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Advice for Salesforce Career Progression

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I am currently looking after the Melbourne Nonprofit Salesforce User Group and one of the attendees asked me for some advice on how to get ahead in their Salesforce career. Yes, I do have to understand that I’m a that point in my career where I need to guide and help new people coming into the industry – it’s part of my job.

So here’s my advice…

My advice to you is to become indispensable in your organisation. Make Salesforce the centre of your organisation’s existence – if it’s not in Salesforce or the Accounting System, or on the Website it doesn’t exist.
 
Pick a project, and do it – seek forgiveness not permission. Even if you have to do it in your own time, and in a sandbox to prove the concept. Get an executive level champion who will encourage you.
 
Spend a lunchtime with staff members you don’t normally deal with – ask them what spreadsheets they are using, what things are difficult for them, and how you can make things easier for them – this is where you will find your projects.
 
Document everything. Write down your learnings. Write case studies as to how what you implemented helped the staff in your organisation. Present the case study to the management – they love feel good stories like that.
 
Run a brown-bag lunch session where you invite any staff member to come and learn something new about Salesforce (eg using Chatter) and even if two people come, it’s worthwhile because you and they would have learnt something new. Document, and share the success with your management.
 
Blog, get on twitter and pester #askforce for questions you have, and follow all the other NFP people on there. eg @bethbrains, @snugsfbay, @mpusto, @tracykronzak @andrew_sf and see who they tweet and start following them.
 
Make yourself known on The Hub. Take a question that someone asks that you don’t know the answer to and make time for yourself to go and research and document the answer and then get back to them. Get on the main Salesforce Success Community also and delve into areas you don’t know about.
 
Continue doing Trailhead. Do trails that you don’t think you would never do in your day to day job.
 
Install apps from the Appexchange in your Dev org and try and work out how they work. Document your findings – publicly.
 
Read blogs, listen to podcasts. Pick a few people that inspire you and read everything they do – for me it’s someone like Jennifer Lee @jenwlee – the enthusiasm and energy she has for learning and teaching Salesforce is amazing – she lives and breathes Salesforce. Read the blogs of the people that they retweet.
 
At some point you need to get to Dreamforce. Or at least a Salesforce Community event in London or Paris or the US somewhere. If you are thinking of travelling, try and do it when there are events like this on. Meet the people in the community. Talk to them. Connect with them.
 
Set up a group of like-minded people on The Hub, talk to other people. Come to the regular Melbourne Salesforce User Group and even the Developer Group. Get yourself to a point that you don’t understand what they are saying then ask questions, and keep asking until they can explain it in a way you understand – it will help them and help you.
 
It’s not all about Salesforce though – you need to think outside of Salesforce – think about the Website and the Accounting System, and all the other systems that you use – how can they be streamlined, eliminated or made much more enjoyable for the staff to do. Most staff get bogged down into this is the way things have to be done, and it’s just all too difficult to even think about changing. Have a look at my blog post So You Want To Learn Salesforce, for more info.
 
Understand the legislative framework in which your organisation exists. Learn about things like the Privacy Act, the Spam Act etc. How do they impact your organisation. Your organisation doesn’t exist in a bubble. Are there things that you can do to streamline your legislative reporting for example.
 
Question everything, question everyone. Be a pain in the butt, in a good way. (Eg I saw a donation form today that has a Date of Birth field on it and Gender is required – why, why are you keeping Personal Identifying Information that you now have to go to great lengths to maintain security on? What benefit does it help your organisation to have that information – well if it’s because you want to know the age of your constituents then ask for Age Range, not Date of Birth).
 
Become certified – yes, it’s a pain, and it’s expensive, and it’s hard to learn the breadth of what you need to know to pass when you work in a small NFP organisation, but there are good groups on Success to help guide you along the way.
 
When you get a bit further on see if there is an area you want to specialise in – do you want to be a consultant, a developer? If you want to be a developer, you first have to be a good Admin (and that’s a whole other topic, but there are great resources when you want to go that route).
 
Contact someone when you get stuck. Write up the problem first though. I get stuck ALL the time. Thankfully I have a great bunch of other MVPs I can ask. But for me, writing the problem out sometimes helps me understand what I need to do next to test it or work it out.
 
Some other blog posts that are a similar topic:

So, you want to learn Salesforce?

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I had an enquiry from a client this week; one of their staff members wants to learn more about how to use Salesforce. “Cool, let me come up with some project ideas that can help your business and we can make a start.”

