Lightning has now moved on massively to become the premier interface for Salesforce. As such, there is not even a discussion for new arrivals on Salesforce; Lightning is definitely the best option.
Continue reading “Why you need to move to Lightning in 2019”
I am involved in a lot of Salesforce Sales Cloud projects, from initial implementations to rebuilds and refreshes; and everyone will at some point include a discussion about Opportunity Stages. As such I wanted to share some of my learning and suggestions to help you get the most of this vital element of Salesforce. Continue reading “Opportunity stages, how to get them right”
Another acquisition has taken place by Salesforce and this time it focuses on Marketing, Marketing Cloud to be specific. It is likely though that the abilities this adds will be seen throughout the Einstein ecosystem at some point soon.
Continue reading “A marketing specific AI acquisition for Salesforce”
With the amount you can read on each Salesforce release and Microsoft slowing their release cadence for Dynamics 365 to be slower than Salesforce and Oracle, it seams like a good time to look at why the release cadence is important. Continue reading “Why is Release Cadence Important”
Salesforce Community offer you the chance to bring your live customer data into a website as well as the opportunity for your customers/ partners or indeed internal members of staff to add data into your Salesforce instance.
It feels as if a new acquisition was announced every week a while back but that it has been a while. However it is always really good to see where the focusses are. This year it looks as if Quip will be one of those focuses.
Continue reading “Quip grows following Attic Labs acquisition”
It’s been a while in coming by Salesforce is finally banging the last nail into the attachment coffin in the upcoming Spring ’18 release. Continue reading “Goodbye Salesforce Attachments”
The new Time field which can be found in the sandbox at the moment enables you to easily add a time to a record. This can be as a manually entered field or as a formula field. People have been finding uses for this in various firms including event control, project management, within cases and for recording appointment dates which can be easily provided to customers.
It is great to see such a long-standing request taking shape in the Salesforce environment but at present it does have a few limitations. These limitations include only being in GMT, not currently being able to be converted to text or number, and not being available in the process builder. However, these limitations can be seen as a good thing at this stage of the beta as it ensures that the base functionality works correctly.
As far as when to use the new field, the rule is to keep it simple at this stage. Personally I have found it very useful for showing client appointment times. This was previously controlled via a complex formula pulling from a time and date field which lead to difficulties for appointments which had more open timeframes such as AM or PM. With the current limitations and possibility that this functionality will not become a production feature it is not worth spending multiple hours configuring, however it is something that you should be aware of as it could easily become a stable of the Salesforce environment. It is a field type which could be very powerful, especially when you consider that fomula functions such as TIMENOW have been enabled already.
I look forward to this being rolled out to production so that the functionality can be fully utilised for customers. If you have any questions about this though then the Success Community is definitely a good place to look.
There are 2 types of Time fields in Winter ’18 beta:
– as a custom field with Data Type = Time, or
– as a Formula field that returns type = Time
There may well be a few of you asking ‘what Quip is again?’. If so, it is best described as an interactive live document which can present information from multiple areas. To give you an example, if you have a complicated sale which involves multiple teams and complex possible options then you can combine all this information into a single document. This means that on that one document you can see a description of the Sale (like Word), a live spreadsheet of the possible pricing options (Like Excel), a list of tasks (in live Kanban) and you can discuss this with other members of the team in live chat. Check out a quick demonstration video here. The result of having all this information live in one place is that if a figure is altered in Salesforce (yes it is part of Salesforce) then the document is updated automatically. It also allows an overall view to be seen without having to constantly create PDF’s and wonder which is the newest. The potential for this to increase productivity is amazing, especially as it is easy to use without requiring coding.
So what has been announced? Live Apps have been announced, this means more integrations into more places, for instance you can now bring Docusign into a document and get the deal signed without having to create multiple documents. Other noticeable apps are with Atlassian, Lucidchart, and New Relic. This really is quite a start for Live apps and I’m sure it will grow very quickly as more companies start to utilise this time saving tool.
All very exciting and worth having a quick explore. Quip will only get bigger, it is obviously a main focus for Salesforce as shown by it being included in the Keynote and could well prove a revolution for your business.
You can embed polls and calendars, annotate images, track your next project, and bring your favorite third-party apps right into Quip
Having worked with the Salesforce Financial Service Cloud (FSC) and seen companies grow into it and through it, it is great to see that it is expanding out to help Retail Banking. This is not only because it is another sign that FSC is being taken seriously but also because it is being directed as it should be, to the help customer.
A lot of industries have blanket issues for instance retail often fails to build long term relationships, SEO companies operate in an environment that is always changing and PPI claims companies just annoy us all. In the case of Banks, this issue is a need to provide a better service. The FSC for Retail banking is aimed to do exactly this and to do so in a scalable way. At the moment I actually expect a disjointed nature when I speak with a bank, if I take out a card online, I don’t think of their branches when I need help. If I see an advertisement I wouldn’t expect their phone lines to get me to someone who knows about it within 1 minute. Part of me kind of likes this as if it somehow shows that their security is good but in reality that’s ridiculous, I would leave a mobile phone network for less.
By enabling a link between all the facets of their businesses, Salesforce is offering banks the chance to step into the omni-channel world that exists on our high-streets. This means that they can build relationships, understand what their customers want and ultimately build better focussed products.
This doesn’t mean that it will all be rosy though. The set up for a bank will take time to get right and the task of moving a bank to Salesforce as well as on FSC would require a very large data migration. These are short term items though which can be got round with good project management and clear objectives. The fact is that combining a good structure for holding the customers information with products like Service Cloud, Einstein and Pardot is a very exciting preposition.
For banks, which are under tremendous pressure to provide better service, it’s an opportunity to use an integrated set of tools from a single vendor.
In a world were startups like Uber are valued at $66.6 Billion, Instagram is valued at $1 Billion and Twitter is valued at $14 Billion it can be hard to see how $50 Million could get the cream of the competitive AI industry. This is especially so when it is reported that none of three companies mentioned above actually make money. Continue reading “$50M fund for AI companies, how far can this take Salesforce?”
In every business I work with it is clear that complexities sit at every level of what they do and therefore their success. It is also these complexities that can make operating there business frustrating at times.