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.
Four years of running the CzechDreamin conference, it is time to look back at our marketing efforts, what we tried and what were the results, as the other conferences might appreciate it as well or share their approach. And call for help at the end 🙂
Year 1
The plan was clear – we have a lot of connections on LinkedIn as individuals, just sharing that the event will happen will do a magic and the conference will be full. After all it worked pretty well with the community groups before, why not with something bigger and unique?
Outcome: failure (not surprisingly)
I do understand why marketers say that people need to hear about things three times ideally in three different forms to react. And that’s the approach we try to apply since then.
We asked Salesforce employees to help us as well and share the message, a few retweets on LinkedIn, but it was still fight to get the attendees.
Year 2 & 3
These two years were – due to Covid – somehow related. We canceled 2020, made 2021 virtual (and for free) and rolled all the tickets all the way to 2022, which made it challenge as people changed companies in the meantime, but still allowed us to make the audience over the years.
Back then, in 2020, we run ads on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. No PPC specialist hired, I tried to do it myself also to see how it evolved over the years, how Google Adwords became almost way to simple to configure with just „give me a page and text and I’ll do the rest“.
The campaigns ran for a few months, with a few dollars spent per day, meaning the reach was super low. Still we spent a few thousands on it and … nothing.
No buy we could clearly link to it. Maybe it worked from the branding perspective, maybe it was important touch #2 but …
Salesforce cooperation – while officially declined – I was still able to persuade a few people to send an email to some set of customers (have no clue to how many or who they were), which to me was additional touch the people might needed to attend.
Also PR person helped us to get some articles published on different sites on the internet, but it wasn’t as heavy as I hoped for.
At the end we made it to 380+ on the day, which was pretty awesome achievement.
Year 4
This year we decided to go super aggresive and spam (I still didn’t find a better word for what I decided to do) half of the LinkedIn. And we’ve got professionals to do it for us, which was awesome, as they really drove the whole thing and all I had to do was to approve the thing, pass my login details to LinkedIn, pay a few invoices and gave up on my idea that I have network only from people I know and can say a few words about.
Combo of Sales Navigator and LinkedHelper allowed us to search for all people with „Salesforce“ listed in their experience based in specific market, connect with them and once they accepted the connection send them some messages over a few days.
You have a great brand (in the Czech Republic)
That was one of the feedback from the agency, as the acceptance rate of my connection requests was almost 50 %, way above the average they usually see. When we went abroad it significantly dropped.
Surprisingly we’ve got only a few negative feedbacks, mainly from people who ran around Salesforce 10 – 15 years ago, still have it listed on their profile, but sadly (I’ve been told) when doing the segmentation it isn’t possible to limit the time frame, when Salesforce should be listed on their profile. So we had quite a few misses in the targeting, but it didn’t really result in a lot of negativity (uff). Obviously people outside of Czechia have been more surprised and we’ve got a lot of „why should I travel from (name any place in Europe) to Prague, you realised it is far away?“ Yes, we did and still found it beneficial to you 😉
Was it worth it? This should be easy to track as at the end we’ve got a list of people they reached out to and we had a list of people who bough the ticket. There have been a surprisigly lot of matches, but after some cleaning like removing previous attendees, possibly removing people we know just were not connected yet, the list of matches went down. Still, maybe it was important touch in the relationship to make it happen, it also broaden my network and we gained a lot of new followers for our LinkedIn page.
We also got a few retweets for our posts from Salesforce employees, sadly we weren’t able to persuade them to send any email this time.
At the end we had around 500 attendees, sold out the event but … I’m still missing something and that’s where I call for help.
Call for help – Year 5 is ahead
Ok, next year already in planning (May 17, 2024) and I want to change the structure of our audience a bit.
Out of these charts, which we’ve got from the attendees on the day, I like to change at least two of them. You can check the whole stats in our brochure.
I like the international mix of attendees and want to keep it. I also love to catch up with all my friends from other companies, BUT I do have a feeling the event is the most beneficial to all those small/medium customers, who most likely don’t have Salesforce partner and do all the customization themselves.