I start to work on some ideas… As this client is doing really amazing stuff with the Salesforce platform, none of which is straight “CRM”, there are many interesting projects to work on. But none of these projects are going to help this staff member “learn Salesforce” because at this stage of their systems journey it becomes more about how does everything work together, with Salesforce at the heart of the business processes, and how we can leverage many apps working together to make their business systems work for them.

So, do I strip out all the cool stuff and devise a program for this staff member to learn just about the Salesforce side of things, or do I push them to become more involved in the whole business systems – I think it has to be the latter. Salesforce does not work in isolation – it only works when it is part of a bigger system. Yet, I don’t think learning about everything is what this staff member thinks he is signing up for. This will be a journey.

The first project is moving to the Service Cloud to get the goodness of the service cloud console, integration with Knowledge, Omni-Channel and Chat services, but we have a whole project to rationalise how and where support cases come in and are dealt with.

We have websites, apps, e-commerce platforms, a Public Knowledge Base, and email. Plus we are expanding to a second language and chat support channels. Each one of those currently has a “Contact Us” function at the moment.

Setting up the new support process requires a lot of process and service design, thinking through each channel… How will people interact with that channel? What sort of support are we offering? Should that channel have a support process that has a higher priority than the other channels? How do we ensure that the support questions are answered in a timely manner by the fewer support staff on the second language? What sort of support questions do we expect? What are our SLA’s? Who is entitled to support? How long should support take? How are we going to track our Support cases to ensure nothing slips through the cracks? What is the language that should be used in answering our support cases?
What templates should we have to make support more streamlined and consistent?, etc etc.

Then we get down to the setup. Apart from learning about Salesforce Service Cloud Console, the Chat functionality, the Knowledge integration, Support Processes, Queues, the Macros, the Quick Text and Case Feeds, there is:

  • Website Web to Case forms – setting up the web forms and some level of integration to Salesforce.
  • Simple Web to Lead does not allow for file uploads for example, so this integration will need to use the API. So do we use Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms on the website, or use Form Assembly.
  • If a person asks for support from the App, we already know who they are, so can we pre-fill the forms in Form Assembly so they don’t have to fill in their info again.
  • And moving to the Premier version of Form Assembly to do pre-fills then opens up lots of other avenues with other forms, including e-signatures and payment integration.
  • Plus when we are opening up our data from Salesforce by querying data to simply pre-fill a form, we have to then think about major security implications – which account is accessing Salesforce, what data is visible through the API, ensuring that someone else’s data can not be exposed accidentally. Thankfully Form Assembly has some great tutorials around securing data through the forms. But even just using the API for form submissions, we need to know about Profiles, API access, and general cloud security concepts.

A simple request to learn Salesforce and help out with a small project has turned into a journey through the world of multiple apps, security considerations, development topics, website setup, service design, and process design. Plus we then have to ensure it is all documented and staff are trained.

My next project for this client is the Marketing and Lead handling process which will delve into not only the web forms but then Mailchimp, the Mailchimp to Salesforce connector, Salesforce Campaigns, Salesforce Leads, Lead conversion and Opportunities, Mailchimp campaign tracking, website tracking, Google Analytics – the list goes on.

The next project after that is the E-Commerce setup which involves almost all of the above plus Websites, Shopping Cart systems, Payment Gateways, Merchant Facilities, Stripe, Paypal, Form Assembly payment integrations, Visualforce Emails, Chatter, Process Builder, Visual Flows, custom Apex REST APIs, External Data Objects and integrations with legacy business systems… before we think about the whole accounting process, Xero Integration and how it flows onto the rest of the business.

Now to put this to my client, and see if they run away in fear or they are ready to delve into the whole world of how their business systems works – because you can not separate out Salesforce from the rest of the business. Salesforce is the platform at the core of the business systems.

So, what about you? Are you ready for your journey into learning about how Salesforce works? Want to be a solution designer, consultant, developer, web developer, service designer, trainer, counsellor and master of office politics? Yes? Great, because I need some help, so please get in touch so we can start this journey together.

Q and A: Apps for Service Delivery

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Question

I’m setting up a new business that is very focused on service delivery. Which cloud-based apps should I use to get started with my business?

Answer

Wow, this is a big question, and the answer, of course, is – “it depends”; and no answer I give here is a substitute for fully investigating and understanding your business requirements fully, to more adequately recommend something.

Read more about Apps for Service Delivery

Using Wufoo Forms with Salesforce

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You need to get information from your website into Salesforce, especially for Leads for new clients.

