Continua il racconto sul quando, come e perchè Enrico ha partorito l’idea dell’ORGanizer 🤓 (se non l’hai ancora fatto, ascolta l’episodio precedente 🔙).
In questo parte tratteremo anche il tema del fallimento 😒 (citando il lavoro di Francesca Corrado) e su come esso sia, a differenza di come si possa pensare e solo se sfruttato nel modo corretto, una fonte importante di stimoli per migliorarsi e andare avanti 🏃♂️.
Buon ascolto 👂!
Volete aiutarci a riattivare la Ohana Community d’Italia? Entrate nel workspace Slack e facciamo community!
Link alle risorse:
Modern Wisdom – https://chriswillx.com/podcast/Lean startup
Partire Leggeri (Erik Ries) – https://amzn.to/3HTsWVM
Fallimento è rivoluzione (Francesca Corrado) – https://amzn.to/48dU8Jq
📣 It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that ORGanizer Connector has successfully passed the AppExchange security review and it will soon be publicly listedit’s just been publicly listed!
What’s ORGanizer Connector?
ORGanizer Connector is a free AppExchange app that can be freely installed on any org type (production, sandbox or developer edition).
The app usage is really simple:
manually create Backup records that contains one or more credentials (Backup Items) whose secrets (password and token) are encrypted with a key stored in the main Backup record (which only who has access to the record can get)
massively import ORGanizer for Salesforce backups to automatically create Backup records using ORGanizer for Salesforce backup files
Each Backup can be shared using Salesforce standard sharing model, so org users can see only the record they are allowed to access and nothing more (we suggest a Private sharing model extended with sharing rules or manual sharing)
The package exposes a couple of REST APIs to let external applications integrate
By having access to a Backup record, you can use the Send Secret by Email button to receive the encryption secret by mail: this secret will be used to decrypt the secrets using the Reveal Password & Token button on the Backup Item record or using the ORGanizer for Salesforce native integration (for Full PRO and Team users only), or creating your own integration following the Github repo example
Is it really free?
The app is absolutely free 👌
If you want to use the ORGanizer for Salesforce native integration you need a Full PROor Team license, though, but for companies it can be a life saver!
Open the Options page (right click on ORGanizer icon and select Options)
Select the Import/Export tab
In the ORGanizer Connector (PRO) section select a connection (i.e. a login already stored on ORGanizer that lets you login to the org where ORGanizer Connector is installed…I suggest using an OAuth login)
Provided org can be a production org, a sandbox org or a Developer Edition org, no limitations!
Select a Backup record and click the Get Backup button
Remember: you need to get the Backup’s Secret using the Send Secret by Email button on the Backup record
Select the logins you want to be loaded into ORGanizer for Salesforce extension
Select a login group already on your extension or create a new one and click the Import Logins button
If you import a login that is already on ORGanizer (username is the unique key) the login will simply be updated with the new passoword and token
Have a look at the video below to have a glimpse of how simple is ORGanizer for Salesforce’s Connector user experience:
When will ORGanizer Connector be available to install from AppExchange?
UPDATE: The package has just been listed and is available from this 🔗 AppExchangelink.
We hope to be ready to publish the listing within Christmas 2022 alogn with an updated version of ORGanizer for Salesforce extension that will enable the native integration for PRO users.
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.
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;DRRequest 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!
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.
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
Request Bin configuration
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:
Request Client example configuration
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
Request Body example
Click the Send button and you’ll get response’s body and headers:
Response bodyResponse 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
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.
Dario is senior consultant and project manager @ TEN,the first Salesforce italian partner. Totally in love with Salesforce from 2013, he achieved 9 certifications so far and an extensive experience on projects’ implementation. Based in Milan, he’s passionate about Formula 1 and basketball.
Duplicate management on crm is always a hot topic during a Salesforce implementation. Data is often stored in different silos like your ERP, E-commerce, Marketing tool.
When you migrate customer data from different sources in your Salesforce org, there are a lot of options out there to help on duplicate issues. One of the best ways is to implement a SSOT (Single Source of Truth) with Salesforce Customer 360 or an MDM tool, but this option could affect the budget.
