Eric Dreshfield, the Kevin Bacon of Salesforce community, short and humble guy who everyone knows. And we were lucky to have him at Prague (even though just virtually) to tell us more about how he got into the Salesforce ecosystem and also about the Customer Experience.
Enjoy podcast with Eric first so you get to know him better and then you can get deeper to find out more about ActiveCampaign.
Eric is in SF world from 2009, 2 years unemployed, got temporary job for 8 weeks in support for IT company, worked two jobs, after 7 months still on the job, HR asked whether he wants to get more money and become full time employee on a position they created for him – BA for launching Service Cloud. He then founded user group and a year later MidwestDreamin and interesting journey since then.
MidwestDreamin probably was not the first community led but the first using the Dreamin name. How it started? No money to send him to Dreamforce but willing to send him if he pays himself, but he rather broad Dreamforce to him. Found hotel which didn’t want downpayment and who were happy to just get his „business“ proposal how much money he can get and how many attendees bring. And people started to talk about it, so he repeated and also wanted to move to bigger city, but it didn’t work out as Salesforce announced their event in similar date and same city. Don’t do it yourself is the most important learning.
Reunion Breakfast started someone else as a starter for those who were first time to Dreamforce, but the following year he overtake as the original founder didn’t work in the SF space anymore. So he just found a restaurant with only one requirement from them – one bill, which he agreed for. $34 000 donated to Project Night Night, who supports homeless children, from 2011 as a result of these activities.
Almost every single position change resulted from connections Eric has, having network might help a lot, hence Kevin Bacon of the Salesforce ecosystem (6 degrees of separation from anyone in the world).
Conferences are not that much about knowledge, he barely scratches the surface of what Salesforce can do, they are more about connections to him.
New admin with admin cert, what should I do next to land my job, learn Marketing Cloud or Pardot? Actually there is also CPQ and Field Service which are hot area with not enough talent, so they can give you a nice boost to start your career.
Why It’s Important to Consider Your Customer’s Experience in Everything You Do
You don’t just sell, you need to budget, track sales, go to events, plan, … how can you manage it all as a small business owner?
75 % of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a company that knows their name and purchase history.
Customer experience is a challenge as people tell 10 others about negative experience but can be also multiplier as customers increase the purchasing with positive experience.
Customer Experience Automation – treat every customer as your most important customer no matter how many of them you have.
Personalization is first step in marketing automation, and right, marketing automation might be a bit of extra content you need to create, but it does wonders to upsell and cross-sell. And as you create the content just once and use again and again it really should save work.
ActiveCampaign integration with Salesforce is around a bit more than a year and the company has roughly 150 000 customers. Managed package available on AppExchange integrated with leads, contacts and accounts, primary customers are B2B companies.
It has the ability to sync any standard and custom field and have a component which visualise the activities on Salesforce side – completed automations, site tracking, email opens and more – and also let them act on the customers, such as put them into specific journey, so sales people doesn’t have to access AC at all.
And the automations looks awesome, I have to wonder why even use Salesforce native tools and not go with ActiveCampaigns. Scoring, website integration, creation in Salesforce only when lead is ready, assignment rules support, pre-build automations you can just use and not create from scratch. Actually, the reason might be that custom objects, campaigns or opportunities are not supported yet, but will be.
14 days free trial, 20 % discount to non-profits, no time to waste, go and test it.
New kid on the block aka new pokemon (as Tomas said at CzechDreamin) aka certification which created a lot of buzz lately.
And also certification which I would say is better when learning than when passing as you can pass it with just Platform App builder experience, I would say. But maybe I was just lucky with questions.
The Salesforce UX Designer credential is intended for individuals who are aspiring or experienced designers wanting to build and design human-centered experiences on the Salesforce Platform.
The learning trailmix is pretty awesome, I passed most of the modules a while ago and really enjoyed the learning process. The last module I did was „Writing for Web Accessibility“ which is a topic I never really paid much attention to, always thought that font size, contract, image descriptions (this is a big topic as well), and right use of headings are the most important part. Surprisingly, there is more to do and suddenly I don’t know how to express myself. Are you able to describe what is where on screen when you cannot use left, right, above and below?
To maximize the experience for visually impaired users, avoid terms that require the user to physically see the layout or design of the page in order to understand the content. This includes words that refer to color, size, shape, or location to enhance comprehension. You can use these descriptors, but don’t rely solely on this type of language to be understood.
