About the author: Vadim Rokhman is a Trailblazer adventurer and a Product Manager of Sculptor CPQ at Twistellar, keen on delivering helpful tips and Sculptor CPQ solution for sales reps to drive sales automation in Salesforce CRM.

The automation of business operations currently holds a leading position in the development priorities of many firms. Automation has developed new forms and capabilities since the initial CRM and ERP systems, including the popular Salesforce platform.

The following trends stand out among the vast range of those, currently dominating business automation:

Use of chatbots and virtual assistants
Compilation and analysis of customer behavioral data
Self-service options and customer virtual desks
Automated workflows for sales reps (approval templates, revenue reports, customers)

Numerous apps created for Salesforce CRM already have self-service and automated workflows embedded. One of the most advanced solutions for automating various business processes, accelerating the sales cycle velocity, and ultimately raising a company’s revenue is Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solutions.

The emergence of CPQ

An old-school quoting process in a traditional sales flow was as following:

Determine the best products and the required configurations
Refer to pricing documentation or static systems for the basic price
Track down eligible discounts and apply them manually
Wait for approval if a large discount is requested
Create the final quote document that will be delivered to your customer

In a highly competitive environment, sales representatives deal with complex products and services, create quotes, and interact with customers. Excel and other data sales tools are no longer effective to provide deal velocity without errors and recalculations.

The key challenge has always been to improve the automation, predictability, and efficiency of the quoting process for both sales representatives and clients.

It has triggered different vendors all around the globe to develop CPQ solutions.

At the very least, CPQ software implementation reduces the use of paperwork and documentation. Sales reps benefit from having price books available at hand and save time by reducing manual calculations and routine operations.

But CPQ is more than that

Implemented CPQ solutions provide such out-of-the box capabilities as product bundles configurator, guided selling, automated pricing rules, and interactive web quotes to help streamline sales flows.

According to recent Gartner research, the CPQ software market size grew 15.5% in 2019 to an estimated 1.42 billion USD. The configure price and quote (CPQ) software market size is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of over 14% during the forecast period.

CFOs meet CPQ

How can a company’s decision maker identify internal signals indicating that business flows need to be tuned up and automated?

We will outline the biggest challenges every company faces when considering CPQ implementation. These observations are based on the interviews with CFOs that the Sculptor CPQ team conducted through 2021-2022 years. All of the represented companies used Salesforce CRM to run their businesses, with no CPQ solution. These are the industries covered by this questionnaire:

Logistics and Shipping Services
Manufacturing
Financial Consulting
Marketing Agencies
Software Services
Retail Business

Top 5 questions the CFOs refer to the Sculptor’s team about CPQ implementation

How to evaluate whether a company needs CPQ in the current business life cycle?
Is implementing CPQ a reasonable investment?
How many resources are required to deploy CPQ and set up relevant business processes?
How long will it take for sales revenue to increase as a result of CPQ-based sales flows?
How will CPQ implementation enhance communications with clients and increase customer satisfaction?

How to evaluate whether a company needs CPQ at the current business life cycle?

Some companies do quite well without CPQ. Sometimes, their business doesn’t provide a broad range of products or services to customers, or there is a sufficient number of sales reps successfully managing the flow of orders using standard tools (Excel) for calculations and generating commercial offers (quotes).

The primary indicators for a CFO to consider the feasibility of implementing CPQ are:

The speed of attracting new leads has slowed down. This may indicate that sellers spend much of their time working on accurate quotes, approving discounts, and discussing pricing policies with management, leaving them with less time to grow relationships with new customers.

The product (service) range is constantly expanding (changing), or includes a large number of independently configurable features, subproducts options with individual attributes (price, block pricing, quantity discounts).

Your pricing policy has become increasingly complex, and sales reps have already worked out all the pricing rules in Excel to calculate discounts for various customer groups. While keeping the option for sales representatives to manually set up prices or discounts in some circumstances, you wish to automate the application of pricing rules to quotes.

Although the workload for sales reps has increased, you don’t want to hire more people. The average time to quote is growing concurrently.

Your business has expanded into new markets with strong competition. As a consequence, multicurrency management, frequently changing pricing policies and quote approval management for VIP clients have become more time-consuming, preventing sales reps from closing deals quickly.

Is implementing CPQ a reasonable investment?

Obviously, business owners want to ensure they receive a return on their investment. CPQ vendors vary in their pricing models and subscription plans.

The “try before you buy” formula is the best way to determine whether a CPQ solution is worth purchasing. On the AppExchange platform, for example, Sculptor CPQ offers a great opportunity: you can install a free version of CPQ in your production with no expiration date (but with some minor limitations).

Alternatively, you can try a Test Drive and jump into the CPQ environment to play with product and bundle configuration, pricing rules in just a few clicks.

Regarding return on investment, you may determine how many man-hours will be saved annually by comparing the amount of time a sales representative would need to generate a typical quote using outdated techniques and software (such as Excel) with the time it would take to get a quote with CPQ guidance.

How many resources are required to deploy CPQ and set up relevant business processes?

It depends on a specific CPQ solution and your current business needs. For instance, a typical Sculptor CPQ installation takes half an hour, while its customization for customer’s needs may take 2-3 weeks. No integrator is needed, a company’s Salesforce administrator can easily set up CPQ for sales reps.

At the same time, the majority of CPQ solutions will require 3-6 months and a certified CPQ specialist or even a third-party Salesforce consulting firm to implement CPQ and tailor everything to the business needs.

How long will it take for sales revenue to increase as a result of CPQ-based sales flows?

Our research provides helpful indicators for CFOs to assess when a company is receiving a return on investment.

We can share these common benefits of Sculptor CPQ that companies see a year after its implementation:

CFOs admitted that sales reps generated more leads and accurate quotes several months after Sculptor implementation.

