The Salesforce org was already live when we got the call. Tadawul Group in Riyadh is the holding company behind the Kingdom’s capital market, and its sales teams were working inside a CRM that had been set up some time back. The wiring was there. The business had moved on since, and the org had not fully kept up.
There was another wrinkle. Saudi Arabia’s data residency rules meant records sitting inside a cloud CRM needed to live on servers inside the country. A typical Salesforce deployment spreads data across global infrastructure by design. That was the first problem to sort out before anyone could talk about adoption, fields, or page layouts.
What we found
We started with an audit of the environment and every sandbox we could find. We read the documentation left behind by whoever set the org up originally. Then we sat with the business and asked a simple question: where does this slow you down, where does it confuse you, where do you ignore it.
The answers came back in a familiar shape. Stale fields that nobody filled in. Page layouts covered in sections that had once mattered and were now noise. Processes automated on paper and happening over email. Users trained once at go-live, quietly working around the tool ever since.
On the compliance side, we picked up the InCountry managed service and learned its model. The documentation is thorough, and the approach is clear. Regulated fields route through infrastructure inside the country while the rest of Salesforce keeps working the way Salesforce works. That gave us a way to satisfy the regulator and keep the standard platform features the business actually relies on.
How we built it
The scope was tightening what was already there and adding what the regulator required.
Department by department, we took the audit findings and worked them into small, incremental process changes. One team at a time, one workflow at a time. Each change came with documentation and a walk-through with the business users who would live with it. That ordering mattered. When users see their own feedback reflected in a change, the training takes. When it is dropped on them cold, it does not.
The InCountry layer went in alongside the clean-up. Regulated fields routed to in-country storage, the rest of Salesforce continued to behave as expected. Documentation captured which fields sat inside the residency boundary so the next person looking at the org could understand the split.
The project ran through several update cycles. Each cycle picked up the next wave of findings, the next set of processes to document and implement, and the next round of user adoption work.
What we tell other clients
Two things were true here at once. The business needed a tidier, better-adopted Salesforce org. The regulator needed the data to sit inside Saudi Arabia. Teams sometimes treat those as separate programmes. We ran them as one.
The lesson we carry into similar compliance-heavy implementations is that residency, adoption, and clean-up belong in the same plan. Pull them apart and the residency work starts to look like a tax on the business. Put them together and the same cycle of change tightens both the compliance story and the day-to-day experience.
– Jeff.