Next great article was about charts. It is so simple to choose the right one to show your data on dashboard, right? Actually not and even though I know it before I was still surprised with all the biases we can pass just by poor choice of graph. Also reminded me of the podcast with John Demby how Tableau didn’t have a pie chart because it is against all good practices.
Surprisingly you also need to know about SLDS, where you can find details about it, and its naming conventions. I felt as half developer at this moment.
I got a few questions about contrast, font size or which research methodology to use, but surprisingly I got also more than enough about how to use path, page layouts, lightning pages and a few other things.
At the end I passed and I agree with everyone who says it is an important certification and we should push ourselves and customers to be better in this area.
— Joey Chan (Cloud Jedi) (@CloudJedi__c) June 10, 2021
It is over. It took us 2 months of planning and preparation and in 2 hours all 12 speakers presented their topics and now it is time to wrap-up. You probably came to see the recording or check the presentations, so help yourself and if you want more details you can scroll down.
Thanks for the invite – it was a fun session! First time I had done this format – it forces efficiency and I had some fun using it.
Michael Orr
Short summaries of sessions
Known and unknown Salesforce Marketing Cloud limitations… and some workarounds ;-), Cyril Louis
MC getting improved over the time, great to see it during the presentation as a lot of limitations disappeared over the time;
no sandbox – flag test data with a new checkbox or have a dedicated BU;
AMPScript or Journey Builder to update non-email data in Salesforce;
you can duplicate journeys as well as landing pages, no more need for some workarounds;
mobile preview is surprisingly still not part of the product, Litmus is the solution;
how not to oversolicitate people – use data extension to track how many emails you sent this day/week/month and make a decision based on that;
curious how many messages you still have? For emails you can just run email, for other channels you need to ask AE;
native lead scoring not available (as is in Pardot), need to make something in Journey Builder.
A guided tour of Marketing Cloud Resources, Kerry Townsend
Tons of content available out there but still no developer/demo edition of Marketing Cloud and it is really cool to have it all at one place so you don’t have to google it.
Implementation Guides, Developer Guides, Trailhead including its mocks for Marketing Cloud, Bootcamps and Trailhead Live where you can check recordings as well. Community Groups, StackExchange are other channels we know are valid for the platform as well, HowToSFMC is Slack channel dedicated to marketers I didn’t know about before.
I’ll not repeat all of those resources but I can see I was overwhelmed, there are even more than I did know about, definitely check Kerry’s presentation or blog with the whole list (planned).
AMPScript Guide is so great!!! With real examples!! A MUST HAVE
Cyril Louis
EDA and Pardot for Higher Education. Anglo-American University case study, Ivanna Gladysh
EDA & Pardot when you want to reach to more students. EDA is built on top of Salesforce created for universities and their students. The data model is extended compared to the standard and if you want to implement it you should know it, right.
Pardot or Marketing Cloud? Never ending discussion, Pardot might be easier to implement and comes with the B2B Analytics for EDA to get some extra information from your data.
And as any non-profit you will get access to the Power of Us Hub where you can mingle with other non-profit folks.
A Framework to Conquer Your Data Quality Blues, Andre van Kampen
Data quality is not usually a topic in implementation projects but should be.
Data Steward – focus, evaluate, prioritise what to work on, fixing all the gaps, do I need a backup strategy, how can I consolidate data, does their quality impact business and don’t forget about data decay. You are creating order in a chaos and help your company to see all data at once.
And you are going in circles – profile, cleaning, standardize, match & merge, monitor.
What do to tomorrow – build a dashboard, check for constantly empty fields, think twice about validation rules.
BREAKING NEWS: @AndreKampen is offering to do two days courses of each of the items below! Just because it’s not shiny, data quality needs to be considered. Amusingly „Monitoring“ is the key takeaway I’m taking away! Thank you for sharing your wisdom Andre 😍#CD21pic.twitter.com/yhOvIBY7Hm
— Paul Ginsberg (he/him) (@NaturallyPaul) June 10, 2021
Become an adoption tracking superstar with a few clicks, Johann Fürmann
What the fuck are your users doing? You know everything about visitors on your website but how much you know about your users using Salesforce? Do they use all the things they asked for?
