As Salesforce professionals, we’re often tasked with navigating complex projects and building strong relationships. But what if your behaviours, and the behaviours of those around you, are being influenced by invisible forces? Enter cognitive biases: “systematic errors in the way individuals reason about the world due to [their] subjective perception of reality,” as defined by Britannica.
I’ll admit it, I’ve fallen into more of these traps than I’d like to admit. Once you start spotting them, you’ll see them everywhere – from workshops to stakeholder meetings, even your own decision-making.
In this article, we’ll put eight critical biases under the microscope and explore how they influence the professionals we are and the projects we do. Reflecting on each bias, I’ll provide concrete suggestions to avoid related pitfalls and encourage you to use the knowledge you’ve gained to display a real edge throughout your Salesforce career.
1. Why Your ‘Quick Fix’ Takes Two Sprints
Ever been convinced that you’re going to finish that flow by the end of the day? Then you encounter that formula or limitation that sees you furiously staring at your screen until 8 PM. That one piece of acceptance criteria you needed refinement on? It ballooned the solution’s complexity and led to a rewrite of multiple related requirements. By the way, these new requirements need sign-off by Andrew (and Andrew is on annual leave until next Wednesday). See where I’m coming from?
This is the planning fallacy: our tendency to underestimate how long it takes to complete a future task. I’ve definitely been burned by this one. Underestimating the complexity of implementing a particular solution is a Salesforce career rite of passage. It’s straightforward enough to scope a deliverable when your user stories have perfectly refined acceptance criteria, zero disruptions come up, and the documentation provides solutions to all edge cases. But this is seldom a reality.
Practical Tips
- When estimating Salesforce development, collaborate with tools such as planning poker to encourage diverse points of view. It’s valuable to hear others articulate why a specific piece of development might take longer than you think.
- On the delivery side, encourage review and feedback of the Statement of Work (SOW) from a range of team members to help uncover hidden assumptions.
- Estimating software development via ‘gut feel’ is tempting. However, in my experience, comparing a task with a previous, similar piece of development and estimating accordingly leads to more precision. Agile Story Pointing is one such approach, and when done collaboratively (as it should be), fosters healthy conversations about the deliverables’ volume, technical difficulty, and uncertainty.
2. You Built It, But Should You Have?
Remember that Lightning Web Component you spent weeks building? You learned loads and loved doing it, but it ended up saving one user a single click and had to be discarded because nobody on the client team had the skillset to maintain it.
This is effort justification in action. When we put significant effort into achieving something, we tend to overvalue the outcome, even if it doesn’t deliver meaningful impact.
The Salesforce ecosystem is truly gargantuan, boasting millions of experienced professionals and thousands of completed projects. Unless you have a genuinely unique requirement, someone has probably already solved a similar technical problem. Indeed, it can be tempting to put effort into customisation when an out-of-the-box solution would suffice. This is especially likely to happen if a portion of the solution does not come as standard or a degree of business process transformation is required.
Practical Tips
- If something on the AppExchange exists to meet your requirement, explore it. Alternatively, see if somebody has published an open-source solution on GitHub or the Salesforce Stack Exchange.
- Seriously evaluate whether an out-of-the-box solution can be leveraged to meet a given business requirement. If you work at a consultancy, check whether a colleague has invested time in pre-building templates to support the creation of workshop artefacts.
3. Short Term Gain, Long Term Pain
It’s safe to say that most of us have been part of a project that felt rushed, with pressures on all sides to ‘go live’ and ‘prove value’ as soon as possible
The folks exerting this pressure were (probably) feeling the pinch from C-suite; themselves at the mercy of a bias I think we can all relate to.
Hyperbolic discounting is our inclination to choose immediate rewards over ones that come later in the future. Interestingly, this happens even when the immediate rewards are smaller.
To be clear, Salesforce is a substantial business investment. Evidencing financial benefits in a timely manner is crucial. But rushing an implementation, cutting corners, and going live prematurely risks undermining the reputational success and adoption of the platform. Can you afford to wait one or two months for that integration to go live? Alternatively, perhaps you can push out the delivery timelines slightly to deliver those UAT enhancement requests.
Practical Tips
- Do not rush toward an MVP go-live without a sufficient value/feasibility analysis. Sometimes, a modest timeline delay can bring an outsized benefit and consequently a more successful project for all involved.
- Negotiating such delays can be contentious. Diagramming tools (e.g. Lucidchart, Miro) can be invaluable when communicating the benefits/trade-offs underpinning these decisions.
4. Make Your Openings Count
Reflect on demos or presentations you have participated in. Chances are, the sections you recollect most clearly took place at the beginning or end. Even in this article, you may be inclined to judge its quality by the first couple of sentences and recall the first bias we explored more acutely.
Here, the primacy effect is rearing its head – our tendency to better remember the first piece of information we encounter. Its sibling, the recency effect, means that items presented last are also recalled vividly. Those in the middle? More forgettable.
