Connecting humans with AI-driven business process recommendations to unlock innovation excellence.
Read the reportOver 150,000 businesses use Salesforce to help run their business. Our annual Benchmark Report shares best practice insights derived from analyzing how humans are running their business in the cloud. We like to think of it as democratizing customer success by unlocking the hive mind of the Salesforce ecosystem.
How do we do it? We analyze the proprietary (meta)data set generated by the Hubbl Diagnostics machine learning platform. Then, we use these insights to improve the platform and generate personalized game plans for Trailblazers to optimize their Salesforce.
Want more details on how we do our analysis? See the 2022 report for an in-depth discussion. Curious about how to leverage the insights in your own org? The 2023 edition takes you through actionable steps in each of Diagnostics’ data categories.
The key to any good game plan is to monitor & evaluate progress. That’s why this year’s Benchmark report highlights the tremendous innovation powered across the Salesforce ecosystem by the Hubbl Technologies platform, providing you with insights you can’t get anywhere else.
Astonishing insights like the fact that the average business has 27,000 metadata items (the way business processes are built) in their Salesforce, and it would take 4 days of clicking to just look at them all in a single business. Imagine trying to analyze and mine the setup of all of Salesforce’s ~150,000 customers! It would take >1600 years of clicking and looking before any analysis or learnings could be uncovered.
The power of Hubbl is that it unlocks the hive mind of businesses operating in the cloud all over the world and brings it to your fingertips.
The insights we’ve uncovered this year are so important for success across the ecosystem that we are making sure it's open and accessible to all. You’ll navigate the report like a game plan that brings out the best in all the players of your team. Whether it is your own internal development team, your users & executives, Salesforce themselves, or your trusted consulting partners—orchestrating success with Salesforce requires open communication between all players.
If innovation is the goal, then the path scoring victory requires a game plan. Time to build yours for 2025.
Fields in objects are the building blocks of Salesforce CRM. You can create any custom object or field that you want. Yes, the power of Salesforce is that you get to build your own playing field. In fact, 70% of all fields in Salesforce analyzed by Hubbl are custom. Since the average Salesforce has >6800 fields, that’s an average of>4700 custom fields per org.
Most teams are getting help building their playing field with objects and fields from installed packages. These packages often add namespace prefixes on the code to help you identify where it came from. Many packages are also managed, meaning your team must rely on the app publishers' metadata quality to power your AI. Choose who builds your playing field carefully. Learn more about the importance of namespace metadata in the SFBen article “What is namespaced metadata and why should you care?”.
Field maintenance is just as important in Salesforce as it is for your favorite sport. Metadata management and governance requires dedicated stakeholder communication to drive customer success.
"With Hubbl Diagnostics, we've been able to gain stakeholder buy-in more effectively, foster transparent communication, and ensure alignment across teams, resulting in smoother project execution."
Generative AI is going to have a tough time leveraging the benefits of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in most business’ Salesforce. Unfortunately, 69% of custom fields have no description on average. This is important because poor metadata definition & governance reduces the accuracy and relevance of AI-generated text.
Complete a field utilization analysis of all the objects in your Salesforce. In just two minutes of effort with Hubbl Diagnostics, you’ll be ready for AI and Data Cloud faster.
Get started nowCan you imagine having a playbook for every custom object you ever wanted? Hubbl Diagnostics’ ability to unlock the Salesforce hive mind means you can finally see what others have been building on the platform, learn from them, and get inspiration for accelerating your own innovation.
For example, through metadata classification, we are able to identify the top ways users have customized their org in different metadata types. Automatically surfacing those insights to Hubbl users is like having an AI architect at your fingertips coaching you through every play of the game.
Take a look, for example, at the top ten custom objects in Salesforce that are not installed from namespaced packages. Are any of these custom objects in your Salesforce? Do you see any inspirations for objects you could use in your business?
An architect knows the types of fields that should be on different custom objects and can guide a solution with those insights. Hubbl’s AI-powered recommendation engine empowers architects and admins with unparalleled insights into potential architectures, accelerating and stimulating innovation. Even though many businesses using Salesforce have created these same top 30 fields on a custom “Invoice” object, they definitely don’t agree on the field types. For example, Account is found as a Lookup, MasterDetail, and Text field. The human in the loop evaluating these architecture decisions needs to make the final call.
Ask yourself if you have a custom Invoice object in your Salesforce, and if, from looking at this list, you see any inspirations for custom fields you are not using yet.
“Hubbl Diagnostics took the guesswork out of prioritizing initiatives. It helped me find the low-hanging fruit and focus on what truly matters.”
Businesses often have common sets of values that are used to standardize data. In Salesforce, these sets are stored in picklists, but they can be cumbersome to maintain across different objects. Global picklists are a great way to make your team’s Salesforce management more efficient by allowing you to set a global value set and use it on multiple objects.