In this article you can read one of the less expensive ways to find and merge duplicates in Salesforce.
Standard Duplicate Management
Duplicate management in Salesforce is a real time process that let you block during creation of new leads, accounts and contacts or alert and report on potential duplicates.It’s included in your Salesforce license and implementation is divided in simple steps:
Create a matching Rule
Select the object:
Give a name and choose fields to consider for looking duplicates (example account name, Shipping street)
Identify object where find duplicates (example account)
Define Actions (allow/block), and record exclusion if you block no record creation will be allowed if you allow is possible to choose to alert users during creation and report on specific objects
Associate matching rule (up to 3) used to find duplicates (created in the step before) You can also decide to use standard matching rule provided by Salesforce
Hints
Matching rules are cross object, for example you can compare Accounts with Leads or with Contacts and vice versa.
If you choose alert on action you can report on duplicate object. This option let admin or super users to decide if merge or not potential duplicates manually and create tasks with process builder like a reminder.
Automate your merging activity
What should be a solution to automate merging? If you have a lot of records, merging manually could become time consuming.
An economic solution is an appexchange product: Cloudingo. The logic is similar to standard duplicate management, but this solution gives more powerful tools that let you automate the job!
These are the main steps.
Create Filter
Choose your Salesforce object (example Account)
Don’t worry about privacy, Cloudingo doesn’t store any data outside your Salesforce org.
Select Fields for match
Select fields to consider for looking duplicates (example Account name,Billing street)
Exclude records
Consider if you would like to exclude certain types of records from the dedupe process. For example partner account and finally save
Automation rules
Create a new rule, choose the object and give a name
Decide how merge records
Is where you define the specifics of how you want Cloudingo to merge your duplicate records.
Every rule created before needs to be associated with an automation.These are main steps to follow:
Master record selection
Decide in a group or record which is the master, for example most complete or first record.
Order groups by a date
If you have chosen a master definition that may results in more than one record having the same value, you can break ties using created or modify dates
Field value selection
Here you can define how all field values on the record must be populated.
For example the most common or the value from the newest record in the group.
You can also choose to override the master value or override only if fields are blank (master enrichment).
In the section specific field values, you can set rules for specific fields on the object. These rules will supersede any settings above.
This is useful for:
Modify logic on external ids fields, to preserve original values on master and avoid mix up keys.
Sum all record values together in a field to determine what value to set on the master.
The final section defines situations where Cloudingo will not merge records or the entire group of records.
Remember to assign the rule to the filter you want to apply!
Dedupe dashboard
You can create a lot of filters and apply the same automation rule or different to everyone. The result is easy to view in your dedupe dashboard:
Groups represent the number of groups of account duplicated
Matches are the single account potentially duplicated
Schedule automation
Here you decide when the rules have to run an merge duplicates with automation rules set before.
Before setting your schedules, consider to run filters in a correct time slot, for example when users activities are reduced and there are no automatic batch uploads from your middleware or from other systems.
Hints:
It’s strongly recommended to connect first your full sandbox environment and test dedupe results before running on production. You can easily migrate filters and automation from test to production in Cloudingo.
Be careful not to lose data
Your legacy systems may need to maintain data or keys for your duplicated account. If this is your case, you can consider implementing a simple trigger to get back accounts deleted by Cloudingo in your recycle bin and write it in a custom object.
Your records will maintain original values on fields and will be related to the master account.
Summary
In a parallel stream is very important to understand how to prevent duplicate generation, for example promoting customer registration instead of guest purchasing.
There aren’t magical hints for good working filters, it’s all related about data. If the original database is dirty, you can think about cleaning and enriching with external services before applying dedupe filters.
This guide is not a final solution, but can help you to understand and find a cheaper way to manage duplicate issues.
This guest post has been written by Stas Dunayev, a Managing Director and Valentina Naumenko, a Head of Marketing at Advanced Communities (London based consultancy), a highly innovative team devoted to Salesforce Community Cloud evangelisation.
I decided to give AC a spot on my Nerd At Work because I used their great product on a personal project regarding the Salesforce Ohana Italia, and what a better way to promote a product that is available for free for our Salesforce Ohana! (ed)
We are Advanced Communities and we specialise in Salesforce Community Cloud. We have lots of Community Cloud components on AppExchange and we would like to introduce our most popular component – AC Ideas.