Practical Tips
- Put critical exploratory questions at the start of your discovery workshops. End the meeting with a recap of what was agreed. In general, leading and ending with ‘the most important bits’ – be it a workshop agenda, proposal, or demo – means these sections are more likely to be remembered (and acted upon where needed).
- To minimise succumbing to these biases, read proposals or documentation more than once. AI can really help us with this: get it to take notes, summarise key takeaways and actions that may have been missed.
5. When Hype Outruns the Business Case
Head to LinkedIn and you’ll see no end of posts extolling the virtues of AI. Agentforce anyone? I’ve been blown away by some Proof of Concepts in this area and do not doubt that the product meaningfully raises the bar from an agent and customer experience.
But prematurely announcing that AI solves the world’s problems is a classic example of the pro-innovation effect. This is where we place too much value on shiny new tools without fully considering their downsides. ‘Nailing the basics’ in a Salesforce org must come first. After all, it’s not ‘sexy’, but your future org (and self) will thank you.
Let’s think back to the COVID-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s. It was then that the popularity of NFTs skyrocketed, with some sales fetching millions of dollars. Today, many of those same tokens are worthless. And NFT Cloud remains one of Salesforce’s more niche offerings.
Practical Tips
- A wise colleague once told me not to create “solutions looking for problems”. Having clarity on the specific problem solved by a given piece of tech is key. By using first principles problem solving, you can break a business problem into its most basic building blocks. On a Salesforce project, this can help strip away assumptions, avoid unnecessary complexity, and keep the solution focused on what the business actually needs.
- Foster psychological safety within the team by encouraging skepticism and healthy debate.
- Tactically, introducing a small piece of innovative tech into a project can achieve substantial buy-in (however, only do this if it provides legitimate value!).
6. If You Win, Do I Lose?
I’ve seen this play out in stakeholder anxieties during Salesforce projects, especially when a greenfield implementation replaces another CRM.
There are two main concerns here: “I won’t be able to do my job effectively because of this new tool” and “My job will become redundant”. These worries are totally valid. People want and deserve to feel safe, capable, and empowered in their roles. These concerns are underpinned by the zero-sum bias, where change is seen as a threat and not an opportunity.
Practical Tips
- Speak your client’s/company’s language when outlining the business value Salesforce brings.
- If the implementation is greenfield, consider re-skilling/upskilling existing CRM specialists into Salesforce – especially when they have transferable skills.
- Coach champions of the platform into Salesforce super users who can own elements such as team operational reporting. A Salesforce transformation is the perfect opportunity to rethink inefficient processes, illustrating a ‘win-win’ for all.
7. “We’ve Always Done It This Way”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You’ve probably heard this from stakeholders reluctant to embrace change. That instinct is powerful. It often shows up in Salesforce projects when teams resist moving away from the comfort of familiarity.
This is the status quo bias. It describes our preference for the current state of affairs, leading to hesitation and even fear when faced with change. This cognitive setting stretches back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, when any shift in the environment could mean the difference between survival and death. Today, we see it when users push back on replacing legacy systems, even when the incumbent is holding the business back.
Practical Tips
- Proactively highlight to your client/company the benefits of moving from the legacy system (status quo) to Salesforce.
- Provide examples of how the Salesforce platform addresses current pain points or enhances existing processes.
- Bring clients on the journey by including them in show-and-tells to provide feedback and elicit their input into system enhancements.
- Provide stakeholders with sandbox access so they can ‘play around’ with and get excited about the Salesforce-shaped future.
- The practical tips from ‘zero-sum bias’ are also highly relevant to individuals clinging to the status quo.
8. Bias? Me? Never.
When reading this article, did you wryly smile while recalling the many biases of your colleagues and clients? Spoiler: I did while writing this. It’s easier to spot where someone else has gone wrong than to look at ourselves in the mirror.
One study conducted by Cass Business School found that out of 661 participants, only one believed they were more biased than average. That statistic says it all.
Participants in that study were unknowingly succumbing to blind spot bias: the tendency to recognise biases in others while failing to see them in ourselves.
In Salesforce projects, it might show up when I flag that a client has unrealistic expectations, while overlooking some assumptions I myself am making.
Practical Tips
- Consciously re-review this list and examine where you have exemplified a particular bias throughout your Salesforce career. Have you become overly excited by a piece of tech, believing it to be the panacea that solves all your problems? Where have you underestimated the complexity and edge cases that a particular piece of work has demanded? Reflect on where you may have resisted expanding your skillset to protect the status quo.
Final Thoughts
Cognitive biases shape how we scope, design, and deliver projects. If you ignore them, they’ll quietly undermine your best efforts. Learning to spot them can become a powerful tool, meaning you make better decisions, communicate with more empathy, and lead with more clarity.
So here’s what I’d like you to do: Look back at your last project. Where did bias creep in? The stakeholder who never quite bought in? Was it in the estimate that overlooked intricacy? The shiny new tech no one ended up using? Don’t just skim this list and nod along – use it.