So what are others building out there? We’ve compiled the top ten global picklists (not installed from packages) to give you inspiration for how you are managing your Salesforce metadata. Consolidating picklists in global value sets will improve AI’s ability to connect the dots across your data and improve outputs.
Want to learn more about the most common fields and their types used on these top ten custom objects? Join our Benchmark Report webinar, "Unlocking the Salesforce Hive Mind to Accelerate your Business" to dig deeper and gain ideas for your own Salesforce.
join the webinarEvery elite team needs an equipment manager. And if installed packages are like the equipment your team uses, maximizing the value of your Salesforce investment, they also require proper maintenance to avoid unnecessary risks and failure. In 2023, we revealed that 99% of businesses have out-of-date packages in Salesforce. This motivated the launch of our installed packages assessor to help businesses automate their app adoption monitoring and maintenance.Word is getting out. In 2024, we saw a 5% increase in organizations keeping their packages up-to-date. However, it means that 94% still have at least one out-of-date package in Salesforce.
Even more concerning—from a security perspective—is that 38% of installed packages are not security reviewed. Many of these are managed packages where you don’t even have access to the potentially insecure code that is in Salesforce.
“Keeping installed packages up-to-date is critical for Salesforce org health, security, and speed. However, identifying newer versions of public and privately listed packages can be challenging. Hubbl Diagnostics automates this process through powerful metadata audits, optimizing performance and driving speed to value while minimizing the risk of data breaches and security risks.”
There is evidently plenty of work to do, as 31% of all installed packages are still out-of-date. Out-of-date packages can slow Salesforce down, lead to security risks and make you miss features you should have access to.
Automate your equipment maintenance: Identify your out-of-date and non-security-reviewed packages with only 2 minutes of effort.
Get started freePlaying defense means securing your data, sometimes by encryption. 28% of all Salesforce fields are encrypted by customers. 46% of encrypted fields are custom fields, so customers are almost equally likely to encrypt standard fields vs. custom fields. What is your encryption strategy?
Explore Salesforce's Shield Platform Encryption.
"The ability to run a test scan, check outdated packages, and identify custom code issues provided peace of mind, especially in security and risk management. When we think about the price of Salesforce, having a tool like Hubbl is a no-brainer to ensure we're getting the most of our investment."
Hubbl’s AI-powered recommendation engine has made over 20 million recommendations to customers in personalized game plans, prioritized by the severity of the issue and the level of effort to address it. We found that businesses who have used Salesforce for longer (2000-2010 start dates) have up to 10x more high severity recommendations than businesses who have more recently adopted the platform.
Visualize your custom code security risks and get solutions to solve them.
Get started NowJust like managing the players on your team roster is key to winning the season, license utilization is vital to the adoption of Salesforce across your business. You need to ask yourself: how does your organization’s utilization stack up to the competition? Are you using all the players you have access to?
It’s just over one year since Salesforce launched the free Salesforce integration user licenses. Our data shows that businesses are not taking advantage of these powerful FREE Salesforce licenses that provide more security, granularity in integration access control, and much lower cost.
Review your license utilization for User, Permission Set and Feature licenses in minutes.
Get started NowThe secret to long-term victory is to monitor your progress. Businesses using Salesforce have made great progress this past year in unlocking innovation excellence. For example, they are increasing their use of Salesforce Flow. The percentage of record-triggered automation in Flow (vs. older innovations of workflow rules or process builder) has increased from 14% to 39%.
2022: 12%
2023: 14%
2024: 39%
This means the rate of Flow adoption is up by 10x in 2024, with an increasing trajectory. This is great news for businesses planning to leverage the latest innovations like AI and Data Cloud.
“We were swimming in technical debt. A high amount of customization and prioritization of new features meant that we were constantly fighting fires of things not working correctly. We lacked a true lens into the totality of the tech debt and needed a mechanism that could help prioritize and measure our progress.”
Hubbl’s automated ROI calculator and gamification of the migration from workflow and process builder to Flow has helped businesses motivate their Salesforce modernization, making it faster, increasing user adoption, and improving customer experiences.
Using Hubbl’s proprietary installed package assessor, customers are saving time, speeding up Salesforce, reducing security risks, and gaining features they were missing by identifying out-of-date packages automatically and updating them.
Securing Salesforce is top of mind for most businesses. Hubbl customers take advantage of our static code analysis to identify and resolve high severity security risks like SOQL injection issues.
Gamify your migration to Flow, identify your security risks, and automate your installed package compliance with only 2 minutes of effort.
Get started Now
Join us as we review progress made across the ecosystem and uncover the insights that will guide the next year of innovation on the Salesforce platform.
Our purpose is clear: to make thriving Salesforce solutions easy and accessible to all.
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