Category: SalesForce Customisation

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How to be a Salesforce Consultant?

salesforce consultant

Being a person who has been with the Salesforce environment for more than 10 years, I always dreamt of being a consultant. The opportunity to work on numerous Salesforce implementations for varied clients in a wide ranging business verticals allured me a lot. I really enjoyed the process of understanding how companies perform their business.

As a Salesforce customer, I was associated with various kinds of consultants, some were very good and others not very good. However, what I always marveled at was the depth and breadth of their Salesforce knowledge.

Understanding Salesforce from scratch

I began my association with Salesforce in 2008 when my VP of Marketing told me to find the team for new CRM. I assessed various products and zeroed in on Salesforce as the required solution. I swiftly got to know that the potency of the tool lay in the platform and the capability to create new functionality that wasn’t very innovative. To put it simply, I got convinced fully that I should forgo AVP title for pursuing Salesforce full time.

One Salesforce Administrator post resulted in another and then finally I ended up being in charge of all Salesforce products for a pan Indian, privately held company with numerous business units under a shade. My task was to work with these business units to learn their individual business requirements and then devise a tailored Salesforce solution for their group in a manner that also integrated their data with all of the other business units within the company. Consulting was a tough task and when the time was ripe to take my next step, I felt I was game for the change.

Willing to describe my journey

When I began my quest for the ideal Salesforce consulting shop, I spoke to a few different firms that I thought was a perfect fit for my requirement. As I talked to several prospective recruiters one sentiment cropped up inside my mind. It seemed that only those who were consultants previously were meant to be consultants. I mean it was the usual problem of not being able to gain experience till you already have experience.

Eventually, I lended up as a Solution Architect at a reputed entity — but it was not a cakewalk. So, if you experience similar kind of feeling and want to get into consulting, here are some valuable resume and interview tips:

Speak regarding your internal clients: Simply for the reason that the product owners or subject matter experts that you associate with are working in the same company as you, does not imply they are not your clients. You get additional points for speaking about tough as nails clients and the way you handled them.

Highlight your work with regard to projects: Salesforce is a continuously growing product and it might come across like one giant body of work, however, try to dissect those features that were made into individual projects and speak regarding the problems and successes that you achieved during those projects.

Speak about certain business woes: We very well understand that the Salesforce is an amazing tool but where it actually shines is in its capacity to simultaneously handle puzzling business issues and make the lives of end-users very convenient, so showcase those stories.

Highlight the numbers: You can speak about the amount of time saved by your Salesforce solutions or a certain dollar rate of new business wound up as a result of improved workflow. This explains lucidly why your solutions got a genuine ROI.

I am of the belief that these tips will help you get your next or maybe first Salesforce consultant. I am working as a Solution Architect with Winklix for a little more than a year now and it is a call I am really proud of. All the best.

Thanks ,

Mithitesh

Salesforce Consultant

Winklix

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How Salesforce can benefit businesses in 2021?

salesforce

Do you in business deal with several vendors? Do you find it hard to follow up on all vendors, prospects, orders, and project deliverables? Also, is this impacting your business productivity? If the answer to these are yes, then the time is ripe for you to make a change. Businesses invest big-time on approaching vendors to invite quotations, and then focus hard on knowing about the statuses. With Salesforce at your disposal for vendor management, you can utilize any prospects and various vendors from a single location apart from dealing with your chief business operations.

Salesforce has been a blessing

Being a leading cloud computing platforms, Salesforce has totally transformed the manner in which organizations carry out business by bringing a hugely dynamic, customized and user-friendly platform for holistic implementation services, i.e. Force.com. With Force.com, developers can rapidly make and deploy ideal cloud applications that are compact, safe, and accessible and without fretting over provisioning hardware or application stacks. Also, this platform offers different tools for explaining the data model, the business rationale, and the user interface.

Two To Tango

It does not matter what you’re creating: a totally refurbished UI, merging data from several sources, or utilizing frameworks such as AngularJS, Ember, React, or Backbone, there will be scenarios where you would have to heavily utilize JavaScript. In case you are keeping a track of web development for the last few years, you would have seen the rise in the appeal of JavaScript frameworks in terms of building web applications. Currently, JavaScript frameworks have deservedly made their way into the Salesforce development lifecycle.

Top Salesforce Trends

Hence, at present it is very much obvious that it has become essential to utilize a CRM to boost sales and new customers and look after the retention rates. If someone mentions ‘CRM,’ then the first thing that comes to our mind is Salesforce, as this happens to be the czar in the CRM market. Hence, let us look at some of the famous Salesforce trends and the way businesses are going to capitalize on Salesforce in 2021.

Mobile Evolution

The trend of buying via mobile, and helping the software to back and turn the user experience convenient via disentangled interface design, began many moons ago. Salesforce will keep growing in this regard and the same thing can be expected this year. Among the mobile Salesforce prospects featured in 2021 happens to be a mobile application that helps to deal with the CRM instance on the go for all users in the system and building mobile web-pages and applications with Salesforce SDK with lesser involvement of code.

