Digital Transformation - A Top Priority

2022 will be a crucial year for many organizations as a result of unprecedented global, supply chain, and market instability. In the boardroom, cutting expenses and improving efficiency are more important than ever. The automation and efficiency that cloud technology may bring constitutes an obvious option for businesses who are under pressure to find solutions.

It's a difficult period, and many businesses have never had to deal with so many problems at once. But there are similarities between the beginning of the epidemic and this fresh round of international controversy. We may draw lessons from the earlier situation when some businesses were able to take quick action, develop a long-term digital strategy, and emerge stronger.

The Importance of a Digital Strategy

We learned from the pandemic that a lack of a digital strategy, equals no strategy. Throughout the pandemic, digital transformation intensified, and those businesses that were able to quickly change course thrived.

According to research, "leader" companies increased their tech spending in 2020 and 2021 and as a byproduct are currently expanding five times faster than companies that neglected digital transformation.

Additionally, it was discovered that during the pandemic, a new class of organizations shifted their business model and targeted more than twice as many functions for digital transformation. They are currently expanding four times as quickly. 

Today's leaders are taking advantage of the ongoing opportunity by investing in technology as a means of increasing efficiency and profitability, fostering innovation, and securing competitive advantage.

Industry Wide Change

Plans for technology investments are becoming an increasingly important part of corporate strategy as they shift to a more balanced emphasis on growth and cost-savings. It's a change being noticed in companies from every sector.

Major international manufacturers and retailers are using AI and machine learning to rethink supply chain management, to control growing supplier pricing efficiently, and to figure out how to best fulfill customer purchasing preferences.

Automation through the cloud is revolutionizing the customer experience in the financial services sector, as many firms are realizing the urgent need to upgrade both front and back ends of their systems, or lose business.

The same is true for the public sector as a whole; very recently would anybody have dreamed that we would be interacting via SMS or self-servicing through chatbots. Governments' ability to interact with their constituents has been completely changed by digital platforms, and this trend is only going to grow. Governments have witnessed firsthand the potential of what technology can accomplish for them and their citizens: offering high quality digital services, increasing efficiency and cost effectiveness.

To be competitive in this market, businesses must deliver outstanding client experiences with every engagement. They also need to see a return on their technology investments in the form of increased production, efficiency, and resilience. As their digital platform, many businesses are using Salesforce and Customer 360.

We can't be pessimistic about the economy. Every level, every department, and every process must reevaluate how we approach efficiency. By doing this correctly, we may develop our agility and improve our ability to adjust to the unpredictable future. Long-term success opportunities will indeed emerge from this.

Salesforce x MuleSoft

The Problem

Over the last few years especially, companies have relied on IT to brace an extensive transformation to remote working. Over the last year IT professionals have been asked to deliver up to 50% more projects than before the pandemic. This massive increase in workload with only a slight increase in budgets has led to a growing IT delivery gap. 

In 2022 digital transformation is no longer a preference, it is required for companies to succeed. Consumers expect a fast, simple, and on-demand digital experience or their interest will move on elsewhere.

The IT delivery gap widens when there are more digital transformation initiatives that need to be implemented. Most companies still have trouble striking this balance. Understanding how integration fuels digital transformation is the fundamental building block for overcoming this enormous issue. Bring in MuleSoft.

What is MuleSoft?

MuleSoft has been part of the Salesforce family for more than two years. It’s been helping companies reach digital transformation by quickly and simply intertwining all their business systems.

Customers want personal and connected communication. They don’t want to see the intersections of departments and systems. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) like MuleSoft make it simple to link any application, data, and device, enabling businesses to change and innovate efficiently. 

APIs serve as messengers, taking requests from users and inform the system what the user wants to accomplish before sending the results. APIs used by organizations have major benefits, including improved creativity, self-service, and productivity.

MuleSoft makes it simple to connect the information in order to provide a single perspective of the customer and automates company operations to create a connected user experience. Each integration becomes a reusable component by employing a modern API approach. Organizations are not only able to expedite IT delivery, but also deliver innovation at scale.

How Salesforce and MuleSoft can be used together

To get the complete power of Customer 360, MuleSoft can link any system, application, data, and device. Customers can expedite digital transformation thanks to the combined strength of Salesforce, the leading CRM, and MuleSoft, the leading integration platform.