Johann told us how they went from 3 lines of buttons and 4 lines of related lists to 2 buttons. They stopped listening to users and get hard data to which things they really use.
oh, I love this idea! Everytime a capability is used, mark it somewhere, then track it and report it for usage. Another great output of it is to show your teams ROI at the end of the year. „Our team increased automation by xx% because users now go through these capabilities 12,000 times this year!!!“ THAT IS REAL DATA you can use.
Stuart Edeal
Which objects they use, which fields, which page layouts, which tabs, which flows, which … simple code shared on GitHub (they need to polish it a bit) and you put it where you need it – custom object, HelperClass, Invocable method, Aura component which you embed into your instance.
One record per user per action per day – so don’t really a tons of data to analyse later on.
What now? Before go-live you need to define what adoption you expect, track, speak with sponsors how it is being used and remove if not needed.
Build your apps faster with Dynamic Interactions, Fabien Taillon
Dynamic Interactions – easy way to bind components together, in Pilot in the moment for the future just a few lines of code for developers and huge benefit for admins.
At the moment you can create one big component with built-in handling or two components with all the messaging between them. In future you – as an admin – will be able to define what parameters you want to be able send to which component, only update needed from developer is to update the source component to send the message.
Martin, thank you for the drink breaks… (of course, there was no break)
Stuart Edeal
How hutte.io simplified our unlocked package workflow, Evgenii Pavlov
When I saw Salesforce DX for the first time it was pretty cool, but the control line, Git and other things might scare consultants and admins (and even some developers).
Hutte.io is a UI for your admins, so they don’t see the command line and just use clicks to publish all changes to the next environment.
If you want to upgrade the quality of your procedures and have higher control about your source code/metadata this might be a great way how to simplify life for your people so they don’t have to install and learn new tools.
Plus it also contains some advanced features such as scratch org pooling so you don’t have to wait for a new instance to be created so you can start with your work.
All about Salesforce certifications: Are they worth it?, Tomáš Hnízdil
Certifications are not pokemons, but by getting them you:
get real knowledge during the learning process;
promote yourselves and get higher salary;
promote your employer (especially partners).
36 certifications at the moment and more coming, most of the things to know can be tested and learnt in Developer Edition and non-native speakers can get extra 30 minutes of time.
The UX one is so important!
Johann Furmann
Besides certifications there is a new program of Accredited Professionals which will be only for partners. 32 exams at the moment (from July), training materials already available.
Besides Salesforce you also might fight useful to have MuleSoft, AWS or Tableau certifications.
Intro to the Nonprofit Success Pack, Trish Perkins
What do non-profits want to do?
reach people;
raise money
report;
run program;
manage volunteers.
What objects can they use?
Affiliations to connect people to organizations;
Relationships with other people;
Households & business accounts;
Contacts;
Recurring Donations;
Campaigns also used for different list of peoples;
Engagement Plans;
Opportunities for donations & grants & memberships and much more;
General Accounting Units to track for which the money should be used;
Program Management to track clients and services including schedules;
Volunteers which Salesforce try to get rid off and non-profits want to keep it because it is easy enough to use and complex enough to fullfil the needs.
This is the best summary of a Non Profit I ever heared!
Johann Furmann
Trish also told us about NPSP Sprint – a chance to make meaningful contribution to the NPSP and ecosystem. Consultants, customers and Salesforce people sit together and work on various things needed and you can sign up for the EMEA version which will run on June 29.
8 Steps to Become a Salesforce Developer, Seyit Usmanov
Become Salesforce developer is easy, here are 8 steps:
Earn Salesforce Admin related certifications;
Make Salesforce Personal – run your life on it;
Pass the PD1 certification;
Get experience – find volunteer experience, seek out project on Upwork or get in touch with CRM pro neziskovky;
Join your local developer group;
StackExchange is your friend;
Find a technical mentor, APEX will start clicking after 6 months;
Apply to jobs & track your mistakes.
Seyitbek, your presentation motivated me! 🙂
Pearl Lee
Success in Salesforce projects, Mercedes Basavilbaso
Methodology is the key for successful project, Agile is based on statistics more successful, but maybe a mixture of Waterfall & Agile might better for you. Important question is whether you want to fix the scope or the time & resources.
There’s *no* excuses! But it still happens. Choose your methodology. #CD21 with huge thanks to Mercedes Basavilbaso. That said, are you doing agile correctly? Catch the recording (once it’s publisted) to find out… pic.twitter.com/QPfaY0j5fP
— Paul Ginsberg (he/him) (@NaturallyPaul) June 10, 2021
Why Agile might be the best? Client involvement, issues identified earlier, more flexibility, more open communication and much more.