The main point of our Community Ideas Component is to facilitate the Ideation process. In plain English, this means your customer or partner or even your own employee can create an Idea and other members of your customer/partner/employee community can then view, comment and, most importantly, vote for that Idea. After voting, you can see which Ideas are the most popular ones and decide whether to implement them or not.
The Ideation process can be employed by companies and organisations of all sizes and across all industries as an important part of product design.
To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need first and foremost to listen to your users as this allows you to succeed in both growing your business and retaining your existing customers. You might be familiar with the Ideation process already as Salesforce as a company uses Ideas extensively for its own products. On the well-known IdeaExchange site (https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaSearch), Salesforce users have created thousands of ideas suggesting improvements and missing features and collectively contributing to the success of new Salesforce releases. If Salesforce uses it, why can’t your company do the same?
Ideas Management used for Salesforce Community Cloud platform can provide fantastic benefits for any business: it allows firms to interact with clients as well as partners and to engage with their personnel within a community thus providing an opportunity to generate fresh ideas.
The Ideation process includes the following steps:
Generating and Gathering a great number of ideas from all your stakeholders that then can be filtered and selected into the brightest, most appropriate or most ingenious ones.
Reviewing. The status board enables you to easily review all submitted ideas and to reward your best contributors
Evaluating and Communicating keepsyour community audience informed about the ideas status updates.
AC Ideas, an Idea Management created by Advanced Communities, provides you with a complete set of tools at each stage of the Ideation process. AC Ideas can help you leverage the power of Community Cloud and crowdsource new ideas as well as collect employee feedback and provide valuable insights to help you grow your business.
By employing AC Ideas, you will be able to:
Understand your customer or partner needs.
Stay in touch with your employees.
Step beyond straightforward solutions and generate innovative ones.
Explore new directions which you may not have encountered before.
Ask the right questions to your stakeholders and listen to their answers.
Measure and quantify customers’ demand.
AC Ideas is a lightning solution developed for Salesforce Community Cloud which allows you to get invaluable feedback from your customers and to identify their pain points or missing features in your products and services. The ideation process can and should help you with planning and creating a roadmap for your products.
So let’s take a look at how AC Ideas works.
1. After installing the component and setup of its settings, your users can start generating new Ideas. To do this, they can login to community, go to the Ideas page and click ‘Post an Idea’ and fill in details – the key information about an idea: its title, categories and description.
Post an Idea Tab.Fill in all the required fields
2. Now a new idea is posted! For more efficient management of published ideas there is a list of useful features:
Comments and Votes give your community a voice and provide clarity on what matters most.
Comments and Votes
Votes Threshold: set up the vote threshold, e.g. after exceeding the set threshold, the Idea will automatically change its status from ‘New’ to ‘Accepted’ and the product manager will get notified of this via email.
Votes Threshold
3. And finally, you get a clear structure of your ideas, obtained by using a Categories Hierarchy, as well as Filters and Advanced Search, that allows you to organise your Ideas page in the most efficient way.
Categories Hierarchy, Filters and Advanced Search.
Since the component was launched on AppExchange it has been installed multiple times and is in use by thousands of companies and organisations. The main version is free and does not have any restrictions.
A paid Enterprise version is also available with lots of extra features and is in use by companies such as Australia Post, Mulesoft and Financial Force from this link.
This week’s AppExchange hero is Brandi Johson, marketing consultant at Cloud Coach, who is going to present us Cloud Coach Milestones, the ideal tool for simple task and project management on the Salesforce platform.
Brandi Johnson is a marketing consultant and certified Salesforce admin. She focuses on helping clients create effective marketing strategies and leverage the right marketing technology to meet their unique business needs.
Cloud Coach specializes in enterprise-class project, PSA & PPM software built for businesses that want to make strategic investments in their success. With our unique four-tier approach to project management solutions, as your business grows, Cloud Coach can grow with you. Learn more at CloudCoach.com.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everything you had to do at work was easy? Then they may not have to call it work!
As businesses grow, the challenges they face get more complex – especially when it comes to working with your team to accomplish your goals.