MuleSoft and Salesforce enable businesses to quickly build distinctive, connected experiences by unlocking data across systems, building scalable integration building blocks, and more. The opportunities for integration across various integration patterns, Salesforce products, and outside systems are infinite. Businesses are able to achieve a full, single, customer view in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud by integrating siloed third-party systems and connecting Salesforce Customer 360 with legacy sources to synchronize order, invoice, and product information, among others.

The results are self-evident. According to Forrester, MuleSoft users get over 400% percent ROI in just three years and are able to free up 90% of the time spent by developers on managing APIs and integrations.

Dreamforce 2022 - Here's What to Look For

What is Dreamforce?

Dreamforce is Salesforce’s annual flagship conference, and a highlight for many Salesforce professionals every year. It’s an event that attracts tens of thousands of Trailblazers to The Golden City every fall. Dreamforce consists of countless networking opportunities, workshops, parties, and even famous musical headliners.

At its root, Dreamforce aims to bring the Salesforce ecosystem together to share and learn. The conference inspires attendees to share stories and celebrate their success at one of the largest global tech events. With over 150,000 attendees, as well as sessions and presentations from innovative keynote speakers, you can expect to enjoy a host of groundbreaking Salesforce additions and updates.

Who is Dreamforce for?

This conference is for everyone working in the Salesforce ecosystem. From Admins, architects, developers, Trailblazers, to newbies across every industry and team around the globe.

When and Where?

San Francisco, or “The Golden City,” has been the official home of Dreamforce since its creation in 2003. Dreamforce takes place in the fall each year. This years conference has been set to go down September 20th - 22nd. Although registration is not available until July, be prepared, as tickets sell out fast.

‘Early bird’ pricing will be available in July, with tickets starting at $1300. Some details that have already been made public include:

• 30,000 on-site attendees & 120,000 online participants

• 1400+ breakout sessions

• 25,000 allocated square feet for booths

Dreamforce 2022 will be offering global access with a mixture of on-demand and live events via Salesforce+. So don’t worry if you miss out on tickets, you can still take part in the action online. Salesforce+ is a great resource to get access to free original series, episodes, and more.

What to Expect

This years full itinerary will be released closer to the event but this is what you can expect from Dreamforce 2022:

• Primary Keynote: This is where you will be exposed to all about the latest and greatest Salesforce announcements.

• Dream Pitch: In a Shark Tank style competition, Entrepreneurs will pitch their innovative ideas, with the winner taking home a cash prize.

• True to the Core: An inspiring discussion led by industry pioneers. This Q&A is your opportunity to ask Salesforce execs anything Salesforce.

• Interviews: Some previous high-profile interviews include Barack and Michelle Obama, David Beckham, and even recent NBA Finals MVP Steph Curry.

• Dreamfest: Who doesn’t like to party? If you need a break to take in all the new and exciting information, you can take part in the legendary “Dreamfest”. It has been headlined by some of the worlds biggest acts, including Metallica, The Foo Fighters, and the Killers. You might even get lucky and catch artists like Flo Rida and Macklemore.

Next Steps

Keep an eye on the Salesforce website, as they will for sure be releasing more information soon. Whether you participate in person or online, Dreamforce is an event that you don’t want to miss.

Sales Cloud Unlimited - NEW AI Powered Analytics and Automation

The New Salesforce Unlimited Edition

Salesforce Sales Cloud Unlimited is the complete tech package where AI intelligence, automation and analytics are offered as standard to the higher tier Sales Cloud orgs. If you’ve read about Sales Cloud Unlimited you might find that most of the features seem familiar. The key difference is they are now packaged as one subscription, with one price.

Sales Cloud Unlimited is comprised of five main components:

1. AI solutions, powered by Einstein Activity Capture and Sales Cloud Einstein.

2. Subscription Management for Revenue Cloud.

3. Revenue Intelligence for Industries.

4. Conversation Insights, Salesforce Inbox, and Sales Engagement together.

5. Sales Cloud for Slack.

1. AI Solutions

Built-in AI solutions powered by Sales Cloud Einstein and Einstein Activity capture come as standard. Einstein delivers millions of recommendations daily that bring insight to every sales rep.

The list of AI solutions include:

• Lead Scoring and prioritizing follow-up actions based on the lead converting likelihood.

• Automated contacts.

• Forecasting.

• Recommended Connections.

• Email Insights - Captures the most relevant customer interactions.