Those admins/power users/accidental admins can benefit the most from all the more practical/technical sessions we have (compared to any event run by Salesforce) and can be the heroes of the company the days and weeks after the conference. Also they rarely know about the community groups (sadly) so they struggle themselves and only some of the figured out that there are plenty ways (such as Trailblazer Community) how to get help or do things in a better way than they are used to.
My wish for next year is to let them know about the event and explain the benefits, enable them to connect with the community and feel being part of something wider (saying family might be to weird for them).
The challenge is, how to get to them as:
most likely they aren’t on LinkedIn (at least here in Czechia tons of people are not there at all or not active) and they might not even have Salesforce as part of their job description;
Salesforce is the only one who knows about them, but isn’t legally allowed to let them know;
I’m not sure how the market with (paper) magazines is these days and whether people still read things like Softwarove noviny, ComputerWorld or Chip. Or if they pay attention to some internet magazines where they will notice us (but that would be a weak touch #1);
I have no idea what can be the other surprising way to catch them and get their attention.
So we – as CzechDreamin – officially call for help with the marketing effort. Looking for someone who can help us with reaching to new audience, handle all the PR related things, thinking out of the box with a very limited budget, better engage with our partners and other Salesforce partners on the (European) market to reach out to their existing customers as well and remove the feeling of fear that they would lose the customer would they bring them to the conference.
We prepared intense entry interview consisting of one step where you will say „I’m here to help you and can do this for you“ and then most likely you are in. Are YOU that person? Get in touch with me, please.
INTERCODEC – jak Štěpán říkal jsou „malí ale šikovní“, zkušenosti ze zahraničí i Česka, standard lepší vývoje na míru a mají zkušenosti i s produkty mimo Salesforce.
Zápisky
není ho možné přerušit a mluví děsivě rychle;
i když vás Štěpán připraví na to, že je mladý, stejně mu na základě zkušeností tipujete víc, protože jinak to prostě není možné;
cca čtyři lidé, měli projekty od Austrálie po Státy, nyní se soustředí na Česko i když se začíná zase rozhlížet po zahraničí;
snaží se jít po standardu a zbytečně nevyvíjet;
cloud už není téma;
mají zkušenosti s vystupováním jako odborníci na konkrétní oblast a řídit jiné dodavatele, pokud na projekt kapacitně nestačí;
občas se bojí vyzkoušet na lokálním trhu nějakou novinku, protože buď na to trh není podle něj připraven nebo se skoro bojí, že ho připraví o práci;
šokující na Americe je její dynamika, začíná to rychlostí v odpovědi na emaily;
doporučení funguje nejlépe na získání projektu, emailing funguje také, zvláště když se do něj uvede něco malého, co by příjemce mohlo zaujmout;
mít zkušenosti z vertikály pomáhá, protože všichni jsou zvědaví jak to dělá konkurence, je nutné konzultovat s existujícími zákazníky co je možné ukázat;
umí marketingovou automatizaci, vědět které řešení nebrat je také super;
zeptat se ChatGPT jaké problémy řeší firmy v dané oblasti může být zajímavé na získání věcí k zamyšlení;
integrace s ERP nebývá problém z hlediska technické komunikace, ale dost často je neuvěřitelný nepořádek v datech, které ale chceme mít v Salesforce čisté;
dělat projekt co nejmenší dává smysl, protože se rychle ukáže jestli se jde správným směrem;
osobně nebo virtuálně? Úvodní jednání dnes většinou virtuálně, workshopy při realizaci dává smysl dělat osobně, byť klienti už nejsou moc ochotni platit cesty;
nezkušený člověk se zápalem nebo zkušený bez zápalu? Historicky hledal hodně na školách, ke kterým měl blízko, pořád to funguje. Zápal je pro něj pořád důležitější;
interní workshop na konkrétní téma jako forma vzdělávání funguje, praxe je nicméně nenahraditelná.
