CzechDreamin – the unofficial summary

• Salesforce •   0

You might read my official summary of our inaugural conference already on LinkedIn, here is the behind the scene look.

Those, who attended, know the story behind – how I went to my first community conference in Amsterdam (NPSP Day, thank you Ryan!), met a new people, continued with SurfForce, London’s Calling and more and more and more of them. Each of them helped me to meet people I knew only online and learn some real new things.

And the growing desire to bring such conference to Czech Republic to show people, that they really can learn something on a conference and that it might be a good idea to know other people in the community has been here.

Last year I decided – let’s do it, don’t worry about anything. And CzechDreamin has been born.

Get the basics

Organise conference is pretty simple – you need venue, speakers, attendees and sponsors. Because it doesn’t really matter how much costs the ticket, unless it is really expensive, you need sponsors to cover majority of the costs.

Dreamin style event should have 250+ attendees so we aim for a venue able to host up to around 400 people (as London’s Calling and French Touch Dreamin has such limit as well), with multiple rooms, ideally with all the equipment ready so we don’t have much to organise.

Everyone getting ready for the day

There are a few nice venues – old hotels in the city center (I wish to do it there one day, because the atmosphere is awesome, just the layout doesn’t really work), cinema multiplex on the border of Prague (the screen and seating is super awesome and it can host a ton of people) and finally ended up at Prague Congress Centre, which – once upon a time – was the biggest and most modern congress center in Europe.

The sponsors

We have the basics and can go for sponsors. I followed Jean-Michel’s advice „calculate the costs as you wish to have it, be ready to cut“ and our original budget was around 2 millions CZK (80 000€). Divided by number of sponsor slots we were able to offer it came to 4000/6000/10000€ per sponsor and the real struggle started.

  • it is expensive, BaseCamp organised by Salesforce costs about the same, has way more attendees and is more business relevant. True, we cannot do much with it;
  • we already used our budget – we were super late to the game, started contact sponsors in March;
  • we don’t target that area – we are just too East for most sponsors, at the same time they didn’t realise that the big companies (read IBM, MSD/Merck, eBay, Edwards, Accenture and plenty of others) have delivery centers with technical people here.

Luckily OrgSteward signed right after we opened call for sponsors and helped us with downpayment for the venue. PwC jumped shortly after and then I realised (again) I’m not a sales guy, don’t have the skills and persistence to hunt down sponsors. Clouderia followed seeing my struggles and Keboola saved my ass at the end.

CzechDreamin '19 sponsors

Somewhen in the middle I had a call with Kevin, who told me „don’t be crazy, there is nothing wrong to cancel it“ and I knew that I’m crazy, ready to pay up to 10 000€ out of my pocket just to let Czech people experience such event and hope to see them more on conferences abroad.

Our sponsor’s proposition probably wasn’t the strongest, especially as I decided not to allow them to have a session. That’s something quite normal – I suppose not just in Czech Republic – and I decided I hate it. And it is great to know that I’m not alone, that Jindrich Faborsky feel it is wrong as well, when sponsors pay for the privilege to present to people who pay for the privilege to listen to them.

At the end we cut all we could and from our original 80 000€ budget we made it for 22 000€. No recordings of sessions, no big marketing around the event (which wasn’t good), we cut the food as much as we could, we saved a lot on dinner for speakers (but they enjoyed it anyway I hope), no reserve, no fun activity like photo booth. But we saved money to support Czechitas in their mission, which I feel great about.

Speaker's dinner, stolen from Szandor

Just after the conference I had time to watch Francis Pindar’s talk about finding sponsors, which is really great and I agree 100 %.

The speakers

Thank you, thank you, thank you speakers!

I’m so happy that this part went as I expected and as no one in Czech Republic expected. When I announced the conference the feedback was – will you want us to present some case study? And my answer was „I don’t care about case study, but some nice talk would be great, submit it and we might choose you“.

We got a lot of submissions and were lucky enough to be able to choose from them. Minimum of Czech speakers as they really aren’t used to this.

CzechDreamin'19 speakers

I anonymised all the abstracts and we ranked them. It was super hard to choose which one was better and it was hard to keep the diversity at the end (I already wrote about this). I still remember that one speaker, who contacted me about 2 weeks after we sent out the info, why we didn’t choose her, I checked the abstract and it was super awesome, so I checked the whole list and found out that she really was under the line. It just showed me how fierce the competition was.