One critical example of this is new customer onboarding.
Whether you’re in SaaS, professional services, or manufacturing, having a streamlined customer onboarding program is vital to your success.
A strong customer onboarding program helps you increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Plus, it reduces the stress on your team as they’re moving through the process.
Let’s take a look at Serenity Software – a B2B SaaS company. They’ve nailed their sales process leveraging Salesforce. But once a new customer signs on, the wheels start to come off the process. Emails fly back and forth between the account executive and customer support team trying to track down the details needed and sharing status updates.
The customer success manager keeps shared spreadsheets for each of the clients that they’re working with.
Unfortunately, the team isn’t great about keeping them up-to-date with status updates – leading, of course – to more emails.
They also tried using Trello to keep track of their projects, but they had the same problems: nobody wanted to log into yet another system to see what they needed to work on or post status updates.
Finally, the customer success manager discovered Cloud Coach Milestones in the Salesforce AppExchange. In minutes, she was able to start organizing her customer onboarding projects and increasing collaboration with her team.
She started by creating a template from the spreadsheet she had been using. It was easy to add additional details to each task using subtasks, and assign the work out to her team. Plus, Cloud Coach Milestones put everything into an easy-to-use Gantt chart so she can see at a glance how long everything each tasks takes, and when things are running behind.
Serenity Software took streamlining their projects a step further, and leveraged Salesforce Process Builder to automate their project creation.
Now, whenever an opportunity is marked as Closed-Won, a new project is automatically created leveraging the template the Customer Success Manager created.
Those new projects are automatically connected to the account, so everyone has a 360° view of the customer and the project while its in-progress.
With Cloud Coach Milestones, Serenity Software streamlined their project management processes.
They have happier clients, faster onboarding, and better team communication.
Since all of their projects are in Salesforce where they’re already managing the rest of their business, they can see all of their important business KPIs on centralized dashboards.
Step 2: Check out the getting started videos. When you visit the Cloud Coach Milestones App, you’ll see a tab for “Getting Started.” These videos give you a great overview of Cloud Coach Milestones in action, and help you answer a ton of questions before they get asked.
Step 3: Create a project. Before you start sharing Cloud Coach Milestones with your team or customizing, I recommend that you build your own simple project. This helps you see how Cloud Coach Milestones works out of the box so you can make better choices about integration and customization.
Step 4: Customize your projects. Since Cloud Coach Milestones is built on the Salesforce platform, you can do a lot of customization on your projects to meet your business needs. For example, you may want a field to identify what type of project your team is doing for a client. Choices would be onboarding, maintenance, or special request. By adding a field on the project object, you can add this customization in minutes.
Step 5: Integrate with your existing objects and processes. Out of the box, Cloud Coach Milestones has lookup relationships to Opportunities, Accounts, Cases, and Campaigns. To associate projects with another object (custom or standard), create a new custom lookup field that points to the Cloud Coach Milestones object. Then, add the Milestones related list the page layout, and any projects you launch from that list will be visible on the project.
With Process Builder, you can automatically create projects from your business best-practice templates. The Cloud Coach Milestones Knowledge Base has details on how to autocreate projects with Cloud Coach Milestones and lots more.
Step 6: Assign permission sets to the users that need access to Cloud Coach Milestones. There is no limit to the number of users within your org who can use Milestones. Just like everything else about Cloud Coach Milestones, security was designed with simplicity in mind. There are only two permission sets you need to work with:
CCMI | Minimum User Permissions – grants a user access to all standard Milestones functionality and views. A user with this permission set assigned can create their own projects, view projects that aren’t their own, and manage their tasks and projects.
CCMI | Admin Permissions – permits exactly the same functionality but also includes the ability to load sample data. This is useful for Partners or Users who need to demo or test the product but do not want to spend time creating sample projects.
You’re never alone when you’re working with Cloud Coach Milestones. In addition to the extensive knowledge base that’s growing every week, we offer a free 30-minute onboarding consultation for new installs, and weekly open forum webinars to answer your questions.
Ready to get started with Cloud Coach Milestones? Just head over to the Salesforce AppExchange and click “Get It Now” to get started!
