What is a Salesforce Health Check and do you need one?

If you have been using Salesforce for a while, there is a good chance things look broadly fine from the outside. Your team is logging activities, deals are moving through the pipeline, cases are being raised and closed. But under the surface, Salesforce orgs tend to accumulate problems over time, and those problems are often invisible until they start causing real pain.

A Salesforce Health Check is an independent review of your org that surfaces those problems before they get worse. In this article we will explain exactly what it involves, what it typically uncovers, and how to know whether you need one.

Why Salesforce orgs drift over time

When Salesforce is first set up, everything is usually clean and deliberate. Fields are used as intended, processes make sense, and data quality is managed. Over time though, a number of things tend to happen:

• Staff change, and new users develop their own workarounds
• New fields and objects are added without a clear governance process
• Automation rules built years ago still run in the background, sometimes conflicting with newer ones
• Data deduplication is never quite as thorough as planned
• Security profiles and permission sets get copied rather than designed
• Reports are duplicated, renamed and never deleted

None of these things cause an immediate crisis. But they compound. And they make Salesforce harder to use, less trustworthy, and more expensive to maintain or change.

What does a Salesforce Health Check actually involve?

A Health Check typically follows four steps:

1. Discovery

A short call to understand the scope of your org, what you use Salesforce for, and what areas you are already concerned about. This ensures the review focuses on what matters most to your business.

2. Reverse Demo

Rather than us showing you a presentation, you walk us through your own Salesforce system live. You show us how your team actually uses it day to day, and flag anything that already frustrates you or does not work as intended. This is one of the most valuable parts of the process, because it grounds the review in your reality rather than a theoretical checklist.

3. Scans and Analysis

We run a set of review tools across your org, covering areas including security settings, user access and profiles, automation rules, data quality, storage, and org build quality. We combine the output from these tools with everything we observed during the reverse demo.

4. Written Deliverable

You receive a written summary of what we found, using a simple Red, Amber, Green rating for each area reviewed. Every finding is explained in plain English with a clear recommendation and, where relevant, an estimate of the effort involved to address it. You keep this document regardless of whether you choose to do anything next.

What does a Health Check typically uncover?

No two orgs are the same, but there are patterns that come up repeatedly in our reviews:

• Security gaps — users with more access than they need, sharing rules that are too permissive, or password policies that do not meet best practice
• Redundant automation — old Workflow Rules and Process Builder flows that predate Salesforce Flow, sometimes conflicting with newer automation
• Data quality issues — duplicate records, missing required fields, and data that was migrated years ago and never cleaned up
• Storage pressure — orgs approaching their data or file storage limits without realising it
• Unused features and licences — tools that are being paid for but not used, or features that could add value but have never been configured
• Reporting problems — dashboards and reports that nobody trusts, or that show different numbers depending on who runs them

Free Health Check vs Health Check+

At Second Mind, we offer two tiers. The free Health Check covers the native Salesforce security scan and an Org Check build scan, giving you a quick RAG snapshot across the main areas. It is the right starting point if you just want an initial, no-risk view of your org.

The Health Check+ goes significantly deeper, covering licences and contract, security, access controls, org build, reports and dashboards, with a full written report and time estimates for every recommendation. It is designed for businesses about to start a new Salesforce project, or those who want a proper baseline before any clean-up work begins.

Five signs you probably need a Health Check

• Your Salesforce org has not been formally reviewed in the last 12 to 18 months
• You are seeing duplicate records, inconsistent data, or reports that nobody trusts
• You are about to start a new Salesforce project and want a clean baseline first
• You have inherited a Salesforce org from a previous admin or partner and are not sure what is under the hood
• You want an independent, no-obligation view before deciding whether to invest in further Salesforce work

What happens after a Health Check?

There is no obligation to do anything. The written summary is yours to keep and share internally, and you decide entirely what, if anything, to prioritise. Many clients use the document to build an internal case for follow-on work, or simply as a reference point for their own ongoing maintenance.

Where clients do choose to take action, common next steps include security remediation, data cleanup, automation consolidation, and reporting improvements. All of these can be scoped and quoted separately based on the findings.