* This blog post was contributed by Provar Chief Revenue Officer Andy Menzies, as part of Provar’s executive blog series. This series features thoughts from Provar’s executive suite of leaders. For more contributions, please follow Provar’s blog and connect on social media.
Vitamin vs. painkiller is the age-old question! Which should you take to keep you the most well? I like to use the same analogy when it comes to test automation. The “unhealthy” aspect is the pain that your customer is experiencing – deploying what you’ve produced without testing it. Not only does this make for a bad customer experience, but it also affects your internal organization. Untested development = problems in deployment. Problems in deployment = unhappy, stressed employees. It’s a vicious cycle.
When it comes to a good test automation strategy, think of it as a painkiller. Testing your Salesforce apps needs something more than a holistic, long-term plan of trying to solve with a vitamin. A good test automation strategy is like medicine or a scientific approach because it resolves the issue up front rather than letting it run its course. At the same time, other business aspects crop up and become unwell everywhere. Let’s talk about how we can fix testing with the painkiller approach.
What Have I Learned?
I have been invested in test automation for the past seven years, so it’s been my life for 61,000 hours! For the past 10,500 hours, I have been focused on testing Salesforce applications across multiple industries with Provar. Before joining Provar, I had the privilege to work with other big names in the corporate world, including retail banking applications, legacy green screen apps, digital dashboards (Mercedes cars), spacecraft, F35 fighter jets, not to mention Walmart’s EPOS Inc. pumps. These are diverse organizations, use cases, and mainstream ERP and CRM offerings.
Not everyone understands the importance of testing and how it affects an organization’s overall quality, regardless of what success means to them. Some think allowing your customers and employees to do the testing is OK since not everyone will encounter the defect!
What worries me most is that even today, some firms still believe it’s okay to put low-quality software into production. It’s fascinating that many firms consider employee-facing applications less important than customer-facing — WRONG. They’re both important because happy employees = your customers having a better experience. How often have you heard your sales team moaning about the quality of the Salesforce deployment? Suppose you bought Salesforce to manage the customer with a 360 view, driving productivity through KYC (Know Your Customer). In that case, ensuring that your internal users get productivity gains is paramount, not motivating. If your users are dissatisfied with their experience, they will do everything possible to shortcut or not use Salesforce in the way in which it was intended. Adoption is key, as is the process of enforcing and ensuring adoption.
Positive Business Outcomes
For many years now, in my role as CRO (or various other titles denoting sales responsibility), I have genuinely believed that the most essential part of my job is understanding how the software we sell drives “Positive Business Outcomes.” Our mission at Provar is to match the features and functions of our software with how these drive the ability to achieve these outcomes promptly for our customers. We start by understanding the desired outcomes.
You would be surprised how many folks don’t define these before a purchase. I have to admit that I have done this many times myself. I can recall purchasing Salesforce five or six times in my career, and I was never asked to build a business case to justify the purchase! It was accepted that having Salesforce would drive sales, marketing, and support efficiencies; therefore, we just bought it.
So why is test automation so important when it comes to Salesforce?
Firms now deploy unique workflows, bespoke customer input fields, and a shed load of third-party integrations specific to the firms’ needs. These “customizations” are intended to improve business processes and drive efficiencies across multiple departments. One could argue that this low-code platform is the key to achieving competitive advantage! So, if your investment in Salesforce, combined with capturing your workflows and best practices, is the “productivity” enabler that drives better customer service, support, marketing automation, and sales excellence … why would you not continuously test this platform and application? Low-code dedicated test automation tools like Provar exist for this purpose. Some firms choose to test manually. Others use Selenium to CODE a test framework. I can’t get my head around this approach: a low-code platform, in this case, Salesforce, being tested by a CODE-based tool for testing web browsers. It’s illogical. And then, there is the “maintenance” of your scripts (customer journeys). Selenium is as brittle as “set melted sugar”: every time Salesforce changes, your test framework breaks!
Sometimes, the painkiller is the most effective way to get well fast. That’s the case when it comes to test automation. If you don’t take the painkiller (AKA put a robust test automation strategy in place), you’ll dilute sales productivity, which makes the entire pipeline unwell in the long run. Do yourself a favor. Save the vitamins for other aspects of your business.
Stay tuned for more thought leadership from our Provar executive team in future blog posts! Interested in learning more about how Provar can help elevate your team’s quality journey? Schedule a demo today.