It was hard to pick sessions because there was always more than one I wanted to attend. Thanks to Martin and team for great event.

I’m glad that we involved some first time speakers to experience it, I feel we had some experienced speakers as well to make a great mix for attendees to enjoy the day and for new-timers test whether it is something for them.

It was very useful for admins, developers. For me as a sales guy, a bit less, but even so, I found a lot of stuff I can use later 🙂

And I’m still surprised with the profesionality of all those speakers, who delivered all we needed on time, who enjoyed the speaker’s dinner the day before and knew when they have enough to deliver what they came to deliver. Who did it for free, mostly in their free time. I kind of expected it, but the team was really blown away by it.

The attendees

If finding sponsors was hard, this was impossible. And we couldn’t do much about it.

Posting on Twitter, Trailhead community and other social networks was good, but with not much impact. We all felt how strong is our social network but nothing much came from it anyway.

We pushed Salesforce AEs to get in touch with customer, because they are the only one who really know who is their customer, to find out that it is hard to support 3rd party paid event. But they tried anyway, some customers asking for free tickets, which I refused as it meant I’ll pay for them and the price of ticket is about the same as one hour of consultant.

At the end we tried some traditional media and found we don’t have the money to pay for an article with invite to our conference, especially as we feel the impact will be minimal.

It’s all about the hospitality, which makes the difference between a nice event and an awesome experience. This was definitely the latter.

Rising the price of tickets helped quite a lot, with surge of sale before each rise. But then we were at our planned final price, two weeks before the event we had to confirm final capacity and we still didn’t have enough. We sold about 30 % of tickets in last week or two, which made it even more challenging but at the same time it was something others prepared me for.

At the end we had almost exactly 200 people who attended with around 5 – 10 % no-show rate and with just 3 tickets we gave away for free (I feel that speakers paid even more than attendees in the time they gave it).

The day before

The whole time I somehow struggled to find tasks to do. We have venue, which will take care about most things, we just need to prepare the badges, some flyers on site, organise sponsors and speakers. Done.

So we met the day before to prepare badges, check the venue, send final emails and have a dinner with speakers and sponsors.

We were scrared the day before

It was easy, there must be a catch and something will fail hard.

The day

Finally, after a year from my first tweet, the day D was here. I don’t remember much, all I know is that I asked Lukas to take care about workshop’s room and others to check on other rooms to start and end on time. We had our internal WhatsApp group which I checked maybe 2 times a day (yeah, a day).

That I told photographers what is the rough plan for the day and welcome session. And that I delivered the welcome word, which we hadn’t have much time with Kristyna to train for. That we completely forgot to take team photo (besides the one selfie on stage and one the day before).

Time for some proper Czech lunch

I didn’t see a single session, I remember sitting in one room for about 5 minutes but I don’t remember which session it was. That I had a few chats but I don’t remember with whom and about what. How grateful I’m that Sercante overtook our Twitter, because originally I planned to do it but I didn’t have any second for it.

Szandor speaking about Kafka as a real professor.

I feel that the day ended before it started and that it was great.

You probably feel it’s exaggerated but truth be told: You – as a team and you personally – delivered true excellence here. Friendly, helpful, structured, thoughtful, committed… there hasn’t been a single experience, not a single moment that has potential for improvements. I am extremely happy that I could be part of it. Martin, really – thanks a lot for the effort and your excellent leadership, and please pass it on to your team as well!

I hope that it showed people that they can learn something they can use in their life/org the very next day and that at least some of them already implemented something new they learnt. I hope that I’ll meet more Czech people on next conference I’ll attend anywhere in the world.

The event was great, food was great, speakers were great. My only complaint is I had a hard time to choose which sessions to attend, I wanted to see them all!

And if at least 50 % of attendees will attend next year, that would be awesome. We hope to see you on Thursday, May 28th 2020 at Prague again.

CzechDreamin 2020 tickets.

The presentations

We have no recording, but we do have all those presentations. And we put them in a nice brochure together with some photos. Enjoy!

And we created group on Trailblazer community if you want to stay in touch.

