This is the first time I’ve ever done this, as these emails are meant for you – not for me. So please forgive this shameless plug.
I currently have bandwidth for a consulting project.
I’m most valuable in a solution architecture role, ideally in the nonprofit sector.… Read the rest
A few days ago, 10K released this year’s annual report on the Salesforce Talent Ecosystem.
Here are some notable mentions.
Summary
After two years of decline, the Salesforce job market is rebounding with a new phase of maturity, called “cautious optimism”.… Read the rest
Another popular concern some consultants have with charging a monthly rate for support is what happens during busy months.
Let’s say in one month, lots of support tickets are created. In the following month, only a handful of tickets. Is that fair?… Read the rest
There was lots of feedback and interest regarding the monthly support package, so let’s dive deeper.
When you have an open-buffet style of support, you may be concerned about being overwhelmed.
One way to avoid being overwhelmed is to artificially create a funnel.… Read the rest
The most common support service is for the client to buy a bucket of hours. Support tickets are priced by the hour, and once the bucket reaches 0, more hours are purchased.
While this approach technically works, you’re trading time for money.… Read the rest
I have a wonderful client that I’ve been working with for over a year.
As per my usual MO, the projects were always fixed price. This means I worked towards obtaining the project’s goal, and never submitted change orders.
As with all my projects, I offer a lifetime bug-free guarantee.… Read the rest
The world is a random place. One moment you could be working hard on a feature, and the next moment, the client asks you to drop everything and work on something else.
When I grew up, the boy scouts had the motto, “Be prepared”.… Read the rest
There was a big ruckus recently about Marc Benoiff’s comment about using Agentforce to reduce headcount.
He’s quoted as saying, “I’ve reduced it [company headcount] from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads”.
Some are interpreting this as he fired 4000 people.… Read the rest
As AI becomes more and more adept at writing code (I’m looking at you, Claude Code), it begs the question: can it be used for more than just proof of concepts?
Taking this idea to the extreme, a non-developer can prompt their way and build a project.… Read the rest
Yesterday and today is/was a two-day session called Fundraising.AI Global Summit 2025: Amplify Impact. While not Salesforce specific, it did connect the dots between AI and nonprofits.
Nonprofits are generally slow to adopt technology. They are usually risk-averse, as they don’t have the deep pockets to be able to easily pivot if things go wrong.… Read the rest
Last month I wrote about how to connect AI directly to Salesforce. Since then, I’ve actually followed the instructions in that email. The results were better than I expected.
Using this approach, your AI understands your entire project. So you can ask it questions and have it perform tasks for you.… Read the rest
While at Northeast Dreamin’ in Boston last week, the keynote speaker, Steve Baines, spoke about being a Salesforce architect.
One of his points was, “if you’re building trust and clarity – you’re an architect”.
The overall theme is, being an architect is more of a mindset than an official title. … Read the rest
Let’s dive a little deeper into user adoption, specifically monitoring.
One great way to keep track of whether users are actually using Salesforce is to build a bunch of reports.
Here are some for your consideration
There are two moments when you can improve user adoption: before adoption actually begins, and after.
The best way to solve a problem is to avoid it completely.
This principle definitely applies to user adoption. If you can perform a “good enough” job with change management, then user adoption begins strong.… Read the rest
There are more and more posts on LinkedIn about how the traditional CRM (including Salesforce) is slowly dying.
The posts have similar themes:
Some posts sarcastically suggest you to vibe code your own CRM (BTW, the term “vibe coding” means using AI to develop).… Read the rest
On Sept 3, 2025, Northeast Dreamin will be held.
I went in 2023 and had a blast. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to 2024, but I’m definitely going this year.
Unlike the previous two years, it’s being held in Boston, MA instead of Manchester, NH.… Read the rest
With each passing week, AI gets smarter and smarter.
Apex coding, formula building, general searching, and troubleshooting are currently well positioned to be completely superseded by AI.
However there’s one important thing that hasn’t been replaced just yet; your humanity.
As a Salesforce consultant, your career isn’t completely technical.… Read the rest
The recent examples provided on using AI and Salesforce are disconnected.
That is, you need to do something in Salesforce, so you provide all relevant information to an AI. It gives you an answer, and you implement it. But the AI doesn’t “see” your Salesforce instance and understand the entire context.… Read the rest
Years ago, Google became a household name. It started as a noun and turned into a verb. You “googled” something when you wanted to search for it on the internet.
Fun fact #1: Google’s name comes from the word “googol”, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros
Fun fact #2: I used AI for this fact, not Google
Today, AI is overtaking, or already has overtaken, google searches.… Read the rest
Aside from writing apex code, AI can be a helpful tool for Salesforce consultants.
Here are a few for your consideration:
Field labels
If you’re ever struggling to come up with a concise name for a field, AI can help.
For example, in a current project in which users complete a form, the answers need to be saved in fields.… Read the rest
As your Salesforce project evolves, you’ll eventually need to make enhancements. When it comes to flows, you have two options:
Option 1 is a good choice if the change can be made in the existing flow without having to add any (or adding just a few) elements.… Read the rest
If you’re a developer, you may be tempted to clean up apex code from time to time. This is because some other developers create what is called “spaghetti code”.
Spaghetti code is basically messy code that may work for a time, but incurs technical debt.… Read the rest
As with all things with labels, it’s a good idea to have a naming convention for your flows.
A proper convention allows you and your clients to find what they are looking for easily. It also makes things easier to support, and to create a sense of structure.… Read the rest
Flows are a pivotal feature in Salesforce, and every good enough consultant needs to know how to use them effectively.
Let’s start with naming conventions. Each element in the flow needs a label. They should be clear, consistent, and concise. If more details are needed, place them in the description field.… Read the rest
When building low-code automations in Salesforce, you have two options: Flow and Omniscript.
Flow was designed by Salesforce. As a result, more people are familiar with it. With nearly each release, it gets better and better, as more features are added.… Read the rest
A few readers were curious to know more about yesterday’s email regarding Building flows: go down or go across
Here are a few additional comments.
I generally start all flows using the vertical style. It feels like flows were designed to be used in this way, and it’s usually easy to follow the logic.… Read the rest
Let’s say you design a subflow that attempts to find a contact. After several attempts, if a contact isn’t found, it creates one.
Each attempt tries to find a matching contact using different criterias. For example, find by
If attempt 1 doesn’t return any results, you move to attempt 2.… Read the rest
Here’s a question for you: When you update a field to its current value, what happens?
For example, let’s say you have a contact with a phone number of “123 456 7890”. Then you execute a flow that updates the phone number to “123 456 7890”.… Read the rest
Thanks again to everyone who responded to yesterday’s email about updating a record collection.
The most popular solution to test for > 0 records is to simply use a decision element with {Get_Contacts} Is Empty. This is simple and clean, and I’ll adopt this approach going forward.… Read the rest
Thanks to everyone who responded to yesterday’s email about the steps used to verify a record.
The consensus is, most people use {Get_Contact.Id} is blank or {Get_Contact} is blank.
Now, that email was about verifying whether a single record exists or not.… Read the rest