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Month: December 2018

[Salesforce] Read this before you perform your Salesforce Data Migration

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On December 27, 2018

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Let’s talk about Data Migration in Salesforce with Priscilla Sharon, Salesforce Business Solution Executive for DemandBlue.

DemandBlue is in the business of helping its customers maximise their Salesforce investment through predictable outcomes. As we thrive in an era of cloud-based Infrastructure, Platform and Software services, DemandBlue has pioneered “Service-as-a-Service” through a value-based On Demand Service model that drives bottom-line results. They foster innovation through “Continuous Engagement and On Demand Execution” that offers their customers Speed, Value and Success to achieve their current and future business objectives.

Their On Demand Services for Salesforce include Advisory, Development & Customization, Integration, Administration & Support, Maintenance, and Lightning Migrations.

Salesforce Data Migration – Imagine if you were traveling to an exotic new destination for the holidays. You want to make sure that everything is perfect and that nothing goes wrong. You might want to take all the precautionary measures – get travel insurance, have emergency info at hand and make sure that you pack all the necessary things without leaving anything behind. You know there could be nothing worse than reaching the airport only to realise that you forgot your passport – Sigh! But you also know that you don’t have to go through these hassles with careful planning and preparation, which can make it a safe and wholesome vacation for you.

Just like traveling from one place to another, migrating data from one place to another be it from Excel Spreadsheets or Legacy systems to cloud, needs utmost care and caution throughout the scope of migration in order to avoid any mishaps. And ensuring practical safety tips might just save you from the glitches in your Data Migration plans. So, here’s a quick 6-point checklist – your passport to a safe and successful Salesforce Data Migration journey.

6-point Checklist for Successful Salesforce Data Migration

  1. Engage the Stakeholders: It is critical that you involve your stakeholders and inform them well in advance before migration to ensure that you gain maximum support for the project. Stakeholders from different teams and departments have profuse knowledge of the data and can give actionable insights pertaining to your Salesforce Data Migration plan.
  2. Identify the Data to be Migrated: Stakeholders are aware of the most crucial data and clarify your uncertainties regarding the data structure, the place of storage, if it has any duplications and its effect on the Salesforce Data. It might require you to create new or appending current data fields, validations and field values in Salesforce.
  3. Create a Backup – Most importantly, create a data backup to perform a rollback to recover from any possible errors. With a Data Backup, you can be double sure that you can go ahead with the migration process, so if at any stage there is an issue, you know you have the original data to fall back on.
  4. Prepare Data for Error-free Data Migration: After deciding on the changes to be done in step 2, now you can make the necessary adjustments to ensure error-free Salesforce Data Migration process. You can add or modify objects, fields, workflows and validations.
  5. Run a Test Migration: You don’t want to back out after importing all the data into the system. So, to avoid risking data in production, it is highly recommended that you run the test in a Sandbox environment to fix possible issues.
  6. Migrate Data: The test Migration gives you the confidence to migrate data into the production environment. Inform your stakeholders about the changes and how it will affect them prior to migration. Post your Salesforce Data Migration process, it is crucial that you validate the data.

How to Prepare for Salesforce Data Migration?

Each and every Salesforce Data Migration project is unique. Therefore, different migration may need different tools and resources. Having said that, here are top considerations to incorporate in any Salesforce Data Migration strategy.

  1. Identify the Team Members to be involved: Besides the stakeholders, you need to consider the admins and developers who need to be involved in the Salesforce Data Migration process. You will need to include the end-users who will work with the data.
  2. Start Early to Start Early: A Salesforce Data Migration plan is typically a part of a larger project. So, an early start would mean the early start of the big project you have planned. You need to identify, prepare, clean, restructure and map data well ahead of time.
  3. Build an adequate amount of time into the Schedule: Salesforce Data migration instances will have many exceptions, and you need to be prepared to meet them. Unexpected issues may surface when you practically work with the data. People may skip steps to meet the deadlines if your schedule is unrealistic. You need to remember that getting it right is as important as getting the work done on time.
  4. Designate tasks to the right People: You need to avoid assigning too many of the members on a task or inviting too many people into a discussion. Ensure that you assign each person’s role after you identify the people to be involved.
  5. Identify the Right Tools: Salesforce has quite a number of tools for Data Migration. In certain scenarios, an organization may require tweaks to be made to an existing tool or to develop a new one.

Enjoy this great infographic!