Artificial Intelligence

One of the biggest technical innovations in recent times, AI has started spreading its tentacles to the majority of the sectors. Even sales departments, regardless of any business, can derive a lot of advantages from it. Salesforce unleashed Einstein AI some time back, and while it is growing consistently, at present it is very much handy to improve the functioning of current products to derive maximum out of them. Sales Cloud permits AI to spot the ideal opportunities and offer useful insights through a sales analytics app and add more authenticity to the predictions. With this, it is possible to set automatic notifications to work on potential leads and as a result enhance the prospects of successful deals. A machine learning feature helps in case classifications and by utilizing Service Cloud, customer support representatives can solve routine cases early. Experts forecast that in 2021, executing Einstein AI into Salesforce products is going to be the most common request to Salesforce consulting companies and individuals.

Tailored to suit specific requirements

These days, it is not simply adequate to utilize a product out of the box as it is. Customization was very much there in Salesforce, but business industries in large numbers are triggering demand for certain functionalities and customizing the product in line with particular requirements, considering the array of various tools needed for a certain business to operate, such as billing systems, risk management, project management features, and other industry-specific things and workflows. It is obvious that being in the apparel business is different from being in the business offering booking services. This year, especially businesses have to seriously ponder over streamlining of their CRM. Like any software customization, you will have to get professional counseling to ensure that everything is established as per your requirements. Selecting the appropriate Salesforce consulting partner will define the success of your business. So, while taking such a call, don’t ignore the certifications and accord weightage to official Salesforce partners as this will help you in getting the desired outcomes for your business but also will save time and money for you.

Customer 360 platform

It is becoming extremely critical to nurture good ties with customers these days, as the technology evolves the satisfaction of existing customers matters a lot for businesses. This precisely the reason why assistance departments of all companies are emphasizing on offering excellent services to their clients. Currently, the Salesforce Customer 360 feature can lead to a lot of prosperity for the businesses. At the conclusion last year, Salesforce launched Customer 360 Truth edition that permits merging information of customers from all Salesforce applications at one place. By providing a unique ID to a user, you can see all previous interactions and profile details to ascertain how to provide the right solutions for any problems and display the superior level of customer care service.

Marketing Automation

This has to be highlighted, as this year we might see the proclivity to assign the resources to strategic goals and improving normal tasks devoid of human intervention. Marketing Sales Cloud can enhance marketing campaigns by helping you to dispatch automated emails, arrange customer data to offer targeted discounts, perform A/B tests, and many more things. That is the reason why business owners’ and marketers’ will be focusing on the same this year.

Finally

As a leading phenomenon in the CRM market, Salesforce will set new trends in almost all the industries. Having said that, the enhancement of the current Salesforce features, and the new releases are very important in helping businesses to grow further.

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Which Is Best Strategy To Restore SalesForce Data

Which Is Best Strategy To Restore SalesForce Data

It is quite common for any salesforce user or admin to delete mass scale of data or modify significant amount of records in one go . As the same time it may be chances that due to someone’s bad decision the data may become corrupt also . You must be thankful to recycle bin who can assist you in data recovery in case of data loss , inspire of the fact that it may store certain volume of data for some limited time only .
Another means to recover overwritten data is by making use of filed history tracking in Salesforce . Field history tracking . Field history tracking needs to be enabled manually  , and thereby can’t be enabled for each of the objects . At the same time , it does not permit more than 20 fields per object .
Salesforce provides various back up options such as data export service , data loader and Report export , but in the event of disaster who quickly you will be able to recover the data is all it matters . 

SalesForce Data Backup And Recovery Service 

SalesForce always recommend its customers to opt for native metadata backup solutions or may also recommend third party intervention in backing up and management of data .

“Because of the manual intervention, there is a cost. The cost is relative to the amount of manual work and time needed to perform the recovery. The price for this service is a flat rate of $US 10,000 (Ten Thousand US Dollars) for the one Organization that’s being recovered. The work involved actually costs us much more than that, but we pay for a portion of the service.”

SalesForce Data Recovery Blog

Process

It all starts with the right procedure . Always keep an eye on recycle bin or review deleted records using “export all ” in Salesforce’s Data Loader before raising your case with Salesforce .
Lets quickly look at the steps for restoring data to Salesforce : 

Assess Damage And Defined Goals 

Till now it has been crystal clear in your mind that salesforce database is highly interlinked . For instance say you delete a single parent records in salesforce , all the parent-child database will be automatically deleted and thereby understanding the extent of data loss is essential .

Determination Of Which Data Has Been Lost Where

In order to determine the amount of data loss , the best way out to make a comparison of metadata with backup file of data which has already been exported to Salesforce org. You can use VLOOKUP in excel or any other equivalent to identify the whole relationship .

Creation Of Restoration File 

As you have already determined the missing objects/records , now its time to create separate files for parent and their related objects in “.csv” format 

Transformation Minimisation During Restoration 

The best way to minimise transformation process is :

  • It is always preferable to exclude Audit fields , as Salesforce auto updates it .
  • Always deactivate workflow or validation rules or triggers .
  • Switch auto-number field type to text .

Restore Data 

At the time of manual insert , always try to insert operations to upload parent and make an upsert for child 

What’s Next ? 

After going through the above stages we have seen that salesforce data recovery is cumbersome process right from starting to end point . There are high end chances of possibility of errors or loss of data , and It may also take as long as 20 days or more to recover it . 
One of the best readymade solution for data backup and recovery is Vault . Vault streamlines and automates data recovery process using 1-1 relationships , 1-n relationships and n-n relationships of salesforce data as well as metadata .