If you are on full WordPress you can use Gravity Forms for Salesforce plugin – it is a free plugin to Gravity Forms, and it can be used on all versions of Salesforce – with Web to Lead for the lower end versions of Salesforce, and Web to Anything, via the API with higher end versions of Salesforce.

If you are not using Gravity Forms, you can use the WordPress-to-lead plugin.

You can also use Integration services like Zapier, as detailed in my previous post on Integrations, however Salesforce is a premium pricing level in Zapier.

Wufoo Forms is another app that does Salesforce Integration, but not really very well. About the only time you would use Wufoo integration with Salesforce is if you were a NFP with a WordPress.com site. Wufoo is a great option for nice forms for a WordPress.com site (see my previous post on using Wufoo with WordPress.com), but as there are so many other options for full WordPress, I would not use Wufoo except for on WordPress.com.

Read more using Wufoo Forms with Salesforce

Salesforce Chatter Notifications

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Chatter is a great tool, and if you use Salesforce, you should be using it, and using it every day – many times a day. Chatter is great for “working out loud” and keeping others in your team up to date with what you are doing.

There is a lot of help out there about how to use chatter, including the Chatter Best Practices page on the Salesforce website and this excellent series of 9 chatter training videos created by Engineers Australia for their Chatter implementation. They may be a bit specific to just engineers and just the stand-alone chatter app, but they are very well done.

One thing I could not find enough information on is Notifications, so here is my explanation of notifications. (Well, it started out as being only about notifications, but it may now include a bit more information also).

Chatter, like most social networks, can be Push or Pull – eg you can “pull” the information towards you by going to look at your chatter feeds, or have chatter “push” the information out to you, via notifications.

Read more about Chatter, Chat and Messages in Salesforce

The state of CRM Systems for Not For Profits

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I like working with Not For Profit organisations, especially since they usually have old technology and outdated systems so there is so much that I can help your NFP with, that can revolutionise the way you work. The basis of most NFP data requirements is based around a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system.

Each NFP is different, but there are some common features that most NFPs need to have when looking at a CRM system: [Read more…]

Difficulties using Email in Salesforce

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The subject of this post may seem a bit harsh, but hopefully by the end of this longish post, you will see where I’m coming from. My call right now, is that there is NO email solution that works with Salesforce that is without difficulties. I hope that I’m wrong. I really do. If you think I’m wrong please add to the discussion below.

When I’m talking about emails and Salesforce I am talking about the following scenarios. For the tl;dr version I’ve included my ratings for each of the scenarios:

  1. Receiving email from an existing client – PASS.
  2. Receiving email from a new client – FAIL.
  3. Receiving email from a new client about a specific case – Qualified PASS.
  4. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them – PASS.
  5. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case – FAIL.
  6. Emailing to a client – FAIL.
  7. Emailing to a client about a specific case – FAIL as above, with a MAJOR FAIL for dealing with attachments.
  8. Emailing to a third party about a specific case – FAIL.
I am focusing on Cases with this post, but there are a lot of things similar with Opportunities – the same issues you have about ensuring emails are recorded against the right Case happens with Opportunities and Leads also. How you set up these objects in Salesforce is dependant on your business processes.
The “ideal” email scenario with Salesforce is:
  • All contacts who ever email you are already contacts in Salesforce.
  • All email to those contacts are generated out of Salesforce.
  • Anyone who emails you about an existing case, will ALWAYS only ever reply to an email that has come from Salesforce.
  • Clients will reply to emails about specific cases with only content relevant to that case.
Of course that doesn’t happen in the real world – EVER.
And it definitely doesn’t happen if you are dealing with staff who work only out of their Outlook Inbox.

In this post, I am not talking about paid email syncing options that are available in the App Exchange (or this post will be very long). You can see that there are many many options, for huge dollar amounts. My thinking is that you pay enough for Salesforce, you should not have to pay more for basic functionality such as tracking emails for your client. There is one paid app that I will comment on, specifically in relation to Email to Cases. 

Receiving Email

Receiving email from an existing client

Emailing in to Salesforce to record that email against an existing contacts is pretty well handled. You can use Email to Salesforce, or the Salesforce for Outlook toolbar (which essentially does exactly the same thing). This matches the email address of the sender with an existing contact in Salesforce and then puts the content of the email in an Activity linked to the Contact record. I give this scenario a PASS.