Have a safe journey with DemandBlue…

Salesforce data migration involves critical decisions since it is typically a small part of a bigger project. Though data migration may be a subset of a larger project, it’s no small task, and the end result can make or break the success of the bigger project. Hence, Salesforce offers cutting-edge data migration tools, such as Data Loader, Data Import Wizard along with Third-party apps that help automate Salesforce Data migration. However complex projects may require an experienced Salesforce Data Migration Consultant who has existing tools or can develop them based on an organization’s specific requirements. And we at DemandBlue have been a preferred Salesforce partner for our one-of-a-kind On Demand Solution for Salesforce. On Demand is a unique Service-as-a-Service model where businesses can deploy Salesforce projects without the hassles of costly contracts or complex SOWs; our clients are charged only for the number of hours spent on a project – be it 40 hours of effort spread over a week or two or a 100 hours of effort spread over a period of a month or two, the customer is billed only for what is consumed.

To find out how On Demand Service model for Salesforce can add Value to your next Salesforce project, Talk to DemandBlue team now!

[Salesforce / Mail Marketing] How to generate leads using drip email marketing?

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On December 24, 2018

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In this post we’ll talk about email marketing, a subject that rarely has been seen in this blog. I’ll leave the speech to Siva Devaki.

Siva Devaki is a technocrat and an entrepreneur who is passionate about bringing value to the customers with creative technological solutions. Siva currently busy in growing his technology startup – MassMailer, a simple and easy mass email app for Salesforce CRM customers. Siva is passionate to write articles, blog about email marketing, sales development, email deliverability best practices. You can find Siva’s LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/sivadevaki .

With click-through rates 300% higher than other email marketing campaigns, drip email is one of the highest ROI strategies a company can invest in. Yet running the right drip marketing campaign requires a comprehensive strategy — it isn’t as easy as “set and forget.” Here’s what you need to know about generating leads through scheduled, automated emailing.

How to generate leads using drip email marketing?

The Advantages of Drip Email Marketing

A drip email marketing campaign is a sequence of emails that are sent to leads in order to generate interest and build a relationship. There are a few core benefits to a drip marketing campaign:

  • Drip marketing builds a relationship over time.
  • Drip marketing is fully automated.
  • Drip marketing is a cost-effective form of marketing.

One of the reasons email has such a high ROI is that it’s both effective and cost-effective. A drip email campaign is able to take advantage of these benefits to continuously engage leads and encourage purchasing.

Creating a Drip Email Marketing Strategy

At its heart, a drip marketing campaign is about sustaining long-term contact with your customers. An email newsletter that is sent out every morning with important, interesting and insightful content will remind your customers that your company exists — but also runs the risk of over-saturating your customers and flooding their inbox. Meanwhile, a marketing campaign that sends information about good deals coming up over the weekend can be equally as valuable.

Drip campaigns can also be automated to reconnect with customers at key points of their journey, such as emailing customers who have unsubscribed from a service inviting them back or emailing customers who have abandoned items within their cart. A drip strategy must include the frequency of emails as well as the content of these emails and can be integrated into customer relationship management suites for better responsiveness and personalization.

Tips on How to Generate Leads through Drip Emails

  • Consider letting leads choose their own email frequency. For newsletters and deals, the frequency can be at a monthly, weekly, or even daily level.
  • Pay attention to your lead generation statistics. How often are leads clicking on links? Are they opening emails or deleting them? Are trends moving upward or downward?
  • Provide good content. If you want your leads to open your emails rather than deleting them, you need to provide the content that they want — not the content you want to give them.
  • Identify the right times of the day. Before work and after work are usually the best time to send emails, but your demographic may vary. Checking your statistics and testing out different types can help.

MassMailer for Drip Marketing Campaigns

MassMailer provides complete campaign automation, statistics, and email template builder for drip marketing campaigns. Through MassMailer, you can easily send emails out on an automated basis to your Salesforce leads, leveraging built-in templates (or building your own). MassMailer provides the statistics that you need to determine whether your drip marketing campaigns are working, while also helping you avoid traditional limits on Salesforce emails.

A drip email campaign will build your relationships with your customers, creating brand awareness and supporting your brand identity. Through scheduled, automated emails — and with the help of MassMailer — you can encourage conversions and improve your email marketing ROI. 

[ORGanizer] Reindeer release: cool new features and a special gift from The Welkin Suite

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On December 19, 2018

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The ORGanizer for Salesforce Reindeer Release is finally live!

Thanks to the guys of The Welkin Suite we have a special gift for all ORGanusers: an amazing 40% discount if you start a subscription from within the TWS ORGanizer’s banner! 

To discover how to get it, follow this post!


The Welkin Suite 40% discount

Before discovering all the new features of the Reindeer Release v0.6.8.0 let’s see how to get the 40% discount for The Welkin Suite subscription.

Make sure you have the latest ORGanizer for Salesforce version (right click on the ORGanizer icon > Manage Extensions):

Now click on the ORGanizer for Salesforce icon to show the Popup page and identify The Welkin Suite banner:

Click it and the promo code will be automatically added to your basket on the Welkin Suite site!