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Einstein Analytics Academy Prague

• Salesforce •   0

We continue on our journey to educate customers and partners on Czech market – we did FSL workshop, MuleSoft training and the last one is Einstein Analytics Academy. This one was longer (2 days) and delivered by Salesforce (great Rikke Hovgaard).

It was great. Around 30 people gathered at PwC offices to learn as much as possible in two days. I’ve been surprised how easy it went during the day and how much time we had, because I had a feeling it was way harder last year in London. Just to learnt that I had 2 days of basic and 2 days of advanced training packed into 2 days while this was only the basic training. Still great and awesome, was also great to see the progress of the platform.

The attendeees

Recipes

We started with data structure, how to get them in and manipulate. Data flows can be complex, recipes are super easy way to achieve a lot with some basic knowledge. And when you get a few tricks like use bucket and not replace, because buckets you can easily update while replace create a new column every time … that’s what you need to save your time for real.

Dashboards

Moments where – if you know where to look at – notice experience and a few delivered sessions. It looked super easy to create a dashboard and I must add super cool looking dashboard. All the elements, colours, … but that all takes practice and notes how to set it up. You won’t notice unless you know and will get out with a feeling how easy it is – which is great. And if you know you will appreciate the experience of Rikke.

Basically in the evening of first day we had all data in and great looking dashboards and feeling we are able to repeat it.

Hackathon

Tweak it for the target audience is something Rikke want to do. So we spent evening looking for some nice Czech relevant data, just to find out that open data are a big topic but when you try to find some it is still pretty hard.

But she found data from AirBnb so we used them for activity on second day. Split into groups, here are your data and you have one hour to deliver something awesome and get some insights.

Work in groups, do something great

An hour later we got a few great presentations and interesting findings. Where to clean for best ROI was the one I remember and we had a great fun about it.

Where to find cleaning with best ROI

Binding and data flows

Of course, at the end we covered these heavy topics. It still looked super easy, we got some advice when to choose data flow and when recipe.

Overall the training was awesome and I like how the group evolves – we started FSL with 100 % partner focused training and we gradually open it to (potential) customers. For MuleSoft we had people from outside the Salesforce circle, for Analytics we had surprisingly high number of marketing people.

Next? The general feedback was to do something around Marketing Cloud, I aim for the end of October/November, before everyone will leave for Dreamforce or after it. Stay tuned.

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DX to automate your work

• Salesforce •   1

In preparation for the CzechDreamin Pawel asked me to help him with preparation of 40 Field Service Lightning (FSL) instances. No problem, the guide has just 12 pages and I’m super lazy, luckily I heard about Salesforce DX.

1. Authenticate to instances

This was the most manual step as I had to login into each instance.

sfdx force:auth:web:login -a fslX

where X is number from 1 to 40.

2. Create a batch

Second step is old good bat file, which will run my commands on each instance. 

for /L %%A IN ( 1, 1, 40) DO (
     sfdx %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 -u fsl%%A
 )

The for cycle starts at 1, has increment of 1 and finish at 40, will take first 5 arguments from command line and run them as sfdx parameters on specific instance (-u fsl%%A where %%A is the number).

I saved this file as run.bat.

3. Install package

First step in configuration is easy, install a package.

run.bat force:package:install --package packageId

where I got the packageId from the installation link (04txxxx).

4. Download data from referential instance

Pawel configured one instance as an example, from which I could take metadata. The good approach is download only metadata you need to push, but I found out it is easier to download all of them and copy those I need to separate directory to push them to instance.

First of all I had to create the package.xml file. At VS Code you can use the extension for generating it, but I used the old good Package Builder and saved the package.xml file in a root of my DX project.

run.bat force:source:retrieve -x pathToPackageXML

I went through the data directory, created a new folder and copied what I would need – permission sets, object definitions (because there is sharing and feed tracking set), custom fields and fields which has to be tracked (because it is enabled on field level), quick actions, layouts (which includes page layouts and global layout) and profiles.

Sadly, the profiles are super tricky. If you download them as part of the whole package they are downloaded completely, would you use -m Profiles switch it won’t include the page layout assignment definition (and most likely other things as well).