Receiving email from a new client

I have no idea how you are meant to manage emails that you want to track for new contacts, apart from the obvious:

  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually attach the email to the contact through the Unresolved Email Task or the Unresolved Emails screen.

This takes a number of steps and will probably not be done by most staff after about the first week. This scenario is a definite FAIL – so you probably need to ensure there is another way to create contacts first, rather than when receiving emails for the first time.

Interestingly I noted that forwarding an email and using the Salesforce for Outlook results in different behaviour for Unresolved Emails – forwarded emails are shown in a special Unresolved Emails page, whereas Emails added from Outlook only show up as Tasks. 

Receiving Email related to Cases

Setting up Email to Case

There is a great post over at Button Click Admin that goes over all the steps to Set Up Email-to-Case, and there is a good video from Salesforce showing an overview of using Email-to-Case.

Also, when setting up Email to Case, one must have app is Email2Case Attachment Reassign which takes the attachments from the email and puts them in the Attachments related list on the case.

Receiving email from a new client about a specific case

After Email to Case is set up, the logging of emails into Salesforce to create new Cases works quite well – If the client emails directly to your support email address (or you can forward the email to your support email address). For a client that does not yet exist as a Contact in Salesforce, the case will be created similar to the one shown in the Email to Case Setup Video. and you will have to do the following:

  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually edit the created Case to attach the Contact to the Case.
I’m going to give this scenario a Qualified PASS because if all else fails, and the Contact is not created in Salesforce, the Case can still be managed and the contact details from the client are still recorded in the description field on the Case. But it is best to create the Contact in Salesforce as they may be an ongoing client.
I have created a No Code No Cost solution to create new Contacts from Cases like this using Object Converter. 

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them.

This is one of the perfect scenarios noted above. When emailing out of Salesforce to an existing client who has a Contact record created in Salesforce, the email gets a Thread ID added to it. When your client replies to that email, Email to Case sees the Thread ID and attaches the email to the Case and notifies the Case Owner that there is a new email. This scenario works effortlessly and is the way things should work in Salesforce – this gets a big PASS.

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case

But as we know, people aren’t perfect and often your clients will email you about an issue that is related to an existing case. This scenario is more annoying and here are the steps:
  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Open Salesforce and go to the record of the Contact that sent the email
  • Find the email in the Activities Related List
  • Open the Email Tasks record
  • Click Edit
  • In the Related To field enter the Case Number of the Case that this email is related to (Don’t know the Case Number? – no problem, simply open a new tab, search for the Case, copy the Case Number, come back to this tab, paste the Case Number in – easy!)
  • Save the Task
My response to this – AS IF! This scenario is a definite FAIL and there is no way that anyone except the most detailed person will do this. The end result is that Emails will either be only associated with the Contact, or not recorded in Salesforce at all. This then bypasses the whole reason for using Salesforce, which is to have “one thing in one place, once”.

Emailing Out of Salesforce

Emailing to a client

If the client is already a Contact record in Salesforce you could just BCC your email to Salesforce address as you send the email out from your email client. But that’s annoying to have to remember that each time. You can achieve a similar thing by clicking the “Send and Add” button in Salesforce for Outlook – a little easier.

The idea, however is to get people out of working from their Inboxes and work from within Salesforce as their primary tool, so you want them to generate the emails from the Contact record in Salesforce. There are a few advantages and disadvantages  with this way.

Advantages:

  • Multiple email addresses can be stored against each client record – just choose the right one to send to.
  • It looks just like regular email and has all the fields like Additional To and BCC.
  • You can do rich text formatting in the body of the email.
  • You can choose predefined Email Templates that have Merge fields in them to quickly create emails.
  • There is a spell checker built in.
  • You can attach files.
Looks and feels and smells exactly like email – right? Well just start using it for a week or so and you start to find the disadvantages are numerous:
  • Which is the right email address to send to?
  • No auto complete in the other email address fields.
  • No shortcuts or auto formatting that you are used (eg ctrl+shift+8 – Gmail or * space – Outlook to create a bulleted list; ctrl+k to insert a hyperlink).
  • No inline images in your email body (even Gmail can do this now).
  • Only one Email signature – you can’t swap email signatures as you can in Outlook.
I could go on. For hard-core email users who feel that they can’t get their job done effectively by using Salesforce this is an issue – they will just stop using Salesforce, and the emails won’t be tracked. And then there are Attachments, which is a whole other story – see below… So sending emails is a FAIL from me.

