The Problem With One-Size-Fits-All CRM Advice

January 24, 2024

You can find endless Salesforce “best practices” online—but that doesn’t mean they’ll work for your org.

What works for a 10-person startup won’t necessarily work for a 1,000-person enterprise. A flow pattern that’s elegant in one org may buckle under scale in another. That’s the problem with one-size-fits-all advice: it assumes context doesn’t matter.

At Redwood Lane, we’ve learned that the right solution depends entirely on your team, your process, and your goals.

Why Best Practices Can Backfire

Over-automation: Copying a “recommended” flow structure can lead to dozens of record-triggered flows that are impossible to manage.
Under-utilization: Following advice to “keep things simple” sometimes leaves teams stuck with manual steps they could have automated.
Misaligned features: A shiny new Salesforce release may look exciting, but if it doesn’t fit your team’s actual workflow, it creates more noise than value.

Best practices are starting points, not blueprints.

How We Approach Each Org

We ask more questions than we answer—at first.
Before recommending anything, we dig into why a process exists. What pain point are we solving? What outcome is most valuable to the team?
We study your data, usage patterns, and team behavior.
- Which fields are actually populated?
- Which reports are leaders relying on?
- Where do users drop off in workflows?
  Data tells us where the system supports the business—and where it gets in the way.
We prototype solutions and test them with real users.
We’d rather build a small proof-of-concept that fails fast than roll out a giant automation that fails silently in production. User feedback shapes the final design.

Example in Practice

A client once came to us with advice they’d read online: “Use Record Types for every department.” They had nine Record Types on a single object, with layouts and picklists so fragmented that nobody could find what they needed.

Instead of sticking to the “best practice,” we consolidated to three Record Types and used Dynamic Forms for the rest. User adoption jumped, and admin maintenance dropped overnight.

Key Takeaway

Smart consulting isn’t just about knowing the tools—it’s about knowing when not to use them.

Every Salesforce org is unique. The best solution isn’t the one you find in a blog post—it’s the one that fits your data, your team, and your strategy.