I interviewed Lila Logue, Director of Delivery at Roycon, to discuss how you can do more with less using Salesforce. Whether preparing for a new implementation or working with a current org, here’s how you can manage your resources effectively.
How Does Salesforce Save Time and Resources?
The magic of the Salesforce platform comes from not only the solid infrastructure and ability to automate and put processes in a single location but also its commitment to enhancing the platform three times a year. It’s not buy it and forget it, and that’s the beauty of the platform – it releases the benefit of the acquisition and the ability to automate and grow your business from a stable platform.
What types of companies would benefit?
Any company of any size looking to standardize its operations on the platform, regardless of vertical, specialty, or how they market to its clients, can realize the benefit of the platform. Out of the box, you get a lot of meaningful object relationships and ways to customize the platform – should you need a custom field or a custom way of tracking things, it’s highly configurable. Because of that, it can play well in any industry and size. But it is an investment and needs to be set up. It doesn’t just work out of the gate; it needs to be set up; you need a partner who has been there, and that’s why having a partner in the ecosystem is so valuable.
In your experience, is there an example in that you’ve seen significant resource savings?
Resource savings are evident for all the clouds and tools that make up the Salesforce platform. Here are just a couple of examples:
Sales Cloud, you have a centralized place to look at what’s coming into the pipeline from a staffing or services perspective. You’re also able to align and celebrate when deals are closing. Through automation, we can send out notifications to the team to congratulate reps on closing opportunities. It’s a great management tool and can be used as a celebration of success when things are closing.
Field Service Lightning is the extension of not having service reps at their desks but being able to deploy technology to mobile devices, enabling the service tech in the field to properly service the client and tie back the transaction to the platform. You can easily utilize the staff and hold people accountable because the data is the data. A huge benefit is being able to make the transition to being data-driven. Based on experience within the platform, you can adopt the mindset that “If it isn’t in Salesforce, then it didn’t happen,” which is extremely powerful from a management perspective.
Can you realize the benefits with an existing org?
Yes – we can answer this with tech debt. Tech debt is debt, and it needs to be satisfied. Existing platforms realize the platform’s benefits by keeping up with the releases. For example, global picklists satisfy disparate processes and values across objects. On a lead, for example, we capture the region, and we have our defined regions, and they govern how we assign opportunities and cases – it all starts with the lead. Instead of maintaining multiple picklists across multiple objects, we can manage them in one place. Using the global picklists wherever possible helps you manage the data drift. That’s out of the box, that’s free, on the platform, and it’s just amazing. You can also make them restrictive, so as an admin, you can’t skew your data. If I’m doing an import, it would be validated to the exact value, holding admins accountable for data governance. That is one of the things in mature Production orgs that admins can use that’s easy out of the box, big bang for the buck.
Too much automation is just as ineffective from an end-user perspective as not enough automation.
You can also use validation rules in your existing org to force certain behavior. You can have it be conditional, so if a certain field is selected, another field is populated, and the user has to enter data in a certain way. As an admin concerned about the end-user experience, it needs to be said that too many validation rules are also a terrible situation, but where the data is very important and used for executive reporting, is a very important tool. The data needs to be validated upon import. There is accountability all around. Another way to force data governance and start to clean up the processes that may or may not be fully baked in your Salesforce org. As an added time-saver, consider having your error messages match the name of or refer to the validation rule in settings so that an end-user can understand the error and the admin knows which validation rule to troubleshoot from.
With the sunset of Process Builder and Workflow Rules, understanding flow, cross-objects, bulkification, and automation that can be built and extended via APEX from a flow perspective is really meaningful. Be sure to think about processes holistically and how they impact data governance. From user experience to the efficiency of the org, Flow has really come a long way in the last year.
Regardless of where you are in your journey, implementing or considering, Salesforce is such a large ecosystem – there are a lot of resources out there, a lot of partners out there, and going it alone sometimes costs more money than engaging with a partner. And if you need help with your Salesforce implementation, feel free to reach out – we’ll help you get there.
Connect with Lila
Lila often thinks she’s the funniest person in the room, but don’t be misled by her humor, Lila is your go-to technical resource. She grew up as a systems administrator, who helped drive the growth of rapidly scaling companies. She’s developed, built, and scaled marketing and sales operations over and over, and has successfully developed the skill to perfect that tricky relationship between marketing and sales. Lila excels at closing the loop to identify where leads are coming in and how to successfully measure KPIs, all while balancing marketing spend. On top of her extensive background, she has spent the last 5 years consulting, focused on community building in the media and communication space.
About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.