Emailing Out of Cases

For emailing out of Cases, or Opportunities or any other client related object, I’ve concentrated on Attachments. Specifically for Cases, there is an app called Email to Case Premium – this is a paid app so I will deal with the features and issues of this app in a future post.

Attachments

Attachments are where the real hell begins. So, you’ve spent all this money getting Salesforce up and running for your organisation, and you want to ensure you get the most out of it, therefore you insist that all documents related to Cases (or Opportunities, or Accounts or any other object) are attached to the Salesforce record that they relate to. (Why you would try to manually maintain matching folders on your share drive or in Box.net or similar is beyond me). Now, you want to email one of those documents to the Client or someone else – these are the steps to attach one document to an email from within Salesforce:
  • Before you email, go to the Case record, decide on the attachments you want to download.
  • Right click on the file name and download it to your local computer, or network drive (and use up your bandwidth for a second time, because you have already uploaded it once).
  • Now create the email and fill in all the details.
  • Click on Attach a file.
  • Click Choose File.
  • Browse to the File, remembering where you just saved it.
  • Click Attach to the email and wait for it to upload (using your bandwidth for the third time).
  • Click Done.
  • Now you can Send the email – Finally!
What an absolute joke! And querying this with Salesforce officially (this was a deal-breaker for a client of mine recently), they say that this is the way it is designed and the only way they can suggest you attach documents to emails, that are already attached to the record.
Yes, you could pay lots of $$ for Email to Case Premium, Loop or Conga – a few apps that will help attaching documents to emails, but that is not the point. How does Salesforce even consider this to be acceptable business practice? You know what’s going to happen, people will start saving documents onto the dreaded file share either instead of, or even worse, as well as the Salesforce record, then you have a nightmare of consistency – which one is the correct and latest version of the document. Wow! You will end up needing SharePoint just to manage the versions of the documents – and that is way overkill.
Dealing with Attachments is a MAJOR FAIL!

Emailing to Third Parties

This scenario really depends on your business, but a number of businesses would need to take documents from Clients, especially relating to a specific Opportunity or Case, and then forward them to another third party for processing or information.
Apart from dealing with the whole attachment issue there are a number of other issues:
  • You will need a place to record the Third Parties on the Case or Opportunity – your best bet is a custom child Object, because the standard functionality of Contact Roles is a bit limiting.
  • When you want to email to one third party you will need to copy the email address, create the email, then paste the email address in to the Additional To field.
  • What if you want to email two or more third parties – good luck with working out how to do that – possibly open a separate copy of the Case in a new tab, then do the email and switch back and forth between the two tabs and copy and paste the email.
  • If you want to use Text or HTML Email Templates there is a limitation that emails must be sent to a Contact or a User – so you may have to have your name in the To field, as well as the third party – this may look strange to them.

So – that is a lot of stuffing around just to send an email – so, for me, emails to third parties are a FAIL.

Summary

This is a long post and I have tried to be thorough in looking at ALL the options. There are some basic functions of emailing that get a PASS, but as soon as you take it even a little bit past the basics (I don’t think adding an attachment is anything but basic), we descend into the realm of FAIL.

I have yet to see any reasonable, even paid, solution for simply dealing with the attachment issue (without the other features of Loop or Conga). I’m sure it could be coded as a visualforce page, but I really don’t understand why someone hasn’t done it as a simple free app – so maybe I’m missing something that will mean it is difficult to build.

So, if you have any suggestions, other options or favourite apps to deal with emails, please add some detail in the comments below. In a future post, I will talk about the features and issues with one particular email App, Email to Case Premium.

Otherwise, right now, I don’t have a solution.

I’m a Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer

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I have finally formalised my Salesforce knowledge and taken the certification exam to become a Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer.

Salesforce Certified Developer LogoSo what does this mean? Well Salesforce’s idea of being a Developer and mine are two very different things. For me, being a developer means that you build and compile code in a code editor and use a code repository. (Things like html, css, javascript don’t really count as being a real developer in my book).

Salesforce is a declarative platform, which means most of the customisation of Salesforce can be achieved with just clicks, rather than code – that’s the bit that I know, and know well. There is another level of Salesforce that is all about code, which is the bit that I don’t do, (but I have a great developer that I work with that can do that stuff).

So this certification says that I can design and implement a customised Salesforce implementation for you, and if we need to get into some really advanced code, I can spec it up and get someone to build it for us. However, as per my Salesforce Methodology and my previous post on great Tools for Salesforce Administrators, there is so much we can do without code in Salesforce, which is good.