Category Archives: General Salesforce

Thriving as a Salesforce Consultant in an Uncertain Economy

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The global economy has never been more unpredictable. With constant fluctuations and disruptions, finding stability in the job market has become increasingly challenging. However, amidst the uncertainty, one career path has continued to demonstrate resilience and opportunity – Salesforce consulting. As a Salesforce consultant, you can rest assured that if you are proactive, adaptable, and dedicated, the work is there.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how being a Salesforce consultant can help you thrive in an uncertain economy, and why now is the perfect time to explore this rewarding career path.

  1. Growing Demand for Salesforce Professionals

As more and more businesses turn to digital solutions to remain competitive and streamline their operations, the demand for Salesforce professionals is skyrocketing. With Salesforce being the world’s leading CRM platform, companies are constantly seeking expert consultants to implement and optimize their systems. The best part is, this demand is not limited to specific industries or geographical locations, making it a viable option for professionals around the world.

  1. Flexible Career Path

One of the key advantages of being a Salesforce consultant is the flexibility it offers. As a consultant, you have the option to work independently or join a consulting firm, allowing you to choose the work environment that best suits your personal preferences and lifestyle. Additionally, with a wealth of certifications and specializations available, you can tailor your expertise to meet the unique needs of your clients and stay ahead in the market.

  1. Proactive Learning and Skill Development

In an uncertain economy, staying ahead of the curve is essential. As a Salesforce consultant, you must be proactive in learning new features, technologies, and best practices to ensure you’re delivering the best solutions for your clients. By consistently upskilling and staying informed about the latest trends and advancements, you’ll be able to maintain your competitive edge and secure a steady stream of projects.

  1. Network Building and Collaboration

Building a strong professional network is vital for success in any field, but it’s especially important for Salesforce consultants. By actively engaging with the Salesforce community, attending events, and collaborating with other professionals, you’ll not only expand your knowledge but also create opportunities for new projects and referrals. A strong network can be your safety net in uncertain times, providing you with a continuous flow of work even when the economy is struggling.

  1. Adapting to Change

The ability to adapt to change is a valuable skill in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. As a Salesforce consultant, you’ll be exposed to various industries, business models, and organizational structures, allowing you to hone your adaptability and problem-solving skills. Embracing change and being agile in your approach will enable you to navigate the uncertainty and excel in your career.

Conclusion

There’s no denying that we live in an unpredictable world. However, as a Salesforce consultant, you have the unique opportunity to thrive even in uncertain economic conditions. By being proactive, continuously learning, and embracing change, you can ensure a successful and fulfilling career in Salesforce consulting. So, if you’re ready to seize control of your professional destiny and make a positive impact on businesses worldwide, now is the perfect time to embark on a journey as a Salesforce consultant.

Quick Text Warms Up Salesforce Users This Winter ’19

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Several releases back, Salesforce introduced new productivity tools to help users with their repetitive tasks. The one we are featuring here is quick text; the other is Macros, which we’ll explore on another blog.

Quick text allows users to insert a standard comment or note on a record to answer common questions or record quick comments. Similar to email templates, they allow a company to standardize on the wording used to help maintain consistent messaging across the team.

With Winter ’19, quick text can now be added to tasks and events in addition to other objects. Also added is the ability to organize quick texts into folders, making them easier to share with users.

How To Set Up Quick Text

Quick text comes already enabled in your Lightning Salesforce Org. (In Classic, it is enabled if you have Live Agent.)

You can find the setting by going to Setup -> User Interface -> Quick Text Settings

Using Folders

Here, you will also find the option to enable the ability to share and organize quick text in Folders. Folders help you organize and share quick text. You can create up to four levels of folders: one root folder and up to three subfolders.

Sharing Settings

If you enable this feature it is important to note that sharing settings on folders override sharing settings on individual items. If you shared quick text in Salesforce Classic, those settings are ignored after this preference is enabled. If you decide to disable this preference later, folder sharing is ignored, and individual sharing settings apply.