• Pipeline Inspection - provides a consolidated view of pipeline metrics, opportunities, weekly changes, close date predictions, and activity info.

• Einstein Conversation Insights.

2. Subscription Management for Revenue Cloud

Subscription Management allows you to manage subscriptions from any self-service channel - buy, pay, renew is now all in one convenient place. It also allows you to manage the complete subscription journey from product to cash. See metrics for insights into your recurring business.

Subscription Management integrates e-commerce, in-app, or any other self-service touchpoint, allowing companies to offer self-service options based on their customers wants and needs.

Lastly, Einstein allows companies to prioritize collection efforts by predicting the likelihood of late or non-payments, as well as recommending the best action to establish consistent revenue streams.

3. Revenue Intelligence for Industries

Versions of Revenue Intelligence for each industry:

• Financial Services Cloud Intelligence

• Energy & Utilities Cloud Intelligence

• Consumer Goods Cloud Intelligence

• Manufacturing Cloud Intelligence

• Communications Cloud Intelligence

4. Conversion Insights, Salesforce Inbox, and Sales Engagements

Provides a unified selling experience with process automation and call coaching to assist reps appear as trusted advisors and drive company growth.

5. Sales Cloud for Slack

Sales Cloud for Slack allows teams to automate deal status updates to team members, seamlessly maintain current records in Salesforce to nourish pipeline analytics, and make it easy to collaborate in real-time across various teams to close deals in a timely manner.

To wrap up, Sales Cloud Unlimited is a “relaunch” of its flagship CRM Product. The tools reflect Salesforce’s philosophy to look at the top 10 things reps spend their time doing manually, and automate as many as possible in order to give them more time for selling. The Sales Cloud Unlimited subscription fees will not increase at this time and remain $300 per user, per month.

Thank you for reading about the new and improved Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition. You’re welcome back anytime to learn more about whats new in the Salesforce Ecosystem.

The Hottest Out-of-the-Box Tool Available - Salesforce Flow

What is Salesforce Flow?

Salesforce recently announced that Workflow and Process Builder are being retired in favor of Flow. The demand and curiosity towards this new functionality has seen a radical increase in the Salesforce ecosystem. In simple terms flows are your new best friend. What exactly is Salesforce Flow?

Flow is an automation tool that can support a wide variety of business processes. Compared to WorkFlow Rules or Process Builder, Flow offers vast capabilities and improved performance:

• Better performance all around, as well as the ability to refine and streamline high-volume automation via features like Run Asynchronously, Fast Field Update (Before Save), and Entry Conditions.

• Better error handling, troubleshooting, and debugging.

• Remarkable extensibility with Invocable Actions and Sub-Flows. Package up bits of automation, wither in Flow itself or in Apex, for re-use around your org to create building blocks to empower more admins and standardize common interactions.

There are quite a few types of Flow, which you can see highlighted below. Salesforce has done a great job of including a short explanation for each type directly in the Flow Builder to help you make the right choice before beginning the build. You can find more information on each type in the official documentation.

What is a Salesforce Screen Flow?

Screen flows provide a way to guide users through a business process; they provide instructions or call scripts, prompt users to populate certain fields, and perform actions behind the scenes such as Record Create or Record Update. Your users will move through a series of screens that you have created - all without having to write a single line of code. Screen flows are user friendly, especially when building from scratch without being an experienced developer.

A single Salesforce Flow can have multiple screens. These display screens will sit on your Flow canvas alongside your other elements. You can find out more about each element here.

The components panel on the left contains the items available to be displayed on the screen element. This is where you will find standard components such as a checkbox, picklist, and text, as well as custom components that have either been developed internally or come from managed packages. Some useful components are:

• EMAIL - This is very helpful when an email address is required from the user running the screen flow.

• TOGGLE - This component is fun for the user experience within a screen flow as it can replace a checkbox or a picklist.

• FILE UPLOAD - This will allow users to import files directly through the screen flow. It’s especially useful as users won’t have to navigate to other pages to upload files.

A screen flow is appropriate if a process can be broken down into steps that require user input and it should be displayed for users based on record criteria or on previous choices in the flow.

A Salesforce Screen Flow can be useful to a variety of different types of users and teams. One of the most common examples is using a screen flow to collect data in order to create a record.

Now that you have become familiar with Salesforce Screen Flow and with Flow basics, it’s time to get your hands dirty and make the switch from Workflow Rules and Process Builder. Be sure to stay up to date on all the new functionalities available to you in Salesforce.

