Salesforce can look easy to change—add a few Flows, connect an integration, ship quickly. But long-term success depends far more on implementation quality than on licenses.

I’ve joined projects expecting to deliver enhancements, only to spend most of the time fixing the damage from a poor partner. On the surface, everything “worked.” Underneath, the org was fragile, slow, and hard to maintain.

What went wrong

1) Flow overload created automation spaghetti
Record-triggered Flows were built without discipline: update-after-update patterns, hidden recursion, and overly complex logic in a single Flow. Small updates triggered chains of DML, governor limit failures, and vague errors that were painful to debug.
Flows are great—until the logic becomes complex, bulk-sensitive, or performance-critical. In those cases, Apex triggers/handlers often provide better control, testability, and troubleshooting.

2) Weak engineering standards made issues hard to diagnose
No clear naming conventions, limited fault handling, minimal documentation, and poor testing meant every change became risky. Debugging turned into guesswork, and enhancements became investigations.

3) Integrations caused duplicates and missing data
A “straightforward” sync created duplicated records and incomplete customer details because basic patterns were missing: external IDs + upsert, idempotency, matching rules, and a backfill/re-sync strategy. Without recovery mechanisms, the business paid the price in manual cleanup and unreliable reporting.

The real cost

Bad implementations don’t always fail immediately—they pass UAT and break later under real volume. Then you pay twice: once to build, and again to fix.

How to choose a better partner

Pick a partner who can clearly explain:

  • When to use Flow vs Apex (and why)
  • How they prevent recursion and limit issues
  • Their integration playbook (upsert, dedupe, retries, backfill)
  • Their documentation and handover approach
  • Their quality gates (reviews, testing, deployment discipline)

Bottom line: Salesforce is a long-term platform. Choose your implementation partner carefully—or the technical debt will bite you sooner than you think.