If you have purchased ORGanizer PRO, drop me a line using the support form, I’ll send you a dedicated promo code.

Reindeer Release new features

New PRO license limits

If you purchased a PRO license (available only on Chrome version) you’ll now get increased storage limits:

That is you can store up to 2000 logins (sync or not) and up to 1000 sync logins: the Beta limits are 200/150, but the free tire limit will get lower once the ORGanizer gets out of Beta!

Profiles Chamber

Want to massively change profiles? With the Profiles Chamber plugin you can!

In this release the plugin only supports Login Hours massive update with different options and the chance to create templates for a given Org).

You can choose multiple profiles and days to update and then apply changes (by deploying in your ORG): only the Login Hours data is actually pushed.

For detailed info about the Profiles Chamber follow this link.

Replace API names refactoring

The Replace API Names plugin has been completely rewritten to give consistency between Classic and LEX:

The API name is now shown directly next to the real label: few bugs has also been fixed (e.g. misbehavior with fields with the same label).

[Salesforce / Interview Tips] Preparing for a job interview as a Salesforce Administrator

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On December 4, 2018

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Becoming a Salesforce Administrator is often the entry route into the world’s number one CRM technology, but this doesn’t make the job interview process any easier for prospective admins.

As the most prominent role in Salesforce, the competition for a job as a Salesforce Administrator is particularly high. In Mason Frank’s 2018/19 independent Salesforce salary survey, 70% of respondents reported being a Certified Salesforce Administrator, far higher than any other certification. With other candidates waiting in the wings, you need to be sure your interview goes perfectly to guarantee the job offer, and that comes down to preparation.

A job interview for a Salesforce Administrator role can take many forms, and so you’ll need to be prepared for several different lines of questioning. Your interviewer won’t just be interested in your technical experience as an administrator, they’ll also want to know how you see CRM as part of a larger business, and use this to test how much you’ve researched their organisation. In addition, they’ll also want to get to know you as a person.

Read on for a series of tips on how to prepare for your next job interview as a Salesforce Administrator.

Testing your technical knowledge

Ultimately your prospective employer will want to learn how skilled you are on the Salesforce platform, and so you should expect to be asked technical interview questions. A Salesforce Administrator is quite a varied role, and so technical questions you may be asked can be quite broad. You could be asked something very functional such as ‘what is a roll-up summary field’, or perhaps something a little more scenario-based, such as ‘how do you share a record and in what circumstances would that be expected?’

One thing that you need to be aware of going into the job interview is that your interviewer may have no experience using Salesforce, or alternatively they may be a Certified Technical Architect.

With this in mind, it’s not enough to simply have a good working knowledge of Salesforce, you need to be prepared to explain technical concepts in plain language so that a non-expert will understand you. Having technical knowledge is one thing, but being able to communicate your knowledge to a layman is another thing entirely, so practice this before the interview.

Testing your experience

While knowledge is valuable, application is power.

Salesforce Trailhead is a fantastic education portal and is responsible for launching the career of thousands of Salesforce professionals, but it won’t provide you with that all-important practical experience that employers are looking for. This is why experience is incredibly valuable, and so you should be prepared to discuss the projects you’ve worked on and what you learned from them.

If you’ve worked as part of an implementation team, be ready to discuss the technical elements as well as the challenges you faced and how you overcame them. If you’ve ever experienced data loss or a data breach, be ready to discuss how you discovered the event and how it was resolved. Don’t be afraid to discuss challenges and mistakes made—this is what experience is all about, and will set you apart from the other candidates.

Something else that employers value highly is your ability to work on a collaborative project. As an Admin it’s unlikely that you will be working completely independently, so be prepared to talk about your communication skills, requirements gathering, and ability to work within the confines of a project timeline, using examples from your previous experience.

Testing your cultural fit

It’s essential you have the skills and experience to perform the job you’re being interviewed for, but your prospective employer will also want to get an idea of who you are as a person. After all, they’ll likely be spending around 40 hours a week in your presence, so it’s important they employ someone who they’ll enjoy working with—you should also be confident that you’ll enjoy working with them as well!

Given that your technical knowledge and experience come with the territory of being a Salesforce professional, getting your personal character across can often be the most nerve-racking element of a job interview, but this shouldn’t be the case. Just be yourself and communicate your goals and ambitions clearly.

It’s always a good idea to think about why you entered Salesforce technology and where you eventually want your career to take you, as long as you can relate this to why you want the job you’re interviewing for and how this will help you achieve your goals.

Being a successful Salesforce Administrator is about more than just doing the job, it’s about finding ways to maximise the value of Salesforce in an organisation, and making yourself indispensable as a result.

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