Update Permissions

After enabling quick text, give users access to quick text by updating their permissions. Use a permission set or update profiles to give your users Read permission on the quick text object. Optionally, you can also give users Create, Edit, and Delete access to let them create and manage their own quick text messages.

How To Organize Your Quick Text Messages

Creating a quick text message is as easy as creating any other record in Salesforce. Begin by navigating to the Quick Text Tab (you might need to go to All Tabs if it’s not immediately shown in your navigation). Here you’ll have the option to search through your existing quick texts, create a new record, or create a new folder.

Let’s begin with creating a new folder called Support Responses.

  1. Click on the New Folder button
  2. Type “Support Responses” in the Folder Label
  3. Click Save

That’s it! You’ve created a folder to organize all common support responses in. You can now control access to these messages by sharing the folder out. The folder can be shared with specific users, users within a role, or public groups.

Next, let’s create the quick text message.

How To Create a Quick Text Message

  1. If you’re still in the Support Responses folder, go ahead and click New Quick Text
  2. Give the record a name. Call it “Link to Support Hours”
  3. In the body you can use Merge Fields to personalize your responses. Enter the message. 
  4. Select a category. In orgs created before Spring ’18 that enabled quick text in Salesforce Classic, this field is required, and a default Category is provided for you. In orgs created after Spring ’18, this field isn’t required.
  5. Select the channels in which you want the message to be available. For our example, we’ll select Email (it’s already selected by default).

Enable Available Channels

Depending on which features are enabled in your org, these channels might be available.

  • Email: for Email actions
  • Event: for Event actions
  • Internal: works with internal fields, like on the Change Status action*
  • Knowledge: for Knowledge articles in Lightning Experience
  • Live Agent: works with Live Agent chat in the Service Console
  • Phone: for the Log a Call action
  • Portal: works in a community or a customer portal*
  • Social: for social posts
  • Task: for Task actions

6. Click Save

Your quick text message is ready for use. To test out our new quick text message we’ll navigate to a case. Create a new email message. You’ll see the quick text button in the email toolbar.

Locate and click the quick text message we created earlier.

What Else Can Quick Text Do?

Quick text can be used for more than sending emails, of course. For Live Agent, it’s an incredible time saver when responding to frequently asked questions. Use it for capturing structured notes for your records, as well. It’s a great productivity tool that will be sure to please your users.

Originally posted on Perficient’s Salesforce blog.

Why Choose Salesforce

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Evaluating your next CRM

Salesforce has built a reputation for being the #1 CRM Platform on the market. They continue to evolve and push the boundaries of technology, bringing amazing features to their customers. But Salesforce licenses are not cheap. No, not when you look at the up-front costs associated with purchasing licenses and implementation. Salesforce is not a cheap solution at all from that perspective.

All too often the immediate costs of purchasing Salesforce licenses can come as a shock. However, it’s the unseen and indirect savings that you should also consider when evaluating Salesforce as a CRM Platform for your company.

Salesforce Doesn’t Require Servers

Salesforce is a Cloud-based or SaaS solution. Meaning, your company will not need to purchase expensive servers to support it. Along with that, you will not need to purchase replacement hardware when components break, lease space to store it (or multiple spaces if you want the security of redundancy). You won’t need to hire expensive IT resources with hardware backgrounds to maintain it. The initial and long-term costs of running servers is in no way a cheap investment. The ongoing costs associated with them alone could easily compare to that of the subscription costs associated with Salesforce.

Quick to Market

Salesforce comes with many pre-built templates to help customers get up and running quickly. In truth, if you wanted to, you could begin using Salesforce from Day 1. When you purchase a Salesforce license it comes with standard features, layouts, and almost everything a company might need to begin tracking customers, opportunities, and more!

Having all this configuration already pre-built means you won’t be starting from scratch. Instead, you can focus your efforts on extending the functionality of what has been provided in order to meet your business’s specific needs.

