Stabilizing Legacy Systems Without Breaking Sales

You inherit a Salesforce org built in 2014. It has 47 custom objects, 200+ workflows, and nobody remembers why half of them exist. Sales complains it's slow. IT is afraid to touch anything. Sound familiar?

Legacy systems don’t die—they just get more expensive. Every day you delay cleanup, the problem compounds. But ripping everything out and starting fresh? That’s career suicide for a Revenue Operations leader.

The Debt Spiral

Technical debt isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s a revenue problem:

• Page load times exceed 8 seconds. Reps start using spreadsheets instead.
• Broken automations send duplicate emails. Prospects unsubscribe.
• Reports time out. Forecasts are guesswork.

We audited a Series C company where their Salesforce instance had become so slow that reps were logging activities after calls ended because the page wouldn’t load during the conversation.

They were literally using pen and paper in 2025.

“You can’t rewrite your way out of technical debt. You have to strangle it.”

The Strangler Fig Pattern

In nature, strangler figs grow around host trees, slowly replacing them. In software, the Strangler Fig pattern lets you replace legacy systems incrementally:

1. Identify one painful workflow (e.g., lead routing)
2. Build a new version in parallel using modern tools
3. Route a small percentage of traffic to the new version
4. Monitor, iterate, increase traffic
5. Retire the old workflow when the new one proves stable

This approach eliminates the “big bang” risk. If something breaks, you roll back 5% of users—not the entire sales team.

Quick Wins First

Don’t start with the hardest problem. Start with the most visible annoyance:

• Deduplicate accounts. Instant credibility boost.
• Fix broken dashboard filters. Execs notice immediately.
• Speed up page layouts. Remove unused fields and components.

One client had a Contact page layout with 87 fields. Sales reps used 11 of them. We trimmed it to 15 essential fields. Page load time dropped from 6.2 seconds to 1.8 seconds.

Reps sent thank-you emails to IT. When was the last time that happened?

Governance Without Bureaucracy

The reason legacy systems spiral is lack of governance. But governance doesn’t mean “change control committees that meet quarterly.”

It means:

• Field-level permissions so reps can’t create custom fields
• Naming conventions enforced by validation rules
• Monthly audits of unused automations
• Sunset policies for customizations over 2 years old

Establish the rule: If you can’t explain why it exists, it gets archived.