Do you need PM skills?

A fellow long-time reader recently asked (shared with permission):

As I interview for roles, including subcontracting, I’m asked about my ‘Project Management’ skills. By this, I don’t think they’re asking about PM skills as a PM – i.e. managing other peoples’ work.

Read the rest

The hidden question every prospect is asking

In initial sales calls with potential clients, there are many threads to observe and ask questions about.

Most Salesforce consultants have a checklist of questions such as:

  • Tell me about your business
  • What are your current Salesforce challenges?
  • What are your business goals?
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The best way to get leads

When you’re an independent Salesforce consultant, the best way to get leads is from referrals. Nothing else comes close.

These referrals can be from current or former colleagues, clients, and friends.

Having a connection in common is crazy effective, as it effectively eliminates uncertainty.… Read the rest

How to build your reputation

Your reputation as a Salesforce consultant is paramount. It takes years to build and can tumble within moments.

Given this critical importance, let’s take a closer look at it.

A good reputation includes (but is not limited to):

  • Reliability: consistently show up, being available, and helpful
  • Being easy to work with: keep a low ego, be positive and optimistic, and remove friction
  • Speaking the truth: be honest and fair about outcomes
  • Producing value: build high-quality projects and achieve your clients’ business goals
  • Good marketing: use wording that shows you know your client’s problems and that you say what you do and do what you say
  • Collecting social proof: collect client testimonials and give credit to your client, not yourself
  • Contributing to the community: answer community questions and present at in-person events to demonstrate expertise

The takeaway
Do these activities today, and again tomorrow.… Read the rest

Using your client’s own language

Once you’ve identified your ideal client and their expensive problem, the next step is to market to them.

The main theme is to use their words. This means if your clients are

  • doctors, talk about how you can help them and their patients.
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Understanding your client’s problems

Once you’ve identified your ideal client (also known as ICP: Ideal Client Profile), the next step is to understand their problems.

There are two parts to this phase.

The first is for your client’s to acknowledge they have a problem that’s actually worth solving.… Read the rest

Identifying your ideal client

Let’s face facts: you cannot help everyone.

You cannot even help a fraction of all possible clients. This has nothing to do with your talent, this has to do with having limited time and resources.

So you need to decide which clients to help, and which ones to leave behind.… Read the rest

How to obtain leads as an independent

If you were driving down the road in your car, and saw a neon sign with the message, “We help people solve problems”, would you pull over?

I doubt it.

What if the sign read, “We help independent Salesforce consultants build a healthy pipeline so they can achieve their desired lifestyle”?… Read the rest

Saving AI prompts

I cannot remember the last business day that passed where I didn’t use AI.

Whether it’s to

  • Have it explain a complex topic in simple language
  • Vibe code my Salesforce app
  • Clean or reformat data
  • Research a topic
  • Create images

It’s part of my daily toolkit.… Read the rest

Using AI to cleanup addresses

This week, I used AI to perform some address cleanup. Cities are notoriously known for being spelled incorrectly.

In the province of Quebec, things can get particularly interesting. For example, the following are actually all the same city:

  • Saint Jerome
  • Saint Jérôme
  • St-Jérome
  • St-Jérôme

I attached an .csv… Read the rest

The potentially darker side of AI

This weekend, I visited my friends at their home north of the city. Being in the countryside is wonderful for the soul and I was happy to see them and break bread with them.

At one point, I showed their young daughter how easy it is to take a picture of something and have AI generate another picture from it.… Read the rest

Inside Salesforce’s big bet on AI

A recent article on Business Insider confirms something we already had a feeling about.

Salesforce is a marketing company. It’s not a tech company, an AI company, or a family. And it does marketing really well.

Agentforce was announced at last year’s Dreamforce by showing how it was being used by retailer Saks Fifth Avenue (SFA).… Read the rest

From legacy automations to flow

As you may know, the original way of creating automation in Salesforce was workflows. Then came processes. Both were superseded by flows.

