Key Features

1. Automated Outreach: Salesforce Sales Engagement allows sales representatives to automate their outreach efforts, ensuring timely follow-ups and consistent communication with prospects. This not only saves time but also enhances the chances of closing deals.
2. Data-Driven Insights: With integrated analytics, sales teams can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and engagement patterns. This data-driven approach enables more targeted outreach and personalized interactions, improving conversion rates.
3. Seamless CRM Integration: The platform integrates effortlessly with existing Salesforce systems, allowing for a unified view of customer interactions. This integration ensures that sales teams have access to all necessary information at their fingertips, enhancing decision-making processes.
4. Standard Cadences: Businesses can significantly boost productivity by implementing structured workflows known as Standard Cadences. These cadences guide sales teams through engagement, ensuring no lead is overlooked.

Why It Matters

As organizations increasingly adopt AI-driven tools, the potential for growth and enhanced engagement becomes more accessible. Salesforce Sales Engagement optimizes sales processes and positions businesses to adapt quickly in a competitive landscape.

In conclusion, embracing Salesforce Sales Engagement is strategic for any organization looking to elevate its sales game and maximize ROI. By harnessing the power of automation and data, sales teams can focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.

At Cloud Next Level, we have the experience and know-how to help your team implement and use Sales Engagement to improve conversion rates.  Whether it’s starting from scratch or building smart cadences, we can help you and your sales team. 

The post Unlocking Sales Potential with Salesforce Sales Engagement first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

First, let’s discuss some basic tips for using ChatGPT to its fullest.

1. Setting Custom Instructions

If you have the paid version, you can set your profile to Custom instructions that reflect your goals, personality, and how you want responses to be created. Click on your name in the bottom left corner to access this.

2. Master Prompt Engineering for Optimal Responses

For ChatGPT to provide the most relevant and accurate outputs, crafting detailed and clear prompts is crucial. Known as “prompt engineering,” this technique involves specifying exactly what you need from ChatGPT, such as the format of user stories or the structure of code. This upfront clarity reduces back-and-forth and enhances the quality of responses. For instance, you could write “You are a master Salesforce developer with deep expertise in writing efficient Apex code”.

3. Enable ChatGPT to Ask Clarifying Questions

At the end of your prompt, you can say “Ask me questions to clarify”. This will give it the opportunity to gather more details for a better response.

4. Use Strategic Phrasing Like “Take Your Time”

When dealing with complex queries or tasks where precision is paramount, instruct ChatGPT to “take your time.” This phrasing signals the AI to process the request more thoroughly, prioritizing accuracy over speed, which is especially beneficial in scenarios involving intricate coding or detailed report generation.

5. Utilize the ‘Tipping’ Feature to Encourage Specific Outcomes

It has been reported that if you offer ChatGPT a tip, it will produce better results. It’s not real money, so you can say “I will tip you $1 Million for the best answer possible”.

6. Give it Praise

If you like an answer, say something like “Great job!”. This helps train the model and get you answers that work for you in future prompts.

7. Review and Refine Outputs

Don’t assume it is correct or ask it to do something you can’t check for accuracy! While ChatGPT can generate high-quality outputs, it’s crucial to review and refine these to ensure they are accurate and meet your requirements.

Salesforce-specific uses

1. Generating Code

ChatGPT can assist Apex code and offer suggestions for improving existing code, thus speeding up the development process and reducing manual coding errors.

2. Generating User Stories

For example, you could prompt it like “Please create a Salesforce user story for a new feature. The user role is ‘sales manager,’ the goal is to monitor sales performance, and the need is to assess regional sales data efficiently for strategic planning. Include the role, feature purpose, and business benefit in the narrative format of a user story.”

3. Generating Test Cases

For example, “I need you to formulate a test case for a Salesforce feature based on the user story for a sales manager’s dashboard. The test should verify that the dashboard accurately displays monthly sales data by region and allows the sales manager to identify growth areas. Please outline the test steps, expected results, and criteria for passing.”

4. Enhancing Documentation

The tool can be used to generate comprehensive documentation ensuring understanding across the development team. This not only improves the quality of the outputs but also streamlines the testing phase of project development.

5. Interactive Problem Solving

You can interactively solve problems such as generating a flow based on specific criteria. ChatGPT can act as a dynamic partner, engaging in back-and-forth dialogue to refine flows, ensuring each element is tailored to meet both the technical specifications and the end-user’s experience.