Einstein Recommendation Builder: Intelligent Automation Made Easy, Michael Orr
How to sell kolache better – you need Salesforce to recommend you which to make and to which customer sell which.
Just a few click to:
create a new custom object (#LowCodeLove)
set Prediction Builder (most likely value of X) and Recommendation Builder (best X for Y)
have some historical data (at least 10 recommended items, 400 positive interactions and 100 recipients);
configure Next Best Action Strategy;
put NBA component to Lightning page.
Segments and negative interactions supported as well making it even more powerful and templates you can just use are coming.
I remember stopping in West, TX for kolaches every time I went from Dallas to Austin. Thank you @Michael for reminding me these great times!
… and thank you for this awesome presentation!
Tomáš Hnízdil
Best part – it is included in the costs of the platform.
There was also question about concerns about data security as this processing is off platform, but there is some major ingeneering work going on which should solve it.
I’ve been munching while watching all the global speakers.
The fast paced format is fantastic❣️ I didn’t notice it’s 2 hours and got to connect with people from Argentina, Czech, Munich, France, Germany, … and say hi to @Oleh_Mykytyn whom we miss each other.
Zoom bombing is a thing, when you publish the link on social you can expect some gate crashers who have time to interrupt your session. Not sure why they do it but the anonymity of the internet makes it easier. Solution: don’t publish a link publicly, use Waiting room and separate people, go with the Webinar add-on and don’t allow people to connect with each other (exactly the thing we didn’t want to);
this format (20 slides, 20 seconds each) is super challenging for speakers – you need to think what you will include and what you will tell about each slide;
it is hard to slow down after such quick presentation – we didn’t do any wrap-up, let people enjoy breakout room or anything after, I wasn’t able to slow down for next a few hours;
doing conference after working hours is hard, especially if you don’t put aside free time before it. I run my meeting 20 minutes before start and it was visible – I wasn’t in the mood, didn’t prepare surrounding nor zoom background, didn’t check the sounds quality with team (and based on recording it was awful) and a few other things. Going for a day long conference is easier (at least to me) for switching context;
150 people on-line know how to behave, when to unmute and when mute, how to use chat and all these things. That was wonderful;
when moderating such quick conference it is hard to take care of other things – I had a feeling I monitor the chat but when going over the recording I was surprised how great things there were written. Also how busy it was on Twitter and I didn’t have time to watch people on the call. Actually I had no idea who was on the call and just looking at who commented on chat I can see you all folks from all over the world. At in-person even it would be so impolite to ignore you but here I really didn’t spot you at all :-(;
mix of sessions was great – at in-person conferences you have dedicated tracks or the whole conference is dedicated to some area, here it was great to see the mix and learn more about each area in less than 7 minutes. And if it wasn’t your cup of tea? It is over quicker than you blink an eye;
the format is so specific that I don’t believe we can repeat it next month and probably even next year. It is like a spice – good in small bits.
We are really happy that these sponsors supported CzechDreamin in 2020 and let us roll their money all the way to 2022. Thank you, really appreciate it.
CzechDreamin 2022
We hope for the best. We do have the date (May 27, 2022), the venue, probably the speakers (will confirm with them in January 2022 and maybe open a call for speakers).
Povídání o tom, jak dva Slováci na Ukrajině nad variniki dohodli založení nové firmy v Česku, která operuje od Austrálie až po Ameriku. To je Bluez ve zkratce a mluvili jsme o všem možné, pojď si to poslechnout také.