5. Permission Sets

You copied the permission sets to your new folder and just push them in the instance.

run.bat force:source:deploy -p pathToNewFolder

And then you assign them to the one user you have there (I had to run it several times for each permission set I had there):

run.bat force:user:permset:assign --permsetname 'permSetName' 
            --targetusername yourUserAlias

6. Limit sharing on objects

Sharing is set on the object definition file, which is in the objects/objectName directory. If you already copied all those needed file in the directory you already pushed them to your instance. If not, copy now and use our best command

run.bat force:source:deploy -p pathToNewFolder

7. Enable feed tracking

The previous step also enabled the feed tracking on object, just didn’t enable it on specific field. Copy the specific field to your directory and deploy.

It is habit by now, you could compressed it all in one deploy.

8. Page layout assignment

I failed on this one. The assignment is done in profiles, I downloaded them with all the metadata, but DX doesn’t download metadata from managed package, so it doesn’t even download the relation to them in other metadata (like assignment in profiles).

Would you add the reference manually and deploy, nothing will happen.

Eclipse saved me – at least I thought so – as I was able to use it to download the metadata of managed package, copy it to my directory, change all names of referenced component to include the package name and successfully add it to profile and deploy.

Sadly it deployed the page layouts as well as another copy with the same name, which created a bit of mess.

9. Custom fields & actions

Just copy them to your directory and deploy. For global actions I also had to deploy global layout.

10. Update Data Integration Rules

The other request was to update Data Integration Rules to bypass triggers. I was able to download them but never upload them back, even without changing anything.

Object Name: The Field Mapping API Name can only contain underscores and alphanumeric characters. It must be unique, begin with a letter, not include spaces, not end with an underscore, and not contain two consecutive underscores.

Done

It took me a while to figure all of that (as I did it for the first time) and then I look back, proud and had a simple question – why didn’t I create sandboxes? It would be way easier.

But doesn’t matter, I learnt more where the things are set and I feel I can use this in future for a few things. DX is simple, I used about 5 commands all together, the most important part was to find out where all the settings are stored.

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Skloňování jmen

• Salesforce •   0

AppExchange zná většina zákazníků Salesforce – místo, kde si najdu aplikaci, kterou si můžu rozšířit funkcionalitu. Všechny aplikace tam ale nejsou, spoustu z nich mají partneři pouze u sebe případně u konkrétních zákazníků.

Z toho co jsem viděl kolem sebe, tak existuje následující:

  • napojení na banky (CRM pro neziskovky v rámci FPack);
  • napojení na IPEX telefonii (Sprinx Consulting);
  • napojení na Emailkampaně (Sprinx Consulting);
  • napojení na GoSMS bránu (AspectWorks);
  • napojení na SmartEmailing;
  • skloňování jmen.

Postupně bych ten seznam řešení od partnerů chtěl rozšiřovat, jak se mi podaří získávat podrobnosti. Pokud máte vyvinuté něco, co se dá znovu použít, tak dejte prosím vědět.

Skloňování jmen

Chce to tak půlka organizací, se kterými dělám – aby se jim samo vyskloňovalo jméno člověka a pak to mohli používat v mailingu.

Existuje služba, která zvládá skloňování – do 10 jmen denně je zdarma, za 150Kč/měsíčně pak 150 jmen denně. I s těmi 10 jmény denně se dá žít, pokud neimportujete nová data.

Napsal jsem tedy jednoduchou službu, kterou si můžete nainstalovat a začít používat.

Služba není připravena na hromadný import záznamů ke skloňování (není bulkifikovaná), což vám v běžném použití vadit nebude a mimo něj si ji musíte případně vypnout.

Jak funguje

Po nainstalování je potřeba vytvořit záznam v Custom Settings, který bude mít jako jméno klíč, který vám vygenerovalo sklonovani-jmen, a jste schopni zde skloňování vypnout.

Po vytvoření/uložení kontaktu nebo leadu, který nemá vyplněný 5. pád, zkusí nejdřív najít kontakt se stejným příjmením, které je vyskloňované, pokud nenajde hledá lead a pokud nenajde ani ten volá službu a nechá si vrátit vyskloňovanou variantu.

Pokud se skloňování nepovede, tak pole Vocative__c zůstane prázdné, nikam nezapisuji, z jakého důvodu se skloňování nepovedlo.