6. Continual Learning and Improvement

ChatGPT learns from each interaction, making it an increasingly valuable resource as it adapts to the specific nuances of your projects and coding standards. This learning capability ensures that the more you use ChatGPT, the more tailored and effective its assistance becomes.

Conclusion Integrating ChatGPT into your Salesforce development workflow offers significant benefits, from speeding up routine tasks to enhancing the quality of project outputs. By following these expert tips and continuously refining your approach to using ChatGPT, you can maximize its utility and drive more efficient and effective project results. For those looking to delve deeper, check out the book, “ChatGPT for Accelerating Salesforce Development,” which provides further guidance and advanced strategies for using AI in Salesforce environments

The post Leveraging ChatGPT for best result and Enhanced Salesforce Development first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

One of the most essential aspects of standardizing data is to use standard names and abbreviations for geographical locations, such as states, cities, and counties. For example, Ohio should always be spelled “Ohio” and not abbreviated as “OH” or any other variation. This may seem like a minor detail, but it can significantly impact the accuracy and usefulness of reports generated from the CRM database. Imagine the chaos for all fifty states entered in these two ways. What if you joined Mr. or Mrs. in front of a name but then just first name and last name in other entries—chaos ensues.

When data is standardized, analyzing and generating reports that provide valuable insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and other essential business metrics becomes simpler. Standardized data also improves data quality, enhancing decision-making, reducing errors, and minimizing the risk of duplicate data.

In the case of Ohio, being abbreviated as “OH,” for example, can lead to inconsistent data entry, making it difficult to track sales or customer behavior in that state accurately. It could also compound confusion when generating reports that include data from multiple sources, as different people may use various abbreviations or spelling variations.

In summary, standardizing data is essential for ensuring the accuracy and usefulness of CRM databases and the reports generated from them. Organizations can improve their decision-making, enhance customer experiences, and drive business growth by using consistent naming conventions and other standardization techniques.

Valuable Tips for Standardizing CRM Data

In a perfect world, these customizations adapt Salesforce to the unique needs of each business, elevate productivity, improve data management, and enable efficient sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

• Define data standards: Start by defining clear and consistent data standards for your organization. Establish naming conventions, formatting rules, and other guidelines for entering data into the CRM system.
• Use drop-down menus: Use drop-down menus wherever possible to minimize the risk of data entry errors and to ensure consistent data entry. This can help to standardize data across multiple users and departments.
• Enforce data entry rules: Use validation rules to enforce data entry rules, such as mandatory fields, maximum and minimum character counts, and formatting requirements. This can help to ensure that data is entered accurately and consistently.
• Cleanse and de-duplicate data: Regularly cleanse and de-duplicate your CRM data to remove any inconsistencies and duplicate records. This can help to improve data quality and ensure that reports generated from the system are accurate and useful. Do this at a minimum of once a year.
• Provide training and support: Provide training and support to users to ensure they understand the importance of standardizing data and how to enter data consistently. This can help to ensure that data is entered accurately and consistently across the organization.
• Monitor data quality: Regularly spot-check data quality to identify issues or inconsistencies. This can help to identify areas where additional training or support may be needed to improve data standardization.

The post Why Ohio and not OH Should Be Your Data Standard first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

• Data Model Customization: Modifying the standard objects, fields, and relationships or creating custom objects to match the business data structure.
• Workflow and Process Automation: Designing and configuring workflows, approval processes, and automation rules to streamline business processes and automate repetitive tasks.
• Custom Fields and Page Layouts: Adding custom fields to capture unique data points and rearranging page layouts to present relevant information in a user-friendly manner.
• Reports and Dashboards: Creating custom reports and dashboards to visualize data, track key metrics, and gain insights into sales, marketing, and customer service performance.
• Custom Objects and Applications: Building custom objects and applications to manage specific business processes or vertical-specific needs not covered by standard Salesforce functionality.
• User Permissions and Roles: Defining user roles, profiles, and permissions to control access to data and features based on the organizational hierarchy and job responsibilities.
• Integration with External Systems: Integrating Salesforce with other business systems, such as ERP or marketing automation platforms, to enable seamless data flow and process synchronization.
• Email Templates and Workflow: Creating personalized email templates and configuring automated email workflows for various customer journey stages.
• Custom Reports and Dashboards: Develop tailored reports and dashboards to monitor and analyze specific business metrics and performance indicators.
• Mobile Customization: Optimizing Salesforce for mobile devices by configuring mobile layouts, adding mobile-specific features, and ensuring a responsive user experience.

