Dreamforce was AI focused this year, no surprise there is a certification on the topic as well. It is „associate“ certification, meaning cheaper, shorter and probably easier.
A whole trailmix is ready to prepare you, which will lead you through the difference between predictive AI (which has been here for a while) and generative AI (this year star), how to use it responsible and where is place for trust, what is the glossary. (not) surprisingly the majority of the questions are focused on ethical considerations, which says something about Salesforce approach.
While everyone wants to start using in immediately, there are things to consider. As Carl Brundage says
You might have data available but is it current, authoritative, and complete?
because personalization is fine, but if your data are not current then you might mess up a lot.
How are you getting ready for the whole AI thing? Do you have use cases you want to solve? Do you have the right data? Knowledge?
Organizing an event is rewarding activity, but so far (with the exception of our Rapid style in 2021) I always missed all presentations as I’ve been busy with plenty of other things and talks with people. I don’t do it with other events, but with CzechDreamin I go through all the presentation decks to check what it was about and what I missed. And there are usually plenty of great things.
So what did I miss this year (guessing based on the shared presentations, no clue what they said):
great opening keynote with message how important is to know when to follow best practices and when to break them;
Never Ask ‘Does That Make Sense?’, use rather “Am I explaining this in an understandable way or are there some questions?” – read for more details;
don’t set just agenda for a meeting, but put WWHO as well (What, Why, How, Outcome);
Sales process is a separate process, don’t mix it up with Operations, Keep the number of stages as limited as it’s possible, Make Opportunity created and managed easily – minimal necessary fields;
Report & Dashboard REST API looks pretty awesome and you can add filters on the fly;
Effective coding approaches with Salesforce: сombining features for maximum impact was a bit over my head, but I already heard about OOP, about Metadata Relationships and how cool they might be, interesting to see Unified communication form and how it might be better then a lot of lookup fields;
looks like Merkle has some great automation report dashboard for Marketing Cloud;
Trio Tyrlik showed direct API integration with Pardot Marketing Account Engagement to remove the delay in sync;
5 Tinder Secrets to become a Desirable Consultant! which was actually about how to make your LinkedIn profile better to get hired. Important!
Push Upgrades: The last mile of Salesforce DevOps – I appreciate when 3rd party apps doesn’t update on its own and break something, but I really hate monitoring which I can update. Some central subscription approach from Salesforce side would be awesome;
Skill-Based Routing – The Complete Manual – just saving it here when I’ll need it;
„How Might We“ statement can get you better to the root cause, which is the right thing you want to solve;
closing keynote about „We are homo APIens.“ was amazing, see the similarities;
5 key ideas for robust and flexible REST API integrations with Apex – Use separation of concerns, Make everything configurable, Log every call, Handle API Failures, Build yourself a framework <- heavy but makes super sense. Also their Declarative Webhooks app looks really great, I would probably use it instead of Zapier/Make;
Record Triggered Flow with Scheduled Path or Schedule Triggered Flow? That’s the question for architect and I usually prefer the later one;
How to demo like a Salesforce Solution Engineer with tons of practical tips;
Revenue Cloud data model is not easy, but the whole presentation is so clean and easy to follow with some great questions;
Be Kind to Your Future Admin Self – such an amazing list of tips, the talk must be even better;
Data Cloud is everywhere. I probably still didn’t see the pricing, just heard it is complicated, but must be fun to see it. User Group event topic?
GraphQL looks like a great thing, but probably another new technology I won’t wrap my head around;
Restriction Rules looks like miracle solving also the troubles where object access is controlled by parent (looking at you contracts!). Plus solution to finally limit access to External Objects! „Classic must be turned off“ looks like a weird requirement, it isn’t on the database level?
Minimum Profile Approach looks like a plan, the different ways how to structure permission sets and permission set groups will be the main challenge, to keep the flexibility and allow maintainability;
Keep repeating the value of SF. In all layers of the company, Reward good behaviour, Celebrate new releases – especially the last one as one of the user adoption and change management topic is great. While I regularly blog about the new releases and send a link to such article in my regular newsletter, I almost never go directly to key people at customers with a few key changes we should adopt. Such a great opportunity for an extra work!
such a simple topic – dashboard components. And such a great list of information which looks obvious at first but you never digged deep enough. Plus David even published a book on this topic;
A long list of notes, looks like CzechDreamin was really great event to attend. Plenty of knowledge flying around, tons of interesting people to catch up with. Check all the presentations for yourself, available freely on the web.
Will you join us next year? May 17th, 2024 at Prague we look forward to seeing you!
User Experience Designer, Strategy Designer, User Interface Designer – another great new roles in the Salesforce ecosystem. I catched up with Katka to learn more about their importance for customers and projects success. Join us today for a session in English on my podcast.
Notes
while she originally hated the idea of implementing Salesforce in their company, she felt in love, become consultant and finally found her niche in the Salesforce Designer role, for which her hobbies such as photography prepared her well;
Strategy Design – what you should make;
User eXperience Design – what could be the low hanging fruit;
User Interface Design – how it should look like from page layout perspective – are the fields at the right place? – and even page loading time;
when developing custom UI component they can prepare mock, which looks like native Salesforce component and developer can just do it;
why the UX Designer (and Business Analyst) role appeared after 20 years on the market? Maybe the projects grow more complex and it is fair to admit it isn’t one person job anymore;
who should be first – business analyst or designer – when preparing user story? They work close together and each has a different angle;
copywriting is part of the job as well. No easier with ChatGPT (haha), but besides that we completely forgot to talk about how the GPT will help designers in the future, sorry;
when to involve them? They can provide value at any moment, if they are around from the beginning the project should be better. Surprisingly (or not) the Strategy Designer might ask even better questions than Business Analyst, because they probably are able to step back even more and see bigger picture;
anyone can do pretty decent designer job, just learn the principles and basis and you will deliver better solutions;
it is still new area, you cannot really be specialized only in one „part“ of the job, but the whole Strategy Designer – UX Designer – UI Designer combo might be needed;
if you are a designer AND know Salesforce you might be way more productive, because you know the limits and possibilities of the platform and fully utilize the capabilities;
research is an important part of the job;
accessibility is a big topic, sadly still not solved out of the box;
how to start? The Trailmix is really good and getting the cert might be great start. At the same time if you don’t have Salesforce nor designer experience, it won’t be easy, start from different angle. As always start from something smaller and gradually build on that;
I wrote my notes a long time ago in my popular notepad, which I never save, and then restarted my computer, so everything was lost. Still had a feeling I should properly summarize, even though I’m two months late and Winter release can already be seen in GS0, here is my summary, obviously shorter than I originally planned.