Hromadné skloňování

Pro hromadné skloňování má výše uvedená služba jinou cestu a sice přímého nahrání jmen, ke kterým potom vrátí skloňování. Touto cestou poskytne i lepší cenu za vyskloňované jméno.

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A few notes from UG about Marketing

• Salesforce •   0

It is almost three month from our „biggest so far“ user group about Marketing. This time we had the opportunity to visit new Deloitte offices at Zizkov and enjoy the awesome view from terasa. Plus tasty refreshment and as we celebrated our 10th meetup we also got a cake.

Astro cake

First speaker was Zdenek Pejcel from mooza inspire, who gave us an overview of the whole online marketing idea, why is it important, what is difference between B2B and B2C and when to select which product.

Frankly, I’ve been shocked that only 2 % of cold calls result in an appointment or that sales people on average invest 6,25 hours to set a single appointment.

Not sure where these numbers come from, but they are scary and when you see them you know, why inbound marketing might make sense, as it is more customer centric than outbound.

Zdenek Pejcel

On the other hand, everyone will tell you that you need to create a content, but probably no one will tell you how much of it. A lot! Just imagine that the communication should be personalised to everyone, that you have maybe 10 personas of your clients, that you want to send email at least once a month and do the simple calculation. You need extra person to do the writing (or hire and agency) but you need to think hard about the content.

The fact, that buyers now-a-days are 60 % through sales cycle before they get in touch with you is … awesome and terrible at the same time. It means they might never get in touch with you because they will find someone better than you even without give you a call at all, it is great because once they get in touch you already have a deal (almost).

Sales Cloud, MailChimp, Pardot, Marketing Cloud

Which one to choose? Hard question as the answer depends on you a lot.

I would say most companies are ok with the standard mass mail from Salesforce, as they just want to send some simple email (text email with minimum graphics are popular again) and they do hardly any analysis.

Marketers love Mailchimp, it is super easy to put together nice email in it, the analysis is pretty powerful one as well. Sadly the integration via the free app just sucks (unless they changed something again in last a few months) and they limit the free account more and more (and not many people want to pay). You can still switch to SmartEmailing (for which I wrote an integration, more about it in coming weeks) or Email kampaně (for which Sprinx wrote the connector). But they are both paid anyway.

Pardot is focused on B2B, is easy to set up, but lacks the whole omni-channel capability (come to CzechDreamin to find more about this).

Marketing Cloud is the whole family of products and you really need to choose the right product you need. But then you get the whole thing including social, mobile push, geo location, integration with web. And as Filip Pasek from Zonky says

Only limitation is your imagination

The second presentation was from Filip, who was responsible for CRM implementation at Zonky (PPF, P2P loans platform, fintech, startup and other nice acronyms).

Frankly, I’ve been surprised how quick the project was, how a few people was part of the team, how personalised is the communication for each recipient and how complex the whole flow is. Calls, emails, SMS, pop-ups, push to mobile, chat bots, facebook, … And they continue on their journey with Salesforce to have one CRM, integrated with Telco provider and their internal system.

Filip Paseka

I also heard the common complains – hard to test, no sandbox – and how they dealt with it, which reminded me of the great Cyril’s presentation I saw at French Touch Dreamin.

Traditional B2B company and Pardot

Robert Gassmayr told us how they used Pardot before big event. Just imagine big industrial company with sales cycle from 6 months to 2 years. I imagine papers, dinners and calls, cannot see much space for Pardot.

Well, they used it. Sent invites to the event with links to registration form for free tickets (which sounds like great incentive), which notified their sales manager that this customer will be there. Which alone is great benefits as they can prepare better for meeting with them or even propose it before the event.

Robert Gassmayr

At the event they had an app to „scan“ attendees and in a few seconds they had the whole journey of each visitor in their system for future analysis and marketing. Combined with the advertisement for the event before they got a tons of new leads and great statistics for future.

See you next time?

All presentations and some photos from this event can be found on our drive.

We will meet on September 10 to speak about fails and what we learnt from them. This meetup will be held in Czech language.

And just before the year end (December 4) we will speak about Dreamforce and have some drinks before the Christmas season will kick in. Are you going to Dreamforce and want to tell us a bit what you learnt? Still looking for speakers!

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