And it’s available on Salesforce Lightning and Classic!
This week’s new post is dedicated to a new AppExchange app, meant to help us in one of the most difficult and annoying tasks on every CRM: phone number validation.
Thanks to our week’s guest blogger Iain Clements.
Iain runs Cloud Ursa Ltd, a registered Salesforce partner based in the UK. In addition to helping customers configure Salesforce, we also make RingsTrue.
XConnect is a world renowned telecommunications routing specialist that provides the world’s leading global telephone number data and phone intelligence services. XConnect combines trusted information from hundreds of disparate global data sets and enables our customers to build the best communication services and applications using our unified data via simple, secure, scalable and real-time interfaces.
Managing data quality in Salesforce can be time-consuming.
Making sure that your customer records have correct telephone numbers is an endless task. However, authentic numbers lead to less failed call backs and lower contact centre costs. If that phone number belongs to a new potential customer, getting the right data also improves your business.
Can’t I just fix them with regular expressions?
Not easily! Unlike other global numbering schemes (eg IP addressing), Telephone Numbers have evolved organically, (and not necessarily logically). Using Regular Expressions (REGEX) means creating a set of rules, to take a string of information and ‘reformat’ that information into something else.
But what are these rules for Telephone Numbers?
Is the number in national or international format?
Does it include the national dialling code (eg 0)?
Does it include a country code ? How many digits is that country code?
Is the country code valid?
Does the remaining number have the correct number of digits for that country code ?
Is the National number prefix valid for that country?
So what’s the answer?
Well, we’re biased of course but we think our app RingsTrue is a huge time saver for this work.
RingsTrue powered by Xconnect brings a wide range of number checking functionality to your Salesforce environment and tells you if your telephone numbers are authentic or not. It’ll do the heavy lifting of formatting, validating, and actively testing the telephone number for every contact in your database.
Using RingsTrue, powered by XConnect, you will be able to:
Identify which telephone numbers in your CRM are Authentic and whether an authentic telephone number is a mobile number, fixed line number, or some other telephone number type.
Check which of the authentic telephone numbers is known to be In-Service with telecommunications provider.
Discover additional information about the capabilities and services supported by the end-uses devices, as well additional data made available by the mobile service provider.
Here we are in the next Salesforce app guest post.
Skivia is a great solution for Data warehouse in the cloud, with tens of integrations and connectors to integrate, back up, access, and manage your cloud data
with an all-in-one cloud service. With Skivia service you have to think less about where to put all your data (from all your data sources on the cloud) to concentrate on analysis.
Skyvia is not an AppExchange app but it’s an amazing service that fully deserves to be mentioned in one of the best services out there to work with Salesforce data.
The guest blogger
Jacob Martin is crazy about all stuff connected with coding, particularly all Hi-tech ones, such as Cloud computing, Big-Data, BI tools and CRMs in the broader sense.
He is a cloud engineer at Skyvia – the universal cloud data platform for no coding data integration, backup, management, and access.
With the powerful data analysis features and low storage costs of cloud data warehouse services, loading data from cloud applications to data warehouses becomes a very common task. For example, you may want to get your cloud data to a database and then use some BI tool, such as Looker, Tableau, or chart.io, or just to store your historical cloud data in a database for archiving or compliance purposes.
In this article I will describe a way how to load data from Salesforce to Amazon Redshift with almost no efforts using Skyvia service. It is a cloud data platform for data integration, backup, management and access, which can perform this task with no coding and very little configuration.
Replication Configuration in Just a Few Steps
Skyvia is a completely cloud solution that requires no local software except a web browser, and all actions in it are performed via web browser, in a convenient web GUI.
To replicate your data via service, first, you need to register on it. Creating an account is free, and you can try Skyvia within its free pricing plan that allows you to load up to 5000 records per month between cloud applications and databases.
After you create an account, on the Integrations page, click Create Now under Replication. A replication package editor page is opened.
Setting up Connections
In our example, we will use Amazon Redshift as a target database for replication. Note that you may need to configure your AWS security settings to allow access to your Amazon Redshift cluster from Skyvia’s IP – 40.118.246.204. This is necessary for Skyvia to be able to load Salesforce data into your Redshift database.
