The Situation
Approvals are an intoxicating feature in Salesforce. With a few clicks, you can control who does what, when they do it, and whether they can move forward without permission.
That sounds pretty great when you’re dealing with real-world business problems.
People skip steps.
Processes get ignored.
Managers get frustrated.
Leadership wants more visibility.
Before long, approvals start looking like the perfect answer.
Unfortunately, that’s also how many organizations end up creating Salesforce Approval Problems.
Before we go any further, it’s worth understanding what approvals actually are.
Salesforce approvals allow organizations to require one or more people to review and approve records before certain actions can move forward.
The feature exists for a reason.
The problem is that people often start using approvals in ways that backfire.
Salesforce Approval Problems: The Short Answer
If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably already overdone it.
Not because you’re trying to make life difficult or because you’re a bad manager.
Because you had a legitimate problem and approvals seemed like the easiest way to solve it.
The signs are usually pretty obvious once you know what to look for.
You may have overdone it if:
- People spend more time waiting than working.
- Managers approve things they never actually review.
- Users complain about approvals constantly.
- Everyone asks, “Whose approval is this waiting on?”
- Sales cycles are slowing down.
- Employees are visibly irritated by the process.
- You find yourself creating approvals for increasingly small decisions.
At that point, the approval process is creating more problems than it’s solving.
What’s Actually Going On
Let’s be honest.
Managing people can be like herding cats in a hurricane.
It’s difficult.
People have their own priorities. Even with clear processes and training, there will always be people who try to work around the system.
When you’re dealing with those frustrations, approvals seem like a magic elixir.
Many organizations implement approvals because they want to solve problems like:
- Salespeople skipping required steps
- Contracts going out with bad terms
- Unauthorized commitments
- Missing information
- Compliance concerns
- Managers wanting more visibility
- Leadership wanting control
- Employees making inconsistent decisions
On paper, approvals look like a clean solution.
In reality, they often become a substitute for solving the underlying problem.
The Root Causes Of Salesforce Approval Problems
1. Frustration
This is the most common cause.
You just need people to play along.
You have a process, you’ve explained it, and you’ve documented it.
Yet some people seem hellbent on ignoring it.
Approvals feel like an easy way to force compliance.
Sometimes they work.
Many times they create new problems.
2. Pressure From Leadership
Leadership wants visibility and fewer mistakes.
Those are reasonable goals.
Unfortunately, approvals often become the tool managers reach for first because they create the appearance of control.
The question is whether they’re actually improving outcomes.
3. Lack Of Trust
Many approval processes are really trust problems disguised as workflows.
Someone doesn’t trust someone else and instead of addressing the trust issue directly an approval process gets built.
The approval doesn’t solve the trust problem, it just formalizes it as a process in the CRM.
4. Avoiding Difficult Conversations
Approvals are often used to avoid direct management.
It’s easier to build a workflow than it is to tell someone “you need to improve this”.
The workflow becomes a substitute for leadership.
That rarely works out over the long term.
5. Trying To Enforce Preferences
This is where things always go sideways.
Approvals should protect the company,
Approvals should not protect someone’s personal preference.
The moment an approval exists because “that’s what I want” instead of “this protects the business” you can start the countdown for more problems to pop up.
What Salesforce Approval Problems Look Like In Real Life
The worst approval process I’ve ever seen involved contracts.
Every single deal had to be reviewed by management before a contract could be sent.
- Didn’t matter if the deal was large.
- Didn’t matter if the deal was small.
- Didn’t matter if it followed the standard process perfectly.
Every contract.
Every time.
Leadership wanted control over contract terms and deal value.
The problem was they inserted themselves individually into every transaction.
The result was predictable.
Deals slowed down. Prospects lost interest. Competitors moved faster. Salespeople became frustrated.
Eventually the approval process became a bottleneck that actively cost the company money.
The irony was that leadership believed the process was protecting revenue.
In reality, it was preventing revenue.
Why Salesforce Approval Problems Keep Happening
Approvals feel like control, but it can be a double edged sword.
When an approval gets added, leadership often feels better immediately.
There is now a checkpoint.
There is now visibility.
There is now oversight.
What people don’t see immediately is the downstream cost.
The delays.
The frustration.
The user irritation.
The bottlenecks.
Approvals also tend to become politically difficult to remove.
Once someone gains approval authority, taking it away can feel like losing control.
So the process stays. Even when everyone knows it’s hurting productivity.
This is very similar to what happens with other forms of automation.
People focus on what the automation can do and ignore how it affects the people using it.
The Cost Of Ignoring It
The biggest cost isn’t operational.
It’s psychological.
You started with a problem and now that problem is materially worse.
People become irritated.
Managers become irritated.
Everyone waits and nobody feels trusted.
Over time, users stop viewing Salesforce as a tool that helps them.
They start viewing it as a system that blocks them.
That’s a dangerous place to be.
Much like poorly designed task automation, approvals can fundamentally change how people feel about the platform.
And once people develop negative feelings toward Salesforce, fixing that relationship becomes much harder than fixing the approval itself.
What Good Looks Like Instead
The best approval processes I’ve seen all have one thing in common.
They’re protecting against something that could fundamentally damage the company.
Examples include:
- Legal exposure
- Regulatory violations
- Compliance failures
- Major contractual obligations
- Significant financial risk
Those are legitimate reasons. Everything else should be scrutinized carefully.
My rule of thumb is simple If the outcome won’t fundamentally rupture the company, there’s a good chance an approval isn’t the right answer.
People are adults. They should generally be treated as such.
Good approvals protect organizations from catastrophic mistakes. Bad approvals protect managers from discomfort.
Closing Thought
Salesforce Approval Problems rarely start because someone had bad intentions.
Most begin because people are trying to solve legitimate business problems.
The issue is that approvals are often much easier to create than they are to live with.
If your organization is struggling with approvals, frustrated users, or bottlenecks that seem to get worse instead of better, we’d be happy to take a look.
Sometimes the answer isn’t adding another approval.
Sometimes it’s setting the ones on fire that shouldn’t be there in the first place.