Sales Cadences: An In Depth Look

One of the most important features of Salesforce’s High Velocity Sales package is the “Sales Cadence” feature.  In today’s post, we are going to take a deeper look into Sales Cadences, what’s possible in your cadence, and how it helps increase rep productivity and prioritize their tasks.

For reps who only manage a handful of leads, the Sales Cadence feature may not be quite as relevant.  Whereas those reps who are assigned a larger amount of leads, will find Sales Cadences as a lifesaver.  Most sales managers don’t want their reps focusing too much of their time tracking where each prospect is in the outreach process. Figuring out next steps for each prospect by looking at their Activity Timeline just doesn’t scale.  With Sales Cadences, you can configure several different outreach playbooks to assign to your new leads easily & quickly.  Once enabled, your reps will no longer need to spend time figuring out which reps need immediate attention, as the assigned Cadence will tell them that automatically.

Reps will start their day opening up their Work Queue, which is a prioritized list off all the tasks that are pending based off of where a lead is in their cadence.  Some leads may be due for a follow-up email, while others need to be contacted via a direct call.  All of these tasks are listed in the Work Queue.

Now that you have the tools to build out a Sales Cadence, the team needs to identify the best sales approach to apply to the cadence.  Here are some examples of how Sales Cadences can be listed out:

Contacts at Strategic Accounts

For your most important accounts, consider calling every two days.

1.     1.Call

2.     Wait 2 days

3.     Call

4.     Wait 2 days

5.     Call

6.     Repeat

Contacts at High Priority Accounts

For your important but not your most important accounts, consider calling every 25 days.

1.     Call

2.     Wait 25 days

3.     Call

4.     Repeat

Contacts at Average Accounts

For your medium to low-priority accounts, consider calling every 50 days.

1.     Call

2.     Wait 50 days

3.     Call

4.     Repeat

Leads with High Lead Score

Leads that Einstein Lead Scoring found have a high likelihood of converting get higher lead scores. For these leads, consider a more aggressive outreach.

1.     Call

2.     Wait 2 hours

3.     Call a second time. If the lead doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail and send an email.

4.     Wait 2 days

5.     Call

6.     Wait 2 days

7.     Call. If the lead doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail and send an email.

8.     Wait 2 days

9.     Call

10.  Wait 2 days

11.  Call

Repeat until the target is reached or the lead score falls below your chosen threshold for well-qualified leads.

Leads with Low Lead Scores

For leads that Einstein Lead Scoring found have a lower likelihood of converting, consider a less intensive outreach.

1.     Call

2.     Wait 2 hours

3.     Call a second time. If the lead doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail and send an email.

4.     Wait 2 days

5.     Call

6.     Wait 4 days

7.     Call. If the lead doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail and send an email.

Here is a sample image of how the Cadence would look built out in Salesforce.  As you can see, its interface allows you to easily add/remove/modify additional steps within the process:

Community Cloud now the “Experience Cloud”

One of Salesforce’s most popular cloud products has recently changed names from its well known name of “Community Cloud” to “Experience Cloud”.  With that name change, comes other changes to terminology, documentation & tools used to build your Community portal.  The main user interface will be simplified & all the settings are set to stay in the same place, to ease of the strain of the transition.  The name change was brought about to better reflect the many types of connected digital experiences you can create—including portals, websites, help centers, forums, and mobile apps.

Terminology appears to be the biggest change, for example: Whether you’re creating a forum, portal, or any other type of digital experience, at the most basic level, you’re building an online site. So instead of saying community, which primarily connotes a forum where people interact with one another, we now use the term site in much of the user interface and documentation.

Here is a rundown of the terminology changes deployed by Salesforce:

From the User Interface perspective, you’ll notice that you will need to access “Digital Experiences” and “All Sites” to access your previously labeled Communities:

The other items in the Digital Experiences menu are also simplified, but all settings and items contained in this area remain the same. And, as appropriate, we replaced community with site or Experience Cloud site in Experience Workspaces, Experience Builder, and other areas of your org.  Our team is well versed in the “Experience Cloud” features, and here to help your team grow your digital experience for your customers!

Get ready for Salesforce Meetings!