First, we select connection types in the Source and Target headers, as we want to etl Salesforce data to Amazon Redshift, will choose them respectively. Note that Skyvia also supports other data warehouses and relational databases, including Google BigQuery, Asure SQL DWH, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. The full list of supported data sources you can find here.
After this, we need to create the corresponding connections. For Salesforce, the service supports both Username/password and OAuth connections. With the latter option, your Salesforce credentials are not stored on the Skyvia server. You simply enter a connection name, log in to Salesforce and allow Skyvia access to your data.
For Redshift, you need to specify the corresponding connection parameters. Note that for replication you not only need to specify main parameters for connecting to Redshift itself.
You also need to click Advanced and specify parameters for connecting to Amazon S3 storage.
To improve the replication performance, Skyvia creates CSV files with Salesforce data, uploads them to Amazon S3, and uses Redshift COPY command to quickly import data.
Selecting Objects
After you connected to your Salesforce and database, everything is simple. You will see the list of your Salesforce objects and you just need to select check boxes for the objects that you need to copy. A convenient object search allows you to quickly find and select the necessary objects.
You can perform complete or partial replication. For each object you can edit task and exclude some fields or set up filters to copy only a part of the data.
Running Replication
For one-time data loading this is enough. Click Save, and then you may run your replication.
By default, Skyvia automatically creates tables with the corresponding structure in the database, and in some minutes (depending on the volume of your Salesforce data), you will have an exact copies of your Salesforce objects in your database.
Keeping Data Up-to-date
Simple copying of data is not the only feature of Skyvia’s replication. However, for business analysis tasks it’s better to have access to as fresh data as possible. This task can easily be solved using flexible scheduling settings and allows automatically keep your copy of the data always up-to-date.
You can schedule your replication to run automatically and keep your Redshift database always synced with Salesforce. To configure a schedule open the created replication package for editing, and under Schedule (at bottom left of the package editor) click Set schedule.
Skyvia allows flexible schedule configuration. You can configure your replication to run monthly, weekly, daily, on specific weekdays, etc. In non-free pricing plans you may run replication and update your database with a fresh data from Salesforce every hour or every few minutes and get real-time insights on your data. Thus, after you configure your replication, you can easily keep your database always up-to-date.
Skyvia uses incremental updates. This means that every time it loads only the records that were changed in Salesforce since the previous package run, and applies the corresponding changes to the database. It can significantly improve performance and decrease costs, as the latter depends on the number of replicated records.
Universal Cloud Data Platform for Integration
Skyvia is a universal cloud data platform, and replication is only one of the supported integration scenarios. In addition to replication, it supports other operation kinds: import, export, and synchronization.
The replication is used when you need to simply copy data from a cloud app to a database or cloud data warehouse and automatically keep this copy in a current state with minimal configuration efforts. Synchronization synchronizes data in two sources bi-directionally. Export allows you to export data from cloud applications, like Salesforce, and databases to CSV files. Import serves for unidirectional data loading.
Import has some more complex configuration than replication, but it is much more flexible. It allows importing data from CSV files or from cloud applications and databases directly to other cloud applications and databases. Unlike replication, it doesn’t create target tables automatically. Instead you configure mapping between source and target tables and columns.
Powerful mapping settings allow you to load data between the data sources with the different data structure and formats while preserving relations between data. You can provide constant values, use powerful expressions, lookups, etc.
Import can be configured to load only newly updated or inserted records from Salesforce. Thus, we can perform a replication once to create the necessary tables and import all the data, and then configure import to load new and updated records from Salesforce.
As an all in one cloud data platform, Skyvia also offers a cloud to cloud backup solution, an online SQL query tool, and OData REST API server that can make your data available over the web.
Pricing
Skyvia’s integration pricing depends mostly on the number of loaded records. Additionally, higher pricing plans allow scheduling packages to run more often and having more scheduled packages.
Skyvia has a free pricing plan for data integration, allowing you to load 5000 records per month for free. So you can register an account on Skyvia for free and test it whether it suits to your needs and then decide whether to upgrade your pricing plan.
You can see details on Skyvia pricing on their pricing page.
Here is a handy video showing live how Skyvia works.