How will CPQ implementation help to improve interaction with clients and improve their customer success experience?

Customers have become more sophisticated and demanding. They tend to stay with companies that can provide self-service capabilities with a user-friendly interface.

In terms of CPQ, self-service capabilities are represented by the opportunity to edit online a proposed quote. Sculptor CPQ, for instance, has an integrated interactive web quote. That means that a customer can receive a published secure link via Salesforce notification, a messenger or email, edit it online, add missing products and services, approve the quote, and send it back to a sales rep. In this case, we achieve a flawless and adaptable collaboration between a company and its client.

Higher productivity, sales flow acceleration, and automation of routine operations are the key benefits a company gets by implementing CPQ in its business environment.

[AppExchange Series] Salesforce QuickBooks Integration and its New Suggested Account Match Feature

By Curt Hopmann

On March 11, 2022

In Post

About the author: Curt Hopmann has a history of developing new products and improving existing ones, including various Salesforce Apps. As CEO of Breadwinner, Curt is driven to help those businesses that use Salesforce and accounting and payment processing software such as NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, and Stripe to succeed by discovering the power of Breadwinner’s intuitive integration solutions.

Is your organization struggling with cross-departmental coordination and communication? If your sales and finance teams are not in sync, a third-party integration tool such as Breadwinner could be the missing piece of the puzzle. An integration software that syncs your QuickBooks with your Salesforce CRM helps to align your sales and finance data for improved coordination and communication across your organization while creating centralized workflows. And the launch of Breadwinner’s new suggested account match feature makes the process of configuration between the two software even more powerful and practical.

Integrating QuickBooks with Salesforce (How Does It Work?)

Fortunately, it’s never been easier to integrate QuickBooks with Salesforce. Breadwinner offers a purpose-built connector solution for sales and finance teams to streamline their workflows. If you’re growing tired of navigating between QuickBooks and Salesforce to access customer and account data, Breadwinner mirrors critical financial data in real-time across both platforms.

This Salesforce-native application gives sales and finance teams access to automation features designed to radically streamline and simplify the use of QuickBooks and Salesforce. When your team members make changes to data inside Salesforce, this is reflected in QuickBooks within just a few minutes. Sales and finance can use real-time data to make informed decisions.

Connecting QuickBooks with Salesforce creates unified workflows for organizations frustrated with navigating through a disjointed stack of applications to complete simple tasks. Implementing an integration tool like Breadwinner, sales and finance teams are well-equipped to meet customer needs and can play a pivotal role in driving efficiency.

It’s never been more important for ambitious organizations to have access to effective workflow automation solutions. With more sales and finance teams embracing workflow automation than ever before, now is the time to start taking a few intuitive tools for a test drive. This will give you the chance to see how some tools could potentially optimize and enhance existing workflows.

Breadwinner’s New Suggested Account Match Feature

Breadwinner have recently added the new suggested account match feature to their Salesforce and QuickBooks integration. Like all the automation features, account matching is designed to accelerate workflows and eliminate the need for users to manually match QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts–helping to save a significant amount of time.

Their suggested account match feature works like a magic trick. When you bring customer data from QuickBooks into their Salesforce-native application, each QuickBooks customer must match to a Salesforce account. Rather than getting your team to manually match QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts, their account match feature does all the heavy lifting.

You can take the following steps to leverage the new suggested account match feature:

Scroll to the bottom of the main dashboard and select Preview Customer Match.

Once you are on the Breadwinner Account Match page, you will see a preview of how they are aligning your data across QuickBooks and Salesforce. At the top, you will see an option to Accept All Suggested Matches in light grey. If you are satisfied with how the data is aligned in the preview, you should click this link.

A pop-up will appear – providing you with details on how many customers Breadwinner was able to automatically match. You are given the option to either match sub-companies with their parent’s Salesforce account or their equivalent Salesforce account. Once you have selected your preferences, you can proceed by clicking the Yes button.

Taking a full range of data variables into consideration, Breadwinner will make an attempt to auto-match your QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. As Breadwinner can align your data with a remarkable degree of accuracy, all your team will need to do is go through and simply accept the suggested matches. This speeds up the entire onboarding process.

If you have hundreds or even thousands of suggested matches to approve, Breadwinner isn’t going to make you approve each and every one of these. They give you the ability to approve suggested matches in bulk–so you do not need to scroll through them all. Once you’ve looked at just a few matches, you will see whether the data is correctly aligned and ready for approval.

When Breadwinner attempts to match a QuickBooks customer with a Salesforce account, it takes a range of data points into consideration, including the customer’s company name, postal address, and phone number. In the event that Breadwinner is unable to match a QuickBooks customer with a Salesforce account, you can select a Salesforce account with the lookup box.

How Sales & Finance Teams Are Using The New Feature

As a workflow automation solution designed to enhance the productivity of your organization, Breadwinner comes jam-packed with a broad range of automation features. Their new suggested account match feature prevents users from spending hours scrolling through data to manually pair QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. This isn’t a good use of your time.

The suggested account match feature is one of several functionalities enabling users to hit the ground running with Breadwinner and immediately unlock value. The purpose of their connector is to prevent sales and finance teams from spending hours aligning Salesforce and QuickBooks data. Organizations are using our new feature to unlock value even faster than before.

From the outset, sales and finance teams experience the power of workflow automation. When you leverage Breadwinner’s solution, you do not need to set aside time to align QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. With the introduction of the new suggested account match feature, aligning your data is a quick and easy task that’s no longer overwhelming for your team.

Sales and finance teams are using our new suggested account match feature to pair hundreds and thousands of QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. With Breadwinner in your corner, you do not need to feel daunted by this task. After you’ve scrolled through a few of the suggested matches, you can choose to accept all matches and speed up the process.

