As you may know, I’ve been working on Dryad Receipting for Salesforce for a couple of years now. The app saves nonprofits time and reduces stress when generating tax receipts for their donors.
When it first launched, the focus was on the Canadian nonprofit market.… Read the rest
As a followup from yesterday, here’s how I would have written this post.
Availability opening for Salesforce projects in manufacturing
Hi, LinkedIn network — My principal mandate is coming to an end soon. So I’ll be available for new opportunities starting May 15th, 2025.… Read the rest
Talking about specialization or lack thereof, here’s a real world use case about how NOT to advertise you’re available for work.
Below is a post from LinkedIn that appeared in my feed today. I removed the person’s name to keep them anonymous.… Read the rest
Given how Salesforce certifications have lost most of their value, another question logically follows. How do you convey knowledge without them?
Here are three steps to get you going.
1. Specialize
If you’re a generalist, it’s difficult to distinguish yourself from your competition.… Read the rest
There’s a lot of recent chatter on social media about Salesforce certifications. Some consultants are asking whether certs still have any value or not.
Back in the day, certs were a great way to distinguish yourself from competition. And partners shared the total number of certs from their employees as a vanity metric.… Read the rest
It is with great pleasure to announce that I’ll be attending Montréal Dreamin’ this year.
The event takes place on June 5 and 6, 2025 at the Double Tree Hilton. Once again, I’ll be a speaker and a sponsor.
The speech is the same one I did at True North Dreamin (TND), called “Free yourself from hourly billing and unlock your full value”.… Read the rest
Another key point with an advisory retainer is making yourself available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To be clear, “being available” doesn’t mean “being responsive”. It simply means the client can contact you anytime. You can make a best effort to respond ASAP, and even answer after 5pm.… Read the rest
Regarding advisory retainers, here is the exact template I use for quotes.
Feel free to copy+paste and adjust as needed.
This is an advisory role, assisting with strategy and best practices without hands-on involvement. I will meet regularly with the team to review progress, answer any questions, and generally advise the team as needed.… Read the rest
Before we begin, this is not an email about bragging.
This is about showing you the art of the possible. If I can do it, so can you. I don’t have any magical powers that you don’t have. I simply don’t limit myself to common perceptions.… Read the rest
As a solo Salesforce consultant, the market dictates your maximum hourly rate.
The hourly rate for an experienced consultant is usually between $150 to $200 an hour, which results in approximately $200k to $250k a year.
FYI, I know a Certified Technical Architect (CTA) that charges $300 an hour, which is the highest I’ve seen for a solo consultant.… Read the rest
True North Dreamin (TND) wrapped up today, after two days of keynotes, sessions, and workshops. It was quite a fun event, and especially meeting people in real life that I’ve only spoken to on Zoom or chatted with on LinkedIn.
Here are some thoughts.… Read the rest
Let’s review yesterday’s scenario, in which my role was Solution Architect, and my responsibilities were:
For this work, I billed by the hour, up to an agreed upon maximum of 20 hours per week.… Read the rest
About 6 months ago, I chose to work with a Salesforce agency that billed by the hour. At the time, I needed the opportunity and it was a fun project, so I accepted a reasonable hourly rate.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out I’m not compatible with hourly billing anymore, and the agency let me go.… Read the rest
As a reminder, I’ll be attending True North Dreamin 2025 in Vancouver. The event takes place on April 24-25, 2025 at The Nest at UBC.
I’m attending as a sponsor and a speaker.
As a sponsor, I’ll be demoing two editions of Dryad Receipting for Salesforce, one for NPSP and one for Industries.… Read the rest
While at DreamOle last week, a term was used that I’ve never heard before. To paraphrase, the person said, “Product owners want AI-first products”.
There are several prominent “first” terms.
For example, the term “mobile-first products” is familiar to most. If not, at a certain moment in the past, there was a big shift to ensure all new websites and applications were responsive.… Read the rest
Formulas in Salesforce flows are really cool. They are a unique type of variable, one that has multiple purposes.
Here’s one of my favorite methods to show just how cool they are: formulas are only evaluated at the moment they are used.… Read the rest
Here are my takeaways from this year’s Dream Ole in Zaragoza, Spain.
It’s all about Agentforce
Apparently you cannot escape it. It’s not just prevalent in North America, but in Europe too. The opening keynote speaker was a product manager of Agentforce and we had a chance to chat after her presentation.… Read the rest
It’s a little late to mention, but I’m attending DreamOle in Zaragoza, Spain tomorrow.
If you’re also attending, look out for me and I’ll be happy to meet you.
Here are the sessions in my agenda:
They are offering an Agentforce Certification Bootcamp, in which you can obtain an Agentforce cert, but that hasn’t piqued my interest.… Read the rest
When creating custom fields, there are two settings most people ignore: External Id and Unique. When used properly, these boolean settings can be useful.
By setting a field as an External Id, you’re telling Salesforce that this field represents an Id field from a system outside of Salesforce.… Read the rest
As a Salesforce consultant, sometimes you play the role of architect. That is to say, not only are you implementing the project, you’re also designing it.
The moment you shift into this role, your role increases dramatically.
The main one being, whatever you design, you are responsible for.… Read the rest
There probably isn’t a single Salesforce project that has ever gone perfectly to plan.
Just like the sayings, “If you don’t make any mistakes, you’re probably don’t make anything”, and Mike Tyson’s popular one, “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face”.… Read the rest
Let’s say you have a record-triggered flow that calls a subflow. Sometimes you need to pass variables to the subflow.
If you need to pass a record to the subflow, you have two options:
While both get the job done, I usually recommend option 1.… Read the rest
A LinkedIn article was published yesterday about hardcoding URLs in flows. The author is trying to solve a problem involving URLs that change depending on the environment.
For example, let’s say you have a screen flow that creates an account, and you want to display a link to the newly created account in the last step.… Read the rest
Every once in a while, when debugging flows, you may come across an error such as “Unable to obtain exclusive access to this record or 1 records: 003OL00000EMzT8YAL”
At face value, this error message doesn’t seem to tell you very much.… Read the rest
Record locking is when you inform Salesforce you want to lock a record for a certain period of time. Your process becomes the only one that can access that record. Any other processes that attempt to access it at the same time receive an error.… Read the rest
How that we’ve covered flow bulkification and flow interviews, we can tie things together. As mentioned, sometimes Salesforce automagically bulkifies flow interviews.
Most of the time, this is a good thing. Sometimes it’s not so good.
For example, imagine a flow that gets and updates a custom setting.… Read the rest
In Salesforce, there are two flow parts: the building part and the execution part. Here are some interesting things to know about the latter.
Each time a flow executes, Salesforce creates an instance of the flow. The instance is a standalone unique copy of the flow, running within a specific context.… Read the rest
Most good Salesforce consultants are already familiar with good flow practices. Things like
Every once in a while, it’s interesting to see how our parent company is doing. You know, the big one that we all depend on for our livelihood.
This income chart was recently released:
It’s interesting to notice a few things:
A couple of readers provided some feedback from yesterday’s email that I felt added to the conversation.
The 1st is the option to use validation rules for required fields. This approach has pros and cons.
Pros: