses fail to manage changes efficiently due to the limitations of Salesforce change sets. This can lead to several issues, like platform inefficiency, employee resistance, and slower adoption of proposed changes.

The best way to address these issues is to improve your organization's salesforce change management efforts.

Here are seven best practices you can adopt to manage Salesforce changes better in your business.

1. Build a change management team

When you seriously contemplate the need for change in your organization, one of the first things you must do is establish a change management team.

This internal team will assess the changes and their importance and conduct a readiness assessment to help you plan change efficiently.

The team will also help you:

• Engage key stakeholders early and ensure transparent communication about changes
• Identify risks and implement feedback loops for a seamless transition
• Track adoption KPIs to refine processes for continuous improvement
• Develop training programs and provide hands-on support for users

2. Carry out a change readiness assessment

Conduct a change readiness assessment before implementing Salesforce changes in your business to understand whether your organization is ready for a change.

The assessment helps you figure out if your business is ready for the change you are making

You can do this by asking the following questions:

1. What's the purpose of the changes you are making?
2. What are the processes the proposed changes will impact?
3. What business goals do you aim to achieve with the changes?
4. What's the organizational culture toward implementing changes?
5. What immediate and long-term impact are you expecting from these changes?

These answers will help you devise the changes better and improve your enterprise change management strategy for better Salesforce release management and implementation.

3. Build a change management strategy

An organizational change management strategy is another best practice for implementing and managing organizational changes. The insights from the change readiness assessment help you build a strategy that works for your business and enables you to meet its goals.

Here are a few vital questions to build a suitable and more efficient change management strategy.

1. How will you implement the proposed changes in Salesforce?
2. Who are the stakeholders that will be involved in the process?
3. How are the changes going to impact different elements of your business?
4. What are the potential challenges or risks you need to consider?
5. What's the timeline of the change management project?

Use the answers to these questions to build a custom strategy for change management. It will also help you build and execute a successful change management process aligned with your business goals.

4. Have a clear communication plan

Introducing changes into your Salesforce ecosystem will affect everyone using the platform. Hence, you must inform everyone who's affected by the change what to expect. This includes both internal and external stakeholders.

A strategic change management communication plan must include the following:

—Who stands to receive change management-related communications?

—What matters, and how often must they be communicated?

—What are the best channels to communicate with them?

The strategy will remove the guesswork, and you will also have the communication records for auditing and compliance purposes.

5. Test changes in a sandbox first

Any change you introduce to the Salesforce platform must first be tested in a sandbox environment. It protects your ongoing projects on the platform and gives you everything you need to ensure you are on the right path with the changes.

6. Train your employees

The changes you are introducing to the platform will affect your employees. Despite their experience on the platform and in your organization, expecting them to know how to use the new features and changes is futile.

It is a mistake to leave it to your employees to figure out the changes. Hence, modules and courses should be created to train employees.

Training sessions will also ensure efficient transition and upskilling of employees and avoid productivity loss.

7. Assess and analyze changes for improvement

Assessing and analyzing the results of the changes is a good habit to develop. You must have quantifiable data to check whether your changes have had a positive impact on the organization.

Analyzing the results also allows you to identify areas that need improvement and attention.

There are several questions you can ask to understand this:

—Are the changes working as expected?

—Are the changes delivering the expected results?

—What unexpected changes have come up, and how can they be solved?

—What are your plans to address the issues or tweak the system performance?

The answers point you in the right direction to make continuous improvements on the platform for better efficiency and productivity.

Streamline Your Salesforce Change Management with Flosum

Despite Salesforce's built-in change management functionalities, you may still struggle implementing, managing, and rolling back changes. The best way to overcome these challenges is to use a reliable, third-party Salesforce DevOps tool like Flosum.

Unlike other DevOps tools, Flosum is a Salesforce-native DevOps solution that works within the platform.

It brings a range of functionalities to ease your change management efforts:

1. Robust version control to track and document changes to the Salesforce code
2. Automated release management from code deployment to testing and validation
3. Rollback feature to revert change quickly and ensure minimal disruption to operations
4. Track and store data migrations and recovery operations for systematic change management
5. Zero-trust security by adhering to data standards for better compliance, security, and integrity

All these capabilities make Flosum an ideal tool for efficient and streamlined change management in Salesforce.

Book a free consultation call with our experts to learn how Flosum can improve your Salesforce change management process.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Salesforce offer change management?

Salesforce does not offer a dedicated, built-in change management tool. However, it provides various functionalities like change sets, version control integrations, etc. To ensure efficient Salesforce change management, it is best to use third-party DevOps and version control tools like Flosum.

What is the role of a change manager in Salesforce?

A Salesforce Change Manager ensures the successful adoption and long-term sustainability of Salesforce change implementations. They manage changes to a Salesforce instance, facilitate change management processes, and evaluate the outcomes against expectations to identify areas for improvement.

What are the 4 Ps of change management?

The 4 Ps of change management include Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

What are the 7 Rs of change management?

The 7Rs of change management help determine the crucial aspects of a proposed change. It involves:

• Raised: Who proposed the change?
• Reason: Why is the change being proposed?
• Return: What's the expected outcome of the change?
• Risks: What risks could the change bring about?
• Resources: What resources does the business need to implement the change?
• Responsibility: Who will be in charge of managing the change?
• Relationship: What's the relation between one change and others?

What are the 5Ps of change management?

The 5Ps of change management are Purpose, People, Process, Performance, and Preparation. It is a change management framework in Salesforce.

What's the most crucial element in a change management strategy?

Diverse elements make change management efficient, such as training the employees, assessing the need for Salesforce changes, and communication. The most essential aspect often depends on the business's goal with the changes being introduced.