At Breadwinner, the team is continuously working to push the functionality of their QuickBooks Salesforce integration further. The introduction of the new suggested account match feature is just one example of their efforts in creating a robust integration between the two systems. They have built a highly practical integration that successfully leverages automation to create unified workflows for sales and finance teams.

Take Breadwinner for a test drive with a free trial today, or book a demo with their team.

How to prepare for Salesforce certification?

By Aarathy Unnikrishnan

On March 2, 2022

In Post

About the author: Aarathy Unnikrishnan has started her career as an office administrator, where she got praised for her interpersonal and analytical skills that opened the door for her career in Salesforce as Salesforce Administrator. Her enthusiasm and passion for this hot technology have moulded her as a Salesforce enthusiast over the years.

Salesforce is one the fastest growing cloud-based software companies in the world. Organisations of all sizes, be it small enterprises or fortune 500 companies, everyone confides in salesforce for their growth and marketing.

Now is the time for all you people excited and determined to become a salesforce certified professional. Salesforce is here to stay, and with time, the competition will go up above the peak. So, start preparing for your salesforce certification from today itself.

In this blog, you are going to go through a 5 step preparation guide on how to achieve the salesforce certification. So, without any more delay, let us get straight into the topic.

Here is the 5 step guide for you to get prepared for salesforce certification:

Know about the certification

Before applying for the certification and getting certified, you need to know what the exam is all about. However, only knowing the basic information would not be enough. You need to know about everything starting from its exam pattern to its mark division, detailed syllabus, tricks and tips and everything under the sun about salesforce certification.

Upskill to get certified

Being a salesforce professional means you have to have multiple skill sets. For example, salesforce is a CRM platform. Hence, your communication skills, persuasion technique and skill of dealing with complex matters must be on point to survive in the industry and make your place as an established professional. So, make upskilling one of the essential parts of your preparation journey.

Soak in all the free resources

There are a lot of free resources available on the internet for salesforce certification preparation. In the beginning, gather those resources and try to gain knowledge. You can find free resources available on YouTube in video format. On the other hand, there are a million written format resources available on google and the official salesforce site.

Get into an online course.

Get into an online course once you are confident about the salesforce certification and are ready to dive into deep preparation. Nowadays, online courses are the best way to learn something and are hands-on the most effective way of studying. You will have webinars, recorded live sessions, and a significant amount of study materials to complete the syllabus and whatnot. Getting salesforce certified will be easier for you if you join a course.

Have an accountability partner

Having an accountability partner to work together to get certified is one of the best preparation tips you can ever get. Just like group studies helped get answers to so many unknown questions and made studying fun. In the same way, an accountability partner to clear the salesforce certification exam will work wonders if you are determined to crack it. You can find an accountability partner in communities.

Make practice priority

You must have grown up hearing the quote, “practice makes a man perfect.” Well, let us tell you, this quote can not be any more true for salesforce certification preparation. Once you have the resources and study materials, all you need to do is practice and keep practising. The more you will practice the better your question-solving skills will increase. Get your hands on previous year questions if your syllabus is not revised and solve sample question papers.

Sit for mock tests

Self-assessment and practising sample question papers are the best but to get a reality check of where your preparation is actually standing, mock tests are necessary. When you are able to score well while solving the sample questions, start giving mock tests. It will really help you improve your salesforce certification knowledge.

By now you should be well prepared for your exam. We know for a fact that not everyone clears the salesforce certification on the first go but we also know that if you try hard and give your 100%, nobody can stop you from getting salesforce certified. Let’s do it! Follow these 7 steps guide and excel in your exam. Best of luck!

How you can use Sales Cloud Einstein to accelerate your sales team

By Lars Malmqvist

On February 8, 2022

In Post

About the author: Lars Malmqvist has spent the past 12 years working as an architect and CTO within the Salesforce ecosystem. For the past 5 years, he has been particularly focusing on advanced AI solutions. He has worked on over 40 Salesforce implementations, ranging from simple out-of-the-box scenarios to advanced, bespoke, multi-cloud solutions for large global brands. He is a 23x certified Salesforce CTA with degrees in computer science, mathematics, and technology management and an MBA from the University of Cambridge. Currently, he works as a senior manager at Accenture and is in the final stages of completing a PhD with a focus on deep learning.

Let’s be honest, there’s a reason why Salesforce is called Salesforce.

Making life easier for your sales reps, getting better info for your sales managers, and thereby closing more deals is likely to be one of the main reasons your organization adopted the platform in the first place. These days, where Salesforce is positioning itself to become the center of business IT, the Digital HQ from which your structure your workday and access all of your corporate apps, it is worth noting that for most organizations it all begins with sales.

As with the core CRM, so with the Einstein platform offerings. Sales Cloud Einstein is at this point in time one of the strongest and most mature products in the Einstein suite and it is true to Salesforce’s roots in delivering ways to level up your sales team’s performance.

In this blog post, we will go through the ways Sales Cloud Einstein enables you to reduce time on manual drudgery, target opportunities better, get better forecasting accuracy, and gather analytical insights.

How Sales Cloud Einstein helps sales teams

First, we will look at one of the topics closest to the hearts of sales reps: how to spend less time putting data into the CRM.

Spend less time on data entry

In my experience, there are few parts of the job that sales reps dislike more than keeping data up to date and accurate in the CRM. Unfortunately, the real value of a CRM boils down to having up to date and accurate data. Therefore, it’s not particularly surprising that one of the areas where Salesforce has applied AI is to automate some rather tedious data entry tasks that involve matching and keeping up to date emails, calendar events, and contacts between Salesforce and your email client. In a nutshell, that’s what Einstein Activity Capture and Automated Contacts do.

The features work by connecting your email provider – Office 365, Exchange, and Gmail are supported – to Salesforce and then automatically matching data from your email account to records in Salesforce. There is quite a bit of complexity involved in setting up the matching and avoiding any data privacy issues, but once configured, it more or less runs itself and ferries across the data from your email client to Salesforce and back.