first release with Ruth in the logo;
account logos being retired in Winter ’24 – a bit disappointing as it made the UI nicer, but what we can do;
when sharing files via public link you can set expiration date;
post dashboards to Slack – I really like how they push the Slack more and more, when I presented it at London’s Calling it was already a huge opportunity for Salesforce partners;
if you have Unlimited edition you can put images and text into dashboards (and I start to see a lot of other reasons why to upgrade to Unlimited edition);
Easily Manage Content with Enhanced CMS – I need to look into it in more details. At Actum we do also Sitecore, Kentico and Kontent.ai, as I never thought about Salesforce as a CMS system I cannot really compare it, but our other divisions are interested in knowing the differences. Anyone has knowledge?
Set Field-Level Security for a Field on Permission Sets Instead of Profiles;
Align Fields Horizontally in Field Sections is interesting, because on the picture I would love to have the old behaviour, where website goes up but never realized it works like this in dynamic forms;
Say Hello to Salutation Picklist Values in Lightning Experience <- finally after 8 years(?)!
Boost Productivity with Mass Quick Actions on Related Lists (Beta) is awesome as well, historically I solved it with flows and ids variable, but out of the box solution is obviously better;
Use DataWeave in Apex to Enable Data Transformation to Different Formats (Beta);
Query Five Levels of Parent-to-Child Relationships in SOQL Queries feels huge, I always wondered how to properly bulkify this thing, no need to worry anymore;
Get Enhanced Event Usage Metrics originally didn’t catch my attention. Till the moment customer called me with „we run out of platform events“ and I was lost, because we had no clue who started to consume them;
Provide More Detailed In-App Guidance with Targeted Prompts on Record Fields – probably another reason why UX person should be involved as we have the chance to use help text and now In-App Guidance on fields as well. When to choose what? Should the text be the same?
Field Service and Manage Follow-Up Appointments from the Field;
Create Quotes Without a Related Opportunity is something I still don’t understand, also curious how it will play with forecasting and what to do when opportunity should be created after a while;
See Prospect Engagements for the Month at a Glance shows how the Sales Engagement/High Velocity Sales gets better overtime, maybe reason to migrate to it from all those Outreach, SalesLoft and others?
Use Einstein Conversation Insights in Different Languages still doesn’t support Czech, I’m really curious how the whole GPT thing will work with Czech for the future;
Get Sales Teams Started with Pipeline Inspection Fast what originally worked only in Unlimited edition somehow made it into Enterprise as well free of charge, I need to dig deeper into it;
Personalize Sales Emails with Einstein GPT for Sales for Unlimited edition only, but looks super cool;
Nail Your Meetings with Salesforce Meeting Digest another great looking thing;
Control Who Can Use Organization-Wide Email Addresses drive by permission sets, finally!
Sales Cloud Now Includes Email Productivity Features in Professional and Enterprise Editions;
Log Emails Sent with the Send Email Action from flows – small step, but no need to develop it anymore. Plus the ability to use Email Templates;
I passed this certification basically immediately after it became available but wasn’t really sure it makes sense for the team to pass. Now, when I finished the preparatory Trailmix, I feel it is worth it.
No sales rep I’ve ever worked with would take this. Why would they? It doesn’t even help their resume.
I’m having this debate right now. I also say no, there are very few reps who will do it on their own. But as a consultant, it would be a nice claim to say all of our team, including sales and project managers, are certified/credentialed.
It might indeed be a good onboarding for an AE to learn the “Salesforce way”. I’ve heard others in the community mention that it helps them as an admin to understand how Sales Cloud should operate. But that seems a rather roundabout way to get there rather than a good discovery with their internal reps.
But then I realised, this is a perfect exam for Business Analysts and Admins to sit, to help them understand how sales works, as that’s what they are building for in Sales Cloud at least. I think this exam would be extremely beneficial to those roles because there is a distinct lack of knowledge about sales processes within the tech team, and it is a very smart way for Business Analyst, or SF admin to get into the business mindset.
That’s just a few quotes from people once the exam has been published and I felt (and feel the same).
It probably isn’t the right exam for the experienced sales professional (but they won’t use the guidance part of the Path component as well), but great for new sales people in the ecosystem as well as for admins and consultants to understand what’s going on, how these people work, how they should design the system to better suit them.
Make sure to tailor your pitch to the prospect and stick to a discussion of solutions, not product features. This customized approach makes the prospect feel valued.
Surprisingly (actually not that much) I didn’t find much information about different industries, which are perfectly covered in the special Trailhead for partners (you know you can access it from PLC, right?)
95% of buyers make purchase decisions based on emotion
The Trailmix is full of links to interesting articles, some of them I liked more than others, such as the one about closing deals. And as I said – worth checking at least the trailmix for everyone if you don’t want to pass the exam.