It’s almost release time, with the Summer ’21 release right around the corner – and with that said, we are providing a sneak peak of one of the upcoming features.  With a large majority of teams moving their meetings to the virtual world, Salesforce meetings provides a much needed boost to help manage those engagements.  With Salesforce meetings, reps can now prepare, host, and follow up on calls that they schedule directly within their Salesforce instance.  Salesforce Meetings provides a holistic view of the contacts involved with the meeting (& see who is scheduled to attend), if there are any open service tickets/issues with the customer, and any relevant customer history information. 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

How does it work?  Salesforce Meetings will sit atop your preferred video call provider (Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc) & provides an interface that gives the presenter all the Salesforce information they need, along with providing the attendees a view of the presentation and presenter side by side.  Once the meeting has completed,  Salesforce will provide an automated action item for the rep to enter in call notes to store.  Furthermore, with Salesforce’s integration with Outlook – it can identify an attendee who may not be a contact within Salesforce, and suggest they be added.

Let’s review some of the biggest features:

·      The Meeting Digest screen gives you a summary of any meeting you are attending. Including attendees, any opportunities you are discussing, tasks, activities, and meeting insights, powered by Einstein.

·      In addition, you have Meeting Studio. This provides a platform to help keep customers and prospects engaged virtually. Allowing smooth transitions between sharing content, as well as a place to take notes, document next steps, and collaborate with their team.

·      Integration with Outlook to prompt Post-Meeting notes

Salesforce Learning Paths – helping your employees succeed!

Over this past year, many companies have had to develop a more remote approach to how we run their business.  A key part of ensuring a smooth remote experience is giving your employees all the self-service tools to help make them successful.  With that in mind, Salesforce has recently developed and rolled out Salesforce Learning Paths.  With Salesforce Learning Paths, companies can integrate Trailhead learning modules directly into Salesforce, empowering employees with the on-the-job learning they need to connect with their customers across sales, service, marketing and commerce in the all-digital world.

Salesforce Learning Paths help give your employees learning modules in small doses throughout their day, rather than formal week-long training courses. Business leaders and managers can personalize learning according to an individual, role, team or for the entire organization, helping employees reach their development goals and organizations build workforce expertise.

Some of the key features of Salesforce Learning Paths:

·       Learn directly in Salesforce: Surface relevant learning content in the context of employees’ work, at the moment they need it most

·      Personalize learning: Tailor content for specific individuals, roles, teams or for the entire organization

·      Drive and analyze engagement: Engage employees with gamification, assignments and leaderboards that analyze learning progress in real time

Salesforce Learning Paths is a great way to provide valuable training to your employees, in small doses, from wherever they conduct their business! 

Develop new insights with Einstein Prediction Builder

Predictive insights are the future of business, and within the suite of Salesforce’s Einstein products – there is a tool called Einstein Prediction Builder that all users will want to become familiar with.  Einstein Prediction Builder lets you make predictions about almost any field in Salesforce with just a few clicks. Then you can use the predictions to power a workflow, focus your efforts, and work smarter.  Some of the most common use cases for Einstein Prediction Builder could be centered around Lead Score & whether or not your sales teams are spending time on leads that are likely never to convert.  Or perhaps your Support Team gets a particularly low CSAT score on cases of a certain priority?  Or one of the most common – predicting what customers are likely to churn?  Let’s dive in and start predicting!

-Pick your object (standard or custom): perhaps you want to focus on which customers are likely to churn?  For instance, this could be the contact or account object where you update if churned status.

-Pick your field you want to predict: in the example, if this is a the Churned field – you’ll want to just ensure that there are other records in Salesforce that show some records as churned and some as not

-Pick the contributing fields: whichever object you select, you’ll want to then select those supporting fields that help tell the story around a churned customer.  You may select every field or decide to omit certain ones that don’t contribute valuable insights.

-Save your selections & Salesforce will create a new field to populate the prediction in:  In the above example, you can create a field such as “Churn score”.

-Finally, embed the Einstein prediction component on the page layout of the object you selected.

Although the setup can be somewhat straightforward – there are some key challenges that need to be considered.  One major challenge is volume of data available to build the prediction around.  You will want to have a large data set for Einstein to review & build its predictions around.  Furthermore, the quality of that data is also key.  If there is a data problem, you will most likely have a prediction problem.  However, if you feel good about the place your data is in & know you have the volume of outcomes that be used for historical perspective – then you are perfectly setup to get started!  As of now, Salesforce does allow each Org the opportunity to build & deploy 1 free prediction….so lets get going!