Zápisky z povídání:
menší tým 15 lidí, který je stejně schopen doručit větší projekty;
plochá firemní struktura, možnost výběru projektů, flexibilita, otevřenost – jenom pár součástí firemní DNA;
takový typický projekt trvá 3 – 9 měsíců, projekt na mnoho let se už dneska moc nepodepisuje, ale i ty kratší pak mají další a další etapy, které řešení rozvíjí;
jsou schopni dodat Strategic Advisory, kdy celý ten plán navrhnou, rozdělí a postupně dodají;
do kanceláří chodit nemusí ale stejně tam chodí rádi, ve středu se typicky potkávají u oběda s externisty a dozvídají se nové věci;
mají dost globálních klientů, hodně jich je z Austrálie, některé z Ameriky mají také, ale tam už je těžké to časově zvládnout;
v Austrálii jsou zákazníci víc technologicky napřed, odvážnější zkoušet nové věci, inovace funguje lépe, zkouší zajímavější kombinace cloudů;
Innovation Squad jim dobře funguje, kdy klient má myšlenku a společně ji rozpracují a během dvou až čtyř týdnů vyzkouší, zda to dává smysl. Skvělá věc na rychlé učení nových věcí a současně zábava;
nebojí se zkoušet nové produkty, dělat si komplikovaná dema, zkoušet limity nových produktů;
doporučení funguje na získávání nových klientů skvěle, v Austrálii nemají problém s virtuálními pohovory, k tomu jsou napojení na CTA a lidi s hlubokými znalostmi, kteří dokáží pomoci a současně doporučit dál;
jeden z jejich zajímavých projektů je překvapivě „jenom“ Sales, Service a Experience Cloud dohromady, hlavně díky tomu jak rychle to společně s klientem vyvinuly a velkou část času strávili tvorbou hezkého vzhledu;
It is the time of the year here again, when we get a new Salesforce release. I nick named this one as Release of Pilots, which is great and not so great at the same time. I really like that we know about all those cool pilots going on, I don’t really like the feeling that on those 612 pages of release notes it feels like half of them are pilots.
But don’t worry, I still found a lot of interesting things:
Einstein Search is generally available, which means it isn’t really a new feature, but reminds me I should really offer it to clients;
Page Performance analysis can analyse custom components and offer guidance how to improve them;
dependent picklists can have default values;
Customer Community licence now have access to tasks;
Loyalty Management add Czech as end-user language (pretty cool right that this $30 000/year product now supports even our language);
custom report type on Email Messages which can show you inbound/outbound numbers, effectivity of emails (open?) but it doesn’t work for list emails;
native LinkedIn integration, still paid from LI side, but no need to install external app. Plus Sales Cadence now supports LinkedIn in terms of sending messages;
Lead Scoring (paid add-on) now supports segments to better qualify your leads;
integration with Microsoft Teams is GA (will not be available from day 1) – you can mention records in Teams, inline edit them or post from Chatter to Teams.
CMS now supports scheduled publishing and un-publishing;
Enhanced My Domain doesn’t sounds like a big deal, but I really like the list of domains so you know what to expect;
My Domain will be mandatory from Winter ’22 – they wanted to do this a few year ago, finally looks like the time is here, need to enable those a few orgs which still didn’t do it;
ability to compare versions of Knowledge Base articles;
ability to change email of Guest User plus something about their licence, need to find more to fully understand it.
If your site’s guest users have the standard guest user license, update them to the provisioned guest user license, which gets updated automatically. Updating the guest user license can impact which permissions the users receive. We recommend testing in a sandbox before updating production.
Data Pipeline (paid product) are Salesforce native ETL. At the same time here is a new feature for Tableau CRM which allows you to push data back to Salesforce objects, which looks like something with very similar feature set;
Recipies versioning (Tableau CRM);
pivoting, clustering and time series
flow has some great new feature which looks like small things but brings nice benefits – ability to use IsChanged, IsNew and PriorValue in record-triggered flows, debug record-triggered and paused flows, additionally sort & limit collections, add record fields directly to screen and simplify the design a bit. Potentially big things is „Execute Record Update elements in bulk after loops for all Flow trigger types„, because if I read it right we don’t have to worry about putting records into collection in a loop and update after, because Salesforce will do it for us (just need to update API version to 52).
Betas
In-App Guidance offers targeted prompts – still did’t play with it but now I really should and provide documentation this way?
inline editing in reports (you need to contact support to enable it), support only some types of fields and one by one edit, but still nice extra;
restriction rules should solve a big challenge with Contracts & Tasks visibility, still strange we need to go with new feature on top of standard sharing instead of changing that;
expiration on Permission Sets, which can be valid longer than just for a session – specify date when the user will lose them and don’t worry about it;
Salesforce Functions – every developer waiting for this one, right? It will open after Summer will go live, you can subscribe to be notified;
Omni-Channel flow, which is a flow handling which agent will get which request.
Interesting Pilots
Platform Events with Channels to limit number of events your client has to process;
sending list emails directly from Gmail/Outlook;
Einstein Discovery supports external models (Python, TensorFlow);
Flow Orchestrator which allows you to create multi-step processes, they say that in the future this might also replace approval processes.