In a perfect world, these customizations adapt Salesforce to the unique needs of each business, elevate productivity, improve data management, and enable efficient sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

Can Salesforce be over-customized?

Yes, Salesforce can be over-customized. While customization is a powerful feature of Salesforce that allows businesses to tailor the CRM to their needs, excessive customization can have pitfalls.

• Complexity and Maintenance: The more customizations implemented, the more complex the system becomes. Excessive customizations can lead to a convoluted data model, intricate workflows, and a high number of custom fields and objects. This complexity can make the system harder to maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade. It also increases costs.
• User Adoption Challenges: Introducing too many customizations can confuse and overwhelm users, especially those unfamiliar with the system. User adoption may suffer if the CRM becomes overly complex, leading to resistance and a lack of engagement.
• Upgrades and Compatibility Issues: When Salesforce releases new updates and features, excessive customizations may not seamlessly align with these changes. This can result in compatibility issues, requiring additional time and effort to modify and adapt customizations during system upgrades, which also increases costs.
• Increased Development Time and Costs: Implementing and maintaining extensive customizations can require significant development effort, translating into increased costs. Additionally, complex customizations usually require ongoing development support, adding to the expenses even more.
• Dependency on Custom Code: Extensive customization often involves writing custom code, such as Apex or Visualforce, to meet specific business requirements. Relying heavily on custom code can introduce additional complexity, maintenance challenges, and possible risks if not properly managed. Remember the Salesforce mantra: clicks, not code.

To avoid over customization, businesses should carefully evaluate their needs, prioritize customizations based on their impact and necessity, and strike a balance between customization and the out-of-the-box capabilities of Salesforce. It is crucial to consider long-term maintainability, scalability, user experience, and the potential impact on future system upgrades.

The post The Pros and Cons of Customizing Salesforce first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

Fortunately, Salesforce follows some general guidelines when retiring features. When possible, they give at least 12 months notice that a function is retiring, with reminders as the retirement date approaches. They always have recommended alternatives and are committed to support the retiring feature up to the retirement date. And as a general rule, retirements will coincide with new releases when possible. For a comprehensive look at how Salesforce retires features read THIS article.

So, what feature retirements should you be planning for this summer with the Summer ’20 Release? Here’s a few along with the information you need to make the transition smooth.

Marketing Cloud – Classic Content Creation.

Classic Content Email Create functionality will be disabled in June 2020 and Classic Content Email Edit functionality will be disabled in January 2021. After January 2021 you will only be able to view emails previously created with the Classic Content tools.

Customers will be required to use Content Builder for all email content after June 2020.

Content Builder is Salesforce’s latest email content creation tool that was initially offered in 2016, and includes enhanced functionality not available in classic content creation tools.

Looking to make the transition to Content Builder now? Salesforce has a help document located here. And moreinformation will be provided at a later date that will have additional resources, including available open office hours and scheduled webinars, to help you walk through the transition to Content Builder.

Agent Console (also known as Console Tab or Legacy Console)

Agent Console will be retired in the Summer ‘20 Release. After the retirement date, users assigned with the Agent Console layout will no longer be able to access the feature.

This retirement should have limited impact since the Agent Console feature has not been actively enhanced since the Spring ‘11 release and has not been available to new customers since the Spring ‘15 release. Lightning Console contains all of the functionality available in the Agent Console and is now available to customers in a more modern, productive and feature-rich user interface.

If by chance you are a legacy user of this feature you need to take the following steps:

Agent Console users must be transitioned to the Lightning Console. To identify which users are using the Agent Console:

1. Go to ‘Setup,’ then ‘Profiles,’ and select a Profile
2. On the profile detail page, look for Console Settings.
3. Select ‘Edit,’ next to ‘Console Layout.’

On the Console Layout Assignment page, you can view which profiles are assigned to the Agent Console Layout.

Legacy Folder Sharing

Salesforce is planning to retire Legacy Folder Sharing in the Summer ’20 release as they focus their efforts on Enhanced Folder Sharing.

This will be an easy transition with no steps needed on your part. With the Summer ‘20 release, customers using Legacy Folder Sharing will automatically be upgraded to Enhanced Folder Sharing. If, however, you chose to enable Enhanced Folder Sharing before the Summer ’20 release follow these steps:

1. FromSetup, enter ‘Folder Sharing‘ in the Quick Find
2. SelectFolder Sharing.
3. SelectEnable access levels for sharing report and dashboard folders.
4. ClickSave.

