There was a Trailblazer Community meetup for the Salesforce Developer Group in Montreal this past Wednesday.
As Montreal is my hometown, it was a delight to attend.
A cozy group of developers, analysts, consultants, and a few architects were present. Although I wasn’t there for too long, I made several new connections.… Read the rest
On Aug 15, 2024, the first ever Montreal Dreamin conference will be held. There hasn’t been a trailblazer community event in Canada since True North Dreamin in 2019, so this is very exciting news!
I’m also proud to announce that Dryad Receipting for Salesforce is an official sponsor.… Read the rest
Sometimes it’s helpful to see things from another perspective.
Here are a few ways to certainly not help your end users and avoid adoption in a Salesforce project.
Don’t understand their current process
Before starting to build, you should have a good understanding of your client’s current process.… Read the rest
Adoption is one of the most important criterias for a successful Salesforce implementation.
Given this, here are a few ways to improve adoption.
Find your champions
Champions are future users that will influence others to your cause. It helps to have a combination of positive champions and negative champions.… Read the rest
After years of experience working on Salesforce projects, I’ve come to realize that one of the most important factors for a successful project has nothing to do about technology.
As an architect or consultant, this may seem counterintuitive. But upon further examination, this fact is rather easy to accept.… Read the rest
During a typical day, how do you know what to do next?
You may have multiple projects to work on, or multiple elements of a single project, in addition to personal things that need your attention, meetings to book, etc.
For me, I track things in a to-do list.… Read the rest
Looking at the other side of yesterday’s coin, there are some drawbacks to being an independent Salesforce consultant.
Here are a few for your consideration.
You need to be a one-person business
Instead of entirely focusing on discovery, design, or implementation, you need to manage every aspect of your business.… Read the rest
There are all sorts of reasons why people go independent. In the Salesforce ecosystem, here are three positive ones.
Autonomy
The lifestyle generally allows you to be in control. You choose your clients, how hard you work, how long you work, when to take breaks, and so on.… Read the rest
The other day I was reading an article from fs.blog. It’s a fascinating blog about thinking, mental models, how we learn and think, and all kinds of brain activities.
In the article, “How not to be stupid”, Adam Robinson discusses seven factors that lead to stupidity.… Read the rest
As a Salesforce consultant, you’ll make tons of project decisions.
Some of these decisions are easy to follow-through and complete. No one really questions the choice, and the result is a smashing success.
Other times, the decision is not optimal and course-correction is needed.… Read the rest
OK, you’ve set up your one-person shop, hung your “we’re open” sign on your website, and now sit back and wait for clients to stroll in by the hundreds.
Several weeks later, and you don’t have a single client.
This is obviously a very bad way to start, as you should already have 1-3 clients lined up before becoming an independent consultant.… Read the rest
I’ve been at a client’s location for a handful of days this week. It’s great to see so many people in-person and in 3D, rather than the 2D we see through Zoom.
Last night, once all the productive working sessions were done, and the office small-talk ended, a few of us headed out for dinner.… Read the rest
In a typical Salesforce implementation project, you’re usually asked to provide a work estimate fairly early in the sales process.
The biggest problem with this is, you’re providing a number in a moment when you know the least about the client and the project.… Read the rest
Another problem with hourly billing as a Salesforce consultant is your incentives are in the wrong direction.
Imagine you have a house and are presented with two options:
Are you an independent Salesforce consultant that still charges by the hour?
Have you noticed the market limits your maximum hourly rate?
For example, the expected hourly rate for an experienced consultant is about $150 to $200 an hour, which results in an income ceiling of about $200k to $250k a year.… Read the rest
As an independent Salesforce consultant, one of the best ways to set yourself up for success and happiness is to have good clients.
Imagine a situation in which the Salesforce project implementation isn’t going well.
We’ve all been there, even the best of us. In a recent case, I worked with a subcontractor that was.. less than ideal.
As the upcoming deadline loomed, the client started getting nervous.… Read the rest
I’m currently managing a subcontractor’s work and a client’s expectations for a Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce migration. It’s not going well, and I wanted to share some lessons learned with you.
This was mentioned before, but it’s recommended to do at least 3 rounds of data migration, which includes
With smaller clients or projects, sometimes you can merge the Dev and Test into one instance.… Read the rest
Over the weekend, I spent some of my downtime at a cottage with an old friend. I’ve noticed that spending time in the country, close to nature and to water, really relaxes and rejuvenates me.
My friend’s father is close to 83 years old, and sadly he suffers from dementia.… Read the rest
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve partnered with iATS to provide payment to receipting capabilities for Canadian nonprofits using Salesforce.
Brickwork by iATS is a free, Salesforce-native app that connects with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to track and manage donations.… Read the rest
As a Salesforce perfectionist, it’s sometimes really hard to stop refining and optimizing things.
Each time I open a medium or complex flow, I can find ways to make things just a little bit better. And when multiple flows have similar behavior, it’s hard to not modify them to be more consistent with each other.… Read the rest
One of the most important steps in a Salesforce implementation project is User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
This is the moment in which the client and end users can finally test the build and raise issues or concerns as needed.
Nothing is built perfectly, so there will always be some bugs or concerns.… Read the rest
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, project management was in its infancy.
The popular methodology at the time was called “waterfall”, which visually symbolized various stages: sales, discovery, design, build, test, deploy. The subsequent stage was started only once the previous stage was completed.… Read the rest
In the Salesforce nonprofit realm, there were some major changes recently. Since it’s been just over a year since NPC was released, here’s my updated view on the topic.
Background: When nonprofits want to use Salesforce, they typically install the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).… Read the rest
This was my second World Tour in NYC, and I felt the energy to be slightly less intense than last year’s. I attended a couple of sessions about AI and nonprofits, and missed the keynote. But the main theme was basically “everyone can be an Einstein”.… Read the rest
Here was my approach to yesterday’s task challenge.
I started by creating a custom object called “Task Team”, with a lookup to the User. Using a custom objects allows me to potentially create additional fields, such as “Role” (picklist) and “Primary” (checkbox).… Read the rest
Here’s a real-world Salesforce scenario I recently had with a client.
The client needed to record meetings with their end clients. The meeting summary tracked the subject, summary, date, status, related contact(s), and related organization. It also needed to record the internal team (a collection of users) present at the meeting.… Read the rest
Every once in a while, I come across a “feature” in Salesforce that really forces me to scratch my head.
In today’s WTF moment, I was working with a client on a screen flow. We needed to add a lookup component, to allow users to select one or more contacts.… Read the rest
As long as people are typing on keyboards, errors will happen. Duplication is arguably the most common type of error in Salesforce, and of those, accounts and contacts are the most popular.
Creating a strategy to identify duplicates is a multi-phased approach.… Read the rest
Let’s say you’ve verbally proposed a monthly support engagement to your Salesforce client. What does the written proposal look like?
To help answer this, here’s an excerpt from my 5 page proposal template:
Project Options
In the following pages, I have outlined three options of increasing complexity for the project.… Read the rest