Archive

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

• User login frequency. Are people logging in on a frequent basis?

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:

• Traditional CRMs are too focused on on sales team
• Users aren’t updating data, leading to graveyards
• AI is taking over everything

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

As your Salesforce project evolves, you’ll eventually need to make enhancements. When it comes to flows, you have two options:

1. Build a new flow to manage the new functionality
2. Edit an existing flow and add the new functionality

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

1. Email address
2. First and last name
3. Last name and postal code/zip code
4. Last name and birthdate

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

This email is more of a question than a comment. So I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

In flows, it’s common to verify whether a record exists before performing an action. For example, let’s say you need to update a contact if it exists, or create it if it doesn’t.… Read the rest

In Salesforce flows, there’s a relatively new feature called “Update Existing Records”.

It’s only available in Create elements, and it allows you to update existing records instead of creating new ones. This effectively turns the create command into an upsert command.… Read the rest

I must admit, I’m using AI more and more these days. It helps me in numerous ways, but the majority of the time, it’s with development.

Gemini Pro is pretty good with apex coding. With a few prompts, it can create or edit code fairly easily and accurately.… Read the rest

When building a Salesforce package, there are two ways to create and maintain them: 1GP and 2GP.

1GP uses a development org as the source of truth. Most consultants are very familiar with this way of working. You typically start in a DEV sandbox for development, then migrate changes to a UAT sandbox for testing, and finally to production.… Read the rest