Target the right leads and opportunities

Finding out what Leads and Opportunities to target and prioritize with limited sales resources is a perennial problem and most organizations have internal models and processes for making such assessments. Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring seeks to improve on these by applying machine learning to the historical data housed in your Salesforce org to give you a numeric score you can use for prioritization.

Effectively, you configure what data to consider both in terms of fields and by segmenting your Leads and Opportunities in meaningful ways and then set the algorithm loose to come up with a predictive model. Internally, Salesforce will run a model tournament of different machine learning models to come up with a best fit answer. Depending on your data that may be very good or less good.

One major limitation of these models is that they rely on all data being present in the object that you’re predicting. You can’t really aggregate data across objects in a meaningful way. But if you have solid historical data in your Lead and Opportunity objects these features can be winners.

Engage accounts and opportunities with better information

Better information about your accounts and opportunities leads to more deals won, at least in the big picture. Einstein Account Insights and Opportunity Insights are two features designed to give you better information, although in quite different ways.

Einstein Account Insights is effectively an AI-driven news analysis service. It finds and highlights articles related to your accounts from a selection of sources and aggregates these into thematic insights such as whether the company you are dealing with is expanding or contracting. That way you can stay on top of the trends affecting your accounts without having to put in a lot of effort.

Einstein Opportunity Insights on the other hand tries to give you actionable insights about specific opportunities. These come in three kinds:

Deal Predictions that tell you whether or not you are likely to win a deal and whether it will be on time
Follow-Up Reminders that pop up if there haven’t been any recent communications related to an opportunity
Key Moments which appear when something out of the ordinary happens on the opportunity

There isn’t much you can configure for the two insights features, so they will either work for you or they won’t. In general, that will depend on the amount and quality of data in your org as well as the extent to which your accounts appear in mainstream media.

Forecast with greater accuracy

Forecasting accuracy is another problem, which tends to recur with staunch regularity across organizations of all shapes and sizes. Einstein Forecasting builds on top of normal collaborative forecasting by adding predictions for what deals will close by period of time based on a machine learning model that takes into account both historical data on opportunities and the tendencies of the sales reps in the company such as whether they tend to over or understate their projections.

This is the feature that will likely be of least use to most organizations as it is unlikely that a basic machine learning model can really outperform existing forecasting processes in most larger organizations. For smaller outfits, the equation might be different. But you would have to trial it and see.

Get insights in the sales process at all levels

The Sales Analytics app that comes with Sales Cloud Einstein is less AI and more traditional analytics, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t quite good. In effect, you get a range of general-purpose dashboards as well as role specific ones that answer common questions one might have as a sales rep, sales manager, or sales operations professional. There are also a set of reports for reporting on how well the various Sales Cloud Einstein features are performing in your particular org.

All in all, Sales Cloud Einstein is a compelling featureset if you are a heavyweight Sales Cloud user with a good amount of historical data. If you would like to learn more about architecting, designing, and implementing solutions with Sales Cloud Einstein and the rest of the Einstein platform, I recommend getting a hold of my book Architecting AI Solutions on Salesforce, which covers these topics in depth.

API-led integration basics with Mulesoft

By Sachin Kumar

On December 28, 2021

In Post

This guest post has been delivered by Sachin Kumar, who works as a content writer in HKR Training and have a good experience in handling technical content writing and aspire to learn new things to grow professionally. He’s an expertise in delivering content on the market demanding technologies like ServiceNow, Mulesoft, cyber security, Robotic process automation and more.

This blog is intended to provide you with the basic API integration skills with MuleSoft. If you’re new to MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform or curious about the latest product developments, then learn how to connect cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments by connecting apps, data, and devices.

Get this MuleSoft Training course which aids you in mastering the skills of MuleSoft.

According to Forrester, for every $1 spent on MuleSoft today, you will receive $5.45 in return over the next three years.

You will be learning the below topics which are covered to understand the API integration with MuleSoft:

Designing and developing APIs and the integrations at the speed of light.
Using a single runtime for On-premises and any cloud deployment.
Managing and gaining visibility in real-time and fast troubleshooting with one interface.
Ensuring threat protection and automated security at every layer.

1) Designing and Developing APIs and the integrations at the speed of light

Anypoint Creation CenterTM provides you with the tools you require to create connectors, implement application and data flows, and make API designing, reusing, and testing much easier.

Specifications for API design

Employing a web-based interface, make and document APIs. With OAS/RAML, you can quickly create API specs. Testing and validating APIs using a mocking service.

Develop integration flows

Use a visual interface for moving, synchronizing, or modifying data. With an automapper of machine learning, using the auto-populated assets for transforming data.

Connecting the APIs and the integrations

APIs and the integrations should be built, tested, and debugged using graphs or XML. complex data is transformed and mapped, and custom connectors are developed.

What does the Design Center of Anypoint allow you to do?

Rapid APIs Designing

Simply define the appropriate reply for a resource in the web-based editor to produce API specs in RAML or OAS. Security schemas and Data models can be reused as API pieces, and documentation can be produced at the same time. With a simple click, you will be publishing your APIs to an Anypoint Exchange for others to explore and reuse.

Connecting any system

Use a desktop IDE or web interface to connect systems. Use pre-built connectors or use our SDK to create your own. When dealing with visual errors, you can find and repair issues while designing.

Real-time mapping of your data

With DataWeave, our expression language, you can be querying, normalizing, and transforming any type or data amount in real-time. Use machine learning-dependent suggestions to speed up data mapping.

Testing and deploying applications

Use MUnit for testing integrations, mule’s unit, and integration testing framework. In CI/CD environments or locally, automate the tests. Using a single click deploy the applications.