Photo by bruce mars on Pexels.com

As you begin to customize Salesforce, you will find that rarely do you have to get into code. Setting up features, reports, alerts, and all these things that make Salesforce a powerful CRM Platform often doesn’t require any code. What that means is flexibility and the ability to make Salesforce work for you as you need it to in a shorter amount of time vs. building out a custom solution from scratch. Community.

The Salesforce Community

One of the most overlooked values when evaluating Salesforce is the immense size of the community. Almost everywhere you go in the corporate world you run into Salesforce and people that know it. It’s everywhere! In most major cities you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who uses it. (For the record, this author does not condone throwing rocks at people.).

With such a large community in place it makes it easier to find resources to help you with your Salesforce implementation. You can ask questions online and almost immediately get answers. That’s something that can’t be said of many other technologies. Salesforce has invested tremendous amounts of money and effort into creating free resources for training. The results of which have contributed to the incredible growth of the number of people with Salesforce experience.

Just take a look at the rate of growth of the number of attendees at Dreamforce. This chart is only up to 2015.

Attendance has skyrocketed, making Dreamforce the largest conference of its type in the world!

With such a large community finding help for your Salesforce will be measurably easier vs. other solutions.

Conclusion

Certainly from the perspective of upfront costs, the initial investment into Salesforce is considerable. However, when evaluating Salesforce beyond the initial investment, the cost of ownership diminishes rapidly, making Salesforce far more affordable (and scalable) than most other solutions.

If you’re considering Salesforce as your CRM solution, keep in mind that Salesforce is far more than a CRM. It’s truly a technology platform capable of rapidly bringing to market many of your business processes in a very well-connected environment.

How Do You Describe Salesforce?

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“What Exactly Is Salesforce?”

I sometimes run into people that have not heard of Salesforce. It doesn’t happen very often. But when I do, I try to figure out how to best describe what Salesforce is to them.

Me: Salesforce is a Customer Success Platform that allows users to “easily log, manage, and analyze all customer activity in one place with a suite of web-based CRM software.” (Taken from Salesforce, itself.)

Them: Blank stare. “What’s CRM again…?”

Me: “Customer Relationship Management helps companies understand their customers’ needs and solve problems by better managing customer information and interactions — all on a single platform that’s always accessible from any desktop or device.”

Them: “That sounds complicated.”

That’s when I knew it would take a different approach.

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Where Are My Salesforce Report Formats In Lightning Experience?

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If you have recently moved to Salesforce Lightning and are now trying to build a report, you might be wondering where are the report formats?

There’s now no longer a drop down where you can choose Summary vs. Matrix, or Joined. So what happened to them? Rest assured, they’re still there.

The New Salesforce Lightning Report Builder

The Report Builder has long been needing a facelift, and now it’s here! The new Lightning Report Builder introduces a new, more modern look and feel to the Salesforce Report Builder.

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How To Set Up a New Salesforce Org

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Have a New Salesforce Org?

If you purchased a new Salesforce org, you may be wondering where to begin setting it up. In this blog we’ll explore a few of the essential areas to review and configure to help get you started.

When you first sign into your new Salesforce org you will see that it is preconfigured with most of the basic things a company would use. In fact, you could start using it the moment you sign in. But more likely you’ll need to configure some features to make sure that your Salesforce org is setup to support your company’s processes. As a Senior Solutions Architect, here are the basic steps I recommend to cover your “getting started” phase.

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Getting Started with the New Salesforce Lightning Experience

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If you haven’t had a chance to see it or try it, you should immediately sign up for a developer org and see what all the fuss is about. What exactly is Lightning Experience? Lightning Experience is a next generation Salesforce UI that delivers many new features to benefit sales teams of all sizes. Salesforce did more than develop just a new “skin”. They redesigned how Salesforce works. It has been described as not just a new UI but a whole new operating system. It literally changes the way sales users work with information in Salesforce.

Salesforce has been working on this upgrade for a number of years now with its inception beginning with mobile. With the heavy adoption of smart phones and tablets users have become accustomed to the fast, responsive designs of a well-developed mobile application. Salesforce decided to take the lessons learned from Salesforce1 and apply them to the desktop to help users sell smarter and sell faster.

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