While you can technically still create workflows and processes today, they are legacy. Eventually they will be fully deprecated.… Read the rest

Using AI to help analyze tech debt

In case you’re not overly techie, I’ll start from the beginning.

Salesforce is mostly built from .xml files. These are structured text files that tell SF what to do. Every field, object, flow, apex, etc. is composed of .xml files that are executed almost instantly when you use SF.… Read the rest

Salesforce + Slack

Today was the in-person event  I co-hosted with Salesforce.

The goal was to show nonprofits how to use Slack as a sidekick that helps them manage and interact with their contacts, all without leaving Slack.

Of course, these were specific use cases for nonprofits, but the functionality and UI can be used by any organization.… Read the rest

How many children should one record have?

In Salesforce, it’s generally not recommended for a parent record to have more than 10,000 child records.

Beyond this threshold, skew occurs. While Salesforce can technically store more records, it starts to run into significant, transaction-breaking problems.

Here are some concerns, and ways to mitigate them.… Read the rest

Tech debt: where do you start?

A while ago, I lived in a townhouse with an old and crappy fence separating my backyard from my neighbours.

While doing major renovations to the house, I inquired to the city about replacing the fence. They said the only option, as per the bylaws, would be to replace it with a steel picket fence.… Read the rest

How many are too many admins?

It sounds laughable, but I’ve seen small Salesforce orgs in which all users were System Administrators.

On the other side, I’ve seen a single admin for an org with more than 200 users.

The general recommendation is 1 admin per 75–100 users, and some suggest 1 admin per 50–75 users.… Read the rest

Do you use a password manager?

Speaking of passwords, do you use a password manager?

It’s amazing to me to see so many Salesforce consultants either reuse the same password in all their client orgs, or use a very basic way of creating a password per client.… Read the rest

A better password policy

While training for my User Experience certification, I learned a valuable lesson about passwords.

In Salesforce, the default setting for “User passwords expire in” is 90 days. That means every 90 days, users need to think of a new password.

However people aren’t good at creating passwords.… Read the rest

So you’ve inherited a Salesforce org – now what

Congratulations! You’re the proud owner of an existing Salesforce org! OK, but now what?

Peering behind the curtains of an org that’s new to you can be both daunting and exhilarating. What surprises will you find?!

Here’s a 15-step checklist I follow to get a high-level view of things.… Read the rest

Agentforce everything

In an email last week, I wrote, “Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Salesforce changes all of their products to include “Agentforce” (“Agentforce Sales Cloud”, “Agentforce Slack”, etc.)”

Well, this is actually happening!

Although there wasn’t an official announcement, Salesforce has quietly renamed their cloud products to include the word Agentforce.… Read the rest

Did Dreamforce cancel admins?

David Giller recently posted how the most recent Dreamforce may have “cancelled” Salesforce Administrators.

A summary of his thoughts: Previous Dreamforces talked in length about the pivotal role of admins. However in this year’s keynote, the word “admin” was never mentioned.… Read the rest

Salesforce SLDS v1 vs v2

The Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) v2 finally dropped in my latest scratch org, and I’m not impressed.

At first glance, things look more modern. However being UX certified, I noticed several issues that may negatively impact users. Let’s examine page layouts.… Read the rest

What is Hyperforce anyway?

In order to respond to organization’s need to have local data residency, Salesforce created Hyperforce.

Hyperforce is basically Salesforce infrastructure running on Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

Before Hyperforce, Salesforce maintained their own servers in a handful of countries.… Read the rest

Residency regulations and compliance

When you buy a Salesforce instance, it is normally created on a US server (at least that’s what happens in Canada and the US).

However some organizations prefer to have their data in their country or state of residence. In some cases, it’s not merely a preference.… Read the rest

Agent-powered Agentforce for Agents

Yesterday, Salesforce announced Agentforce 360. It’s the fourth iteration of Agentforce, and rather than simply call it Agentforce 4, they went with the word “360”.

It’s a huge announcement, and you can read more about it in Salesforce’s Ben article.

There are now some new features that include the word “360”.… Read the rest