2) Using a single runtime for On-premises and any cloud deployment

The deployment of the Mule application is driven by two key factors:

An instance of the Mule runtime engine.
Deployment of Mule applications to that instance of a Mule.

When you deploy apps to Anypoint Runtime Fabric or CloudHub, the Mule runtime engine instances required to run the applications are handled by these services.

You are responsible for installing and configuring the Mule runtime engine instances that execute your Mule applications when you deploy them on-premises. Since you have complete control over the on-premises instance (unlike Runtime Fabric deployments or CloudHub), you must be aware of the features unique to on-premises deployments.

Using One Mule Instance To Run Multiple Applications

Mule runtime engine can execute several apps from a single instance, allowing you to use the same namespaces in different applications without colliding or sharing information, which has further benefits such as:

A complicated application can be broken down into numerous Mule applications, each with its logic, and then deployed in a single Mule instance.
Domains allow you to exchange configurations across several applications.
Applications can rely on different versions of a library.
The same instance of a Mule can run multiple application versions.

3) Managing and gaining visibility in real-time and fast troubleshooting with one interface.

Comprehend your application network health with full API management lifecycle and governance of enterprise integration. Use API gateways for access controlling and unlocking data using custom or pre-built policies.

Reduce mean resolution time with a single view of the management of application performance, logging, and metrics for business operations. Monitor business-critical initiatives with customized dashboards, API functional testing, and alerts.

Using one platform for Governing the full API lifecycle

From development to retirement, handle APIs with the ease of a product that is unified.

Automate the production of API proxies or the deployment of gateways.
Configure pre-built or custom policies, and change them at runtime without downtime
External Identity Providers and Tiered SLAs are used to customize access.

Most Efficient Monitoring And Troubleshooting Deployments

To achieve efficiency and uptime needs, get a holistic view of your APIs and integrations.

Using real-time alerts for detecting the issues proactively.
Correlate warning indications to determine the root cause.
To limit the impact of outages, disclose hidden dependencies inside deployments.

Analyzing The Metrics Across Every Deployment

Unveiling the deeper insights for supporting your business.

Using customized dashboards for translating IT metrics into business KPIs.
Using the detailed consumer metrics for enhancing the API engagement.
Capturing the trends via detailed, visual reports.

4) Ensuring Threat Protection And Automated Security At Every Layer

Anypoint SecurityTM protects your APIs and integrations with sophisticated defense. Protect and regulate your application network by protecting critical data, stopping threats at the edge, and automatically enforcing security best practices.

Establishing the smart and secure perimeters

Defining the Edge gateways with threat-blocking capabilities that harden overtime via feedback loops.

Protect sensitive data

Protect sensitive data in transit by automatically detecting and tokenizing it.

Embed security by default

Enforce global policies, use best practices throughout the API lifecycle, and keep an eye on compliance.

What can Anypoint Security do for you?

Edge security

Create layers of defense with enterprise-grade Edge gateways that can be quickly configured. Using policy-driven choke points that can be established in minutes, protect against denial of service (DoS), content, and OWASP Top 10 threats.

Automatic hardening

Integrate Edge and API gateways to automatically detect API threats, escalate them to a perimeter, and update protections to remove vulnerabilities. Improve security by implementing a learning system that adapts to new threats.

Detection of sensitive information (coming soon)

Receive notifications when API payloads contain sensitive data like PII, PHI, or credit card information. With prebuilt monitoring dashboards, you can streamline governance and auditing.

Automatic tokenization

With a simple, format-preserving tokenization solution that secures sensitive data while enabling downstream dependencies, you can meet compliance requirements faster.

Policy Automation

Ensure that policies are followed consistently across all environments, check for compliance with policies that have been deployed, and empower API owners to detect out-of-process changes and address violations, bridging the gap between DevOps and security teams.

Access Standardisation

Establish standard authorization and authentication API patterns and make them available as fragments to encourage reuse rather than building new, potentially insecure code.

Conclusion:

In this blog, we have learned features like how to design and develop APIs and integrations quickly, deployments of any cloud and on-premises with a single run-time, quick troubleshooting and real-time visibility management with one interface, and threat protection and automated security at each layer with Mulesoft.

Request Loop: there’s a new free app in (AppExchange) town

By Enrico Murru

On November 25, 2021

In Post

A new AppExchange app by WebResults (Engineering Group)

Question: What happens if you put a messy Salesforce MVP in charge of the Innovation Team of WebResults?

Answer: a lot of mess for sure, but also funny stuff!

TL;DR Request Loop is a new free AppExchange app delivered by the Innovation Team from WebResults to help in Salesforce callouts and callins development/debugging.

What is WebResults’ Innovation Team?

I work in WebResults since 2009, when I first moved my steps into the Salesforce world, starting from junior developer till my current position as “Salesforce Solutions” Unit Manager (soon to be called “Innovation Team”).

We are a team of passionate Salesforce professionals who struggle to keep up with the technological changes in the Salesforce ecosystem and try to move our company forward…we are a sort of R&D team.

As far as I’ve seen during the past years, this is not obvious for a big company, whose people are focused on the delivery, to keep a group of people focused on innovation and research…that’s why I’m really happy to do this job!

What do we do?

Professional services: sometimes we are called as firefighters by our colleagues when needed to help with difficult tasks or technical issues
Innovation tours: we plan meetings with our customers to show off new features or products
Knowledge Hub: we try to keep track of diverse Salesforce related knowledge docs and best practices for the benefit of all WebResults
Evangelization: we struggle to keep the company technologically engaged and updated
Creative app development: is there a problem we have solved in a creative way or that can “cross-project” benefit? let’s package it and create a new app for the whole company and Salesforce Ohana!

Awesome, huh?

What’s Request Loop?

