As a Salesforce consultant, how should you spend your time when you don’t have much work to do?
This is a common question that is becoming more and more relevant as work is harder and harder to find. Whether you’re a full-time employee of a consulting agency or an independent contractor, the answer is mostly the same.… Read the rest
10k is a Salesforce agency in the US. Over the last few years, they also publish annual reports about the state of the Salesforce ecosystem.
In short, this year’s report doesn’t look great. They call it a “post-COVID hangover.”
Here are some notable takeaways:
So demand has gone down while supply increased.… Read the rest
So you’re doing the agile thing during your Salesforce project. Your two week sprints are full of user stories. Each user story is allocated points, which represents the level of development complexity and ultimately, the time to deliver the story.
The project manager (PM) usually knows how many points can be delivered in an average sprint.… Read the rest
When working in sprints, there are two common ways of demonstrating work to a client. The first is during the sprint, which eats up time for actual development.
The second is after the sprint is finished. This is an interesting choice, as your team has more time to deliver more functionality than option 1.… Read the rest
The sprint is complete and you’ve delivered several user stories and points. Yay to the team for their accomplishments. Now it’s time to show off their hard work.
As a Salesforce consultant, it may very well be your responsibility to demo this work.… Read the rest
When you’re delivering a Salesforce project, you’re probably using a form of agile methodology. It’s the popular kid these days.
Work is usually migrated from a Development (DEV) sandbox to a Quality Assurance (QA) sandbox every two weeks. Towards the end of the sprint, you’ll probably want to demonstrate to the client what was done in that sprint.… Read the rest
Everyone goes through challenges. We all have personal and business obstacles. Once you understand this, the knowledge gives you power and understanding.
Today, when someone is overly angry or upset or just overreacts to a situation, my opinion of the situation is different than it used to be.… Read the rest
While at a local Salesforce user group event yesterday, a colleague spoke about how he received several new opportunities. This is obviously a good sign, as recently Salesforce opportunities are harder to come by than in the past.
The challenge he’s now facing is deciding which opportunity to choose from.… Read the rest
When you have several solutions to a Salesforce problem, how do you make a final decision? How do you recognize and fight for the best solution?
Enter a framework. A framework is a series of guidelines and considerations to help you make the right decision for a specific problem.… Read the rest
There’s a phenomenon in psychology called anchors. An anchor is usually the thing you think most often of, when presented with a stimulus.
For example, if I ask you to think of a tool, your first thought is probably of a hammer.… Read the rest
Earlier today, I helped a friend clean his storage locker. He’s been holding onto things for far too long, and needed someone to help him discard things.
Being a minimalist, I told him to throw away, recycle, or donate nearly everything.… Read the rest
Yesterday, a colleague accidentally factory reset their mobile phone. She was jet lagged and didn’t fully realize what she was doing until it was too late.
As a result, she lost hundreds of notes, contacts, pictures, and other important information. None of this data was being backed up into the cloud.… Read the rest
Whenever you create or refresh a partial copy or full sandbox, you should be aware of certain privacy settings. For example, you wouldn’t want to accidentally send an email to a contact from a sandbox.
When a sandbox is updated, the email deliverability setting is automatically set to “System email only”.… Read the rest
Whenever a sandbox is created or refreshed, there may be additional steps to perform.
This is because the information from the source environment (either Production or another sandbox) is copied to the destination environment (the new or refreshed sandbox).
Some information should remain the same in the destination as in the source.… Read the rest
Not all Salesforce projects require the same number of sandboxes. Smaller ones require fewer sandboxes and massive projects require additional ones.
Here’s a rough guideline to manage projects of various sizes. One Production is always assumed.
Small
Medium
Large
Extra Large
The takeaway
Not surprisingly, the larger the project, the more the sandboxes.… Read the rest
Before officially launching medium-to-large amounts of new functionality into Production, you’ll want to perform a checklist.
This checklist is a list of things to be completed by you and your team. It details that all the preliminary steps have already been completed, as well as preparing the use for the upcoming change.… Read the rest
The final diagram in this Salesforce diagram series is the release management diagram.
This is used when you’re using DevOps to manage and deploy changes between sandboxes and eventually to production.
It’s common to have a release branch for each major Salesforce instance.… Read the rest
Understanding the relationships between sandboxes and production systems is another key diagram for Salesforce consultants.
This helps understand which sandboxes are used for what purpose and the general flow of configuration and development.
A diagram for sandbox management needs to include
Looking beyond the borders of Salesforce, a system architecture diagram helps understand Salesforce’s place in the project.
Just like user flows, it’s always a good idea to have a current state and desired future state for system architecture. The future state might be a phased approach, with different integrations introduced in later phases.… Read the rest
Knowing and documenting the user’s process is an important step when designing Salesforce. It’s actually one of the first steps in understanding how things currently work.
If your client is moving from a legacy system to Salesforce, the current process should include what the legacy system does.… Read the rest
As a Salesforce consultant, you often need to create a visual representation of Salesforce objects and their relationships.
This representation allows for both you and your client to understand which objects are parents and which are children. It also helps dictate the sequence for data imports.… Read the rest
In our daily lives, it’s sad to think that 80% of us stay in our comfort zone.
This means they would rather stay with the familiar, where things are known and effectively boring. Regular routines allow weeks to bleed into each other, and playing it safe allows you to avoid risks.… Read the rest
A Salesforce consultant needs to manage their inbox well. With emails originating from clients, internal team members, and perhaps mixed with some personal emails, having a simple but efficient system can really help keep you organized.
Here are some helpful guidelines
1.… Read the rest
As an independent Salesforce Architect, I usually work on multiple projects at the same time.
Throughout the day, I often need to switch focus from project A to project B, and then return to project A. Then jump to project C, and back to A or B.… Read the rest
As an independent Salesforce consultant, your sales call should be focused on learning about your prospect’s challenges and their desired future state.
There are also several topics that should be carefully navigated or avoided altogether. Here are a few cautionary topics:
1.… Read the rest
When most people think of a salesperson, an image of a stereotypical used-car salesman usually comes to mind.
Sales is so much more than that. It’s essentially just a conversation between you and a proposal to see if your services are a good fit.… Read the rest
There were many questions from readers about the flow transform element. So I played around with it a little bit further and discovered some unpleasant surprises. It’s still helpful, just less helpful than expected.
The core of the issue is, when you use the transform from source data to target data, it’s not actually getting all the fields of the target object.… Read the rest
Today was the first ever Dreamin conference in Montreal.
Note: There are two kinds of Salesforce events: those organized by Salesforce themselves, and those organized by Salesforce supporters. Dreamin events are the latter. You can find them all over the globe.… Read the rest
Let’s say you need to determine the number of unique accounts across a series of opportunities.
The old school method of doing this in a flow is using nested loops. Nested means you loop within a loop. You do this because you don’t want to have a Get operation instead of a loop.… Read the rest
In yesterday’s email, we discussed how to create custom fields to indicate which records were active this year and last year.
That works great for those two years, but what if you want to go further back? Like more than 10 years back, to the beginning of your organization.… Read the rest