Request Loop has been built to:

detect SOAP callouts request body (as you know, Salesforce doesn’t let you get the full body of an Apex SOAP request)
simulate REST/SOAP callouts from within Salesforce boundaries (i.e. coming from Salesforce IPs)
create a bin that can receive callins from an external system within Salesforce bounds in order to get what’s going on (again, it’s difficult to debug an Apex SOAP callin)
Keep everything within Salesforce boundaries (it shoulnd’t be done, but often sandboxes use real data and it’s not good to send business data in unsecure/untrusted clouds)

Request Loop is a free tool meant for developers who want to debug webservice communications both inbound and outbound. This tool has been imagined as a quick disposal package that anyone can install in a DE org or a sandbox (even production but it is unlikely and not suggested to debug directly in production), use until necessary and then uninstall to clean up everything.

This package is composed by 2 features:

Request Bin: an inbound Apex webservice that can receive any supported HTTP call (REST or SOAP) and log it for further analysis. This tool can also simulate the response of a valid service (just like the famous Requstb.in online service). Imagine you need to get the SOAP payload of an Apex webservice: no Salesforce tool is available for this porpoise and with Request Loop you can inspect the content message on the fly safely.
Request Client: a tool to send outbound callouts from Salesforce to outside systems. This tool can be used to simulate an external system call from within Salesforce to test a service without the need of a complete Apex implementation.

For a detailed configuration guide, have a look at the user manual on the AppExchange listing page.

Request Bin

A Request Bin is simply a record on the Request Bin object definition which handles:

Request bin’s name (which identifies the service URL to point your external system to)
A valid HTTP response code
Optional response headers
Optional response body

Once you have exposed your bin to the world (by calling the Apex webservice with a valid session token or publishing it inside a public community/site) you can call it from an external system and analyze/debug the requests stored on Request records (request bodies are stored on Files attached to the Request record).

Easy as 1-2-3 or a.b.c…you tell me!

Request Client

Now that we have a configured Request Bin that can take any incoming request, we’ll have a look at the Request Client too that can generate a callout by hand. Click on the Home tab of the Request Loop app:

You can configure:

Supported HTTP method (Salesforce supports a sub-set of HTTP methods, GET / PATCH / PUT / POST / DELETE)
Request URL, which helps you with an autocomplete behavior for Named Credentials, otherwise you can set your own custom URL (remember to add the Remote Site configuration to enable that specific endpoint)
Request headers, with an autocomplete features for the main standard headers (the “Content-Type” header has an autocomplete behavior for the value as well, showing the main standard content types)
the Request body

Click the Send button and you’ll get response’s body and headers:

Use the Download Body link to download a file with the response body on it.

Finally using the Recent Requests tab you can get a list of the last requests done and send them again (info are stored on the local storage):

List of recent requests made through the Request Client

What are you waiting?

It’s free, useful, safe and easy to install, take a tour and tell us what you think and drop a quick review on the AppExchange!

From WebResults
for the Salesforce Ohana with 💙

Empower Salesforce Path with Welkin’s Customizable Path

By Vladimir Gubanovich

On November 17, 2021

In Post

Vladimir Gubanovich is the Head of Product at The Welkin Suite and Head of Salesforce Development Department at Polytech Software. He’s been working with the Salesforce platform and The Welkin Suite for many years already and knows their strengths and bottlenecks first hand.

Nowadays, Salesforce is probably the most sought-after platform providing CRM service. The products it offers help companies make their performance more productive, increasing customer satisfaction and bringing value to their business. Salesforce allows customizing the already existing applications according to user needs and this is a big plus. But on the other hand, customizing can take a lot of effort, not to mention time. What is more, it can cause mix-ups if you have to create dozens of validation rules, for example.

These inconveniences are possible to avoid using Welkin’s Customizable Path as it provides the user with out-of-the-box features standard Salesforce Path doesn’t have.

To make more developers or Salesforce users aware of this I have decided to share this information with you.

Real-life case study

Not long ago, we were contacted by a customer who was using the Salesforce platform for their sales processes. These processes involved six different teams that changed each other’s status from time to time, although they were not supposed to. This made it necessary to restrict each transition to certain profiles and/or roles. Unfortunately, Salesforce doesn’t provide a built-in feature that can limit access to status changes. After fruitless attempts to enforce the limitations with numerous validation rules, the customer gave up and asked us for help.

To solve this problem, we offered him to try Welkin’s Customizable Path that has this feature out of the box. The only thing he should have done was to open Path configuration, switch to the Transitions tab, and click on the “Configuration” for transition permissions. It took him significantly less time and effort to fully configure Welkin’s Customizable Path and grant proper permissions than to customize everything from scratch.

As you can see no coding skills are needed. Everything can be done in a well-understandable standard Salesforce UI.

Some more advantages of using Welkin’s Customizable Path

Creating conditionally required fields without any validation rules

Status change restriction isn’t the only feature of Welkin’s Customizable Path that can make your life much easier. Another area where Welkin IDE can be pretty useful is conditionally required fields. In Salesforce, you can’t create conditionally required fields without writing validation rules. There is no need to mention all the inconveniences connected with that.

Welkin’s Customizable Path solves this problem simply and easily. With its help, you can configure transition screens with as many relevant fields as you need. Besides, Welkin’s Customizable Path also provides a simple way to create screens for each transition, including lists of optional and mandatory fields to be filled; guidance; building a 2-step status change with the 2nd screen that has fields that are shown or hidden depending on the values in the fields from the 1st screen.

Creating an unlimited number of fields

Salesforce Path provides only 5 key fields. It may seem not enough for users, no matter how hard they try to focus on the truly key fields.

In Welkin’s Customizable Path you can create as many fields as you need. This feature is available out of the box.

Building stage transition diagram

To be as productive as possible, businesses split their processes into stages. To make them clear, they use stage transition diagrams that can be quite complicated and hard to remember. Welkin’s Customizable Path facilitates this process significantly. Users should locate their “source” status in the first column and click on the “Add Transition” button nearby, adding all allowed transitions between statuses one by one. No other tool is needed for that. After transitions are configured, the allowed transitions will become highlighted and clickable, while transitions that are not available will be disabled. As a result, users will know in advance what they’re supposed to do next.

Improving Salesforce Approvals

Salesforce Approvals is a great tool that can be used, for example, to approve or reject financial requests as well as to forward them to the appropriate manager within a company. There is only one drawback: users have to check by themselves if a record is locked as a part of an Approval process.

In Welkin’s Customizable Path, the Path component automatically detects if a record is locked and places it in the most important part of a record page – in the Path. It allows users to notice it at once.

So what is Welkin’s Customizable Path? It’s a powerful tool that can be used instead of standard Salesforce Path, providing the user with out-of-the-box features standard Salesforce Path doesn’t have.

The 5 listed above solutions are just a few of the many Welkin’s Customizable Path can offer his customers. To find out more click https://insights.welkinsuite.com/customizable-path-for-salesforce.

Integrating Salesforce and Accounting Software

By Enrico Murru

On October 18, 2021

In Post

This guest post is powered by Breadwinner Integrations, Inc. the leading integration software between Salesforce and accounting systems, including NetSuite, QuickBooks, andXero, as well as major payment processors such as Stripe, Braintree, and Square.

Users of Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) software who are looking to integrate that program with accounting software, like NetSuite, have several options in the marketplace. Some are dedicated integration software for this purpose, while others are cloud computing or automation platforms.

Integration platforms

Boomi – Operates in integration platforms as a service (iPaaS) format, and also offers data management and preparation services. Boomi has solutions geared to specific applications of NetSuite and Salesforce.
Celigo – Operates in iPaaS format. Connects finance applications with enterprise resource planning to lower operating costs and reduce outstanding sales receipts.
DBSync – Integrates QuickBooks with sales and accounting departments. Connects with CRM systems and databases to load and extract data for integration with accounting.

Automation and cloud platforms

FinancialForce – Offers a cloud accounting solution native to Salesforce. Can cash process, manage revenue, and produce real-time financial analysis and audit trails.
Workato – Focuses on integrating Salesforce products with several other applications, including NetSuite, Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP.

Aside from the platforms mentioned above, Breadwinner, an integration software provider, offers a solution for linking the NetSuite corporate inventory, financials, and enterprise planning software suite with Salesforce.

Breadwinner also has other integrations to connect Salesforce with accounting programs such as QuickBooks and payment processors such as Stripe, Square, and Braintree.

How does Breadwinner integrate software?

Breadwinner’s solutions focus on integrating Salesforce with finance software and are experts in this field. Breadwinner for NetSuite has a guided invoice creation feature that can generate a NetSuite invoice out of an opportunity with just a few clicks. This is emblematic of its simplicity.

Other hallmarks of Breadwinner’s ease of use are:

Configuration wizard – Displays of NetSuite objects and Salesforce fields are intuitively mapped, making Breadwinner easy to navigate for its users.
Rapid installation – Breadwinner is built on the Salesforce platform, so a user can see NetSuite records in Salesforce within an hour of installation.
Two-way data transfer – Breadwinner can transfer enriched data from Salesforce into NetSuite for processing, then back into Salesforce immediately.

Breadwinner is efficient and fast at aligning internal teams. It syncs with Salesforce on a per-subsidiary basis when a company has multiple subsidiaries. It also works great with existing integration (iPaaS) tools in Read-Only or Read-Write modes, putting enriched data next to data and systems already in place.

Record Creation Wizard

Integrating Salesforce with your finance software using Breadwinner allows users to quickly generate records such as invoices, estimates, and sales orders from within Salesforce, speeding up payment operations. Breadwinner has a Record Creation Wizard to guide users through this. The new NetSuite records the solution creates are immediately integrated into Salesforce. Your company’s sales and support teams can track NetSuite invoices in Salesforce, including overdue status, to collect payments faster.

Data Accessibility

Breadwinner aligns corporate teams so that they may all access the same common records, including sales and finance data. It does this regardless of the location of the data or the device being used to access that data. This prevents organizational silos and makes live, accurate data available to the right users.

Global API

No matter who creates new NetSuite customer records in Salesforce, these are instantly updated in both systems. Breadwinner’s Global API makes creating and editing NetSuite records easy and with flexibility. It allows users to create and update NetSuite customers and records, such as estimates and sales orders, from within Salesforce, saving staff time and increasing data accuracy.

Compare and contrast

Knowing how Breadwinner works and performs its integration functions for NetSuite and Salesforce lets you see the solution in the context of what is available in the marketplace.

As discussed, there are many benefits of integrating Salesforce with accounting software, particularly NetSuite. Choosing one that is seamless and user-friendly will undoubtedly making your company’s financial operations much easier.

📢 #ORGanizer for #Salesforce announcement 👂

By Enrico Murru

On October 8, 2021

In Post

Few days ago ORGanizer for Salesforce turned 5. 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂

It’s been an amazing journey through the Salesforce Ohana, inspiring both professionaly and personally 💙🌈

In these 5 years I was the “one man company” behind ORGanizer, doing design, development, support, marketing, sales, PR… 🤯🤯🤯

This is not my primary job, it wass meant to be my hobby occupation, so you can understand that it’s become really stressfull to keep the pace 😓

The time has come to move on a brand new project and contribute on the Salesforce Ohana in a brand-new way. 🎁

Recently I published a new adv. on the ORGanizer that states:

📣📣 ORGanizer for Salesforce is looking for a new Trailblazer home 🏡💙

Yes guys, I’m looking for a virtuous #trailblazer company that wants to take ORGanizer by hand and make it do the next step with a more structured vision and business power! 💪💪💪

With tears in my eyes, I believe that my little child needs to spread its wings and fly away 🦅

In the past 5 years I reached many goals that I thought unreachable:

48000 weekly users 👨‍👩‍👨‍👨‍ (and new thousands counting month after month)
200+ downloads a day 💻 (and counting day after day)
Published in 3 stores (Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons and Microsoft Edge Add-ons) 🏪🏪🏪
Published on the #AppExchange with 50+ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews
200+ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews on the Chrome Web Store
100+ releases 🚛
8M+ logins executed in the last 12 months 🛩
1.2M+ query executed in the last 12 months 🔭
12M+ popup openings 📃
Tens of spontaneous online reviews 🤙

👉 Contact me if you re interested in the acquisition: https://organizer.solutions/newowner.html or simply help me spread the word! 🌍🤗

⚠ No scam companies please (and I assure you I’m being contacted by several of them…)

The big burnout – How COVID-19 is accelerating the Salesforce skills gap

By Nabila Salem

On September 15, 2021

In Post

Nabila Salem is on the Board of Tenth Revolution Group, and as President of Revolent Group is responsible for leading on the creation of talent, specialising in Salesforce and AWS. With over 15 years of experience in professional services, tech recruitment and marketing in the UK and USA, Nabila was the first and youngest female to be appointed to VP at the FTSE 250 company she used to work for. She is passionate about creating talent and plays an active role in encouraging, supporting and promoting diversity in the workplace. Nabila was recognised in Management Today’s 35 Women Under 35 List 2019, and most recently in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Tech.

Recent research from the 2021 Mason Frank Salesforce Salary Survey shows that the acceleration of digital transformation triggered by COVID-19 is putting increased pressure on workers, creating the perfect conditions for employee burnout and mass exodus from the workforce. So what should organisations be doing to address this alarming trend, head on?

The data shows that, prior to the pandemic, only 27% of professionals regularly worked outside of their contracted hours. Post-pandemic, this number has rapidly grown to 42%.

It also shows how the number of employees who had never worked outside of their contracted hours is shrinking quickly, going from 10.5% prior to the pandemic, to just 7.28% post-pandemic.

The boom in demand for tech has seen many companies prosper (41% of companies were hiring new IT staff during the pandemic, with a further 62% planning to add more before 2022). But, without intervention, the added pressure on existing employees may result in increased burnout and growing attrition rates.

Why the Salesforce skills gap matters

These new statistics should be of great concern for our sector, particularly for Salesforce stakeholders. As far back as 2018 tech already had the highest turnover rates of any industry, at a staggering 13.2%, so anything that looks to grow that number is a real problem.

As the tech skills gap grows, and experienced but overworked employees leave the sector, the war for talent will get much worse. Businesses of all sizes, not just the small ones, will struggle to afford the people they need to help them thrive.

Of course, the consequences of the skills gap going unfilled are already well documented. The Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute’s Skills Gap Study cautioned of economic output losses in the US of up to $454 billion by 2028 if the skills gap is not closed. And, according to Airswift, the US talent crunch is currently at a 10 year high, which could cost up to $162 billion if unresolved.

How to close the Salesforce skills gap

As a talent creation organization that specializes in creating net new Salesforce and AWS talent, we believe there are measures that can be taken to help prevent the impact of the growing skills gap, and even start to close it.

The first thing you have to realize is no one company or organization can do this alone. It will take a concerted effort from individual organizations, software providers such Salesforce, and talent creation companies such as ourselves.

To do this, you have to work the problem from both ends. First and foremost, we need to shrink our attrition rates as a sector, which means reducing things like employee dissatisfaction, burnout, and start placing a high value on employee wellbeing.

At the same time, organizations need to rely less on traditional hiring methods and accept more candidates from non-traditional career paths. Not every employee needs to be an Ivy League grad!

Finally, we need to improve diversity within our sector, and allow more people from different backgrounds to enter, progress, and stay within tech, if we have any hope of bringing in new talent at the scale we need to solve the skills gap.

Closing the skills gap with strategic diversity initiatives

Historically as a sector, we have employed a very narrow approach to our hiring. We’ve over-relied on traditional hiring positives like grades expected or universities attended. And it shows – our sector has the worst diversity stats of almost any industry.

Not every Salesforce candidate has to be a STEM graduate and, if we only look for these people, we’ll never close the gap. People who have self-taught, upskilled, or gained experience but not qualifications are just as valuable, professionally speaking, as the ‘more traditional’ applicant.

Especially when you consider how Salesforce in particular is highly accessible through non-traditional pathways (with Trailhead, anyone can learn Salesforce), only taking on STEM grads seems unnecessarily reductive.

Beyond this, we also need to look at our processes for acquisition. In particular, we need to examine the things that stop us bringing on a more diverse range of candidates. To do this, businesses need to rethink their workforce planning strategies. While traditional recruitment channels are great for some hires, they should not be relied on exclusively. Instead, look to work with suppliers who have a focus on diversity and inclusion and broaden the range of places you source talent from, be it returners programmes, apprenticeships, or talent creation companies like Revolent.

Ultimately, we cannot let burnout deplete our sector of the valuable employees that we already have. As a collective, we need to support our existing talent and focus on closing the skills gap, in order to relieve pressure and guarantee a healthy, future-proofed pipeline of skilled workers.

ABOUT REVOLENT GROUP

Revolent Group, a division of Tenth Revolution Group, specializes in creating talent that can thrive within niche technology markets, including Salesforce and AWS. We recruit, cross-train, place and develop talent for those ecosystems, fuelling the market with the next generation of certified professionals in cloud technology. With hubs in Australia, the US, UK, and Canada, Revolent offers a truly global solution to the lack of talent in the industry.

For more information, visit: www.revolentgroup.com