Take time to review your permissions once you enable Enhanced Folder sharing to ensure the report and dashboard folders in your organization have the appropriate sharing settings. In Legacy Folder Sharing, there were only two levels of access, but now the Enhanced version has an additional access level called Editor. You’ll want to make sure everyone has access to what they need before the need it.

Salesforce Mobile Web Experience

The Mobile Web Experience is the mobile browser version of the mobile app and has sometimes been referred to as “Salesforce 1” or one.app. This option allowed you to use a browser-based version that closely resembles the old Salesforce mobile app. You can tell you’re using the Mobile Web Experience by the dark blue left navigation bar. Salesforce is planning to retire the Salesforce mobile web experience with the Summer ’20 release. They want to focus development on enhancing the Salesforce mobile app to ensure you have a consistent and quality experience.

Most of you are already using the Lightning Experience Mobile App on your devices but if you are not and want some guidance in your transition check out the Salesforce Mobile App page to learn more about the Salesforce mobile app and its features.

For those industries that limit the use of mobile device apps for regulatory reasons Salesforce is working on a set of features called Mobile Application Management that lets IT departments monitor and control specific apps on your device without controlling the entire device. This set of features will allow customers in regulated industries to use the mobile app without risking a breach of regulations. Salesforce is working on a comprehensive security solution with features like jailbreak detection, network integrity, and dozens of other policies that will make it possible for regulated customers to run the genuine mobile app. It’s not available yet, but it’s coming soon.

Legacy versions of Open Commerce API (OCAPI)

Salesforce is planning to retire the legacy versions of Open Commerce API (OCAPI) 16.x and below on July 1, 2020 (Note: this retirement will not coincide with the Salesforce ’20 release)

Salesforce wants to focus development on the latest API version to improve security and performance, which led them to the decision to retire the legacy Open Commerce API versions.

This retirement may mean significant development for your team if you are still using the legacy version. You will need to rebuild your applications to use the latest OCAPI version available to prevent any disruption to applications that are currently using the legacy versions.You should review their version dependencies and determine where you might be using older versions of OCAPI endpoints. Salesforce can assist with this by providing you with the list of endpoints and your versions that they are calling if needed.

However, it will still be up to you and your development teams to determine where in their code they are making these calls. Salesforce makes the following suggestion:

“Upon determining the endpoints that need to change your development team should begin updating those endpoints to the newer versions and run their suite of tests to determine the effects that the change might have on their commerce site(s). Full regression tests related to the changed areas of code would be suggested.”

Customizable Forecasting

Customizable Forecasting will be retired in the Summer ’20 release. Salesforce is recommending that you migrate your users to Collaborative Forecasts before the retirement date. This replacement feature, Collaborative Forecasts, has improved functionality over Customizable Forecasting and as a result, your experience with forecasting will be enhanced.

To prepare for this change you’ll need to run a standard Users report. Users with access to Customizable Forecasting will have to have their Allow Forecasting permission set to True.

Salesforce is strongly recommending that you and your users migrate to Collaborative Forecasts, and if necessary, export forecasting data out of Customizable Forecasting before the retirement date in June. You can do this by following the Configure Collaborative Forecasts Help topic as well as the Collaborative Forecasts Implementation Guide.

Data Recovery

Effective July 31, 2020, Data Recovery as a paid feature will no longer be available as a service. The Data Recovery service, formally known as Data Restoration, is a legacy process that was used as a last resort, where Salesforce could potentially recover your data at a specific point in time.  We wrote a blog post about this retirement HERE.  #TLDR here’s the highlights:

The data recovery process does not meet Salesforce’s standards for customer experience due to the length of time and reliability of the process. This process takes a minimum of 6 – 8 weeks to complete and they cannot guarantee 100% data recovery. Due to these issues, Salesforce is no longer offering this service as of July 31, 2020.

To help customers routinely back up their data, Salesforce offers several native options that are available at no additional cost to customers. There are also several third-party options that can be leveraged from partners on the AppExchange.

In the event you’ve been using Salesforce Data Recovery Service you’ll want to look into other options to back up your data.

As always if you have any questions or need assistance transitioning from any of these retired features to new features Cloud Next Level is here for you. We can help you evaluate your needs and do the hands-on administrative work to make the change. Get in touch with us to talk about your Salesforce needs. We can help take your company to the Next Level.

The post Salesforce Future Feature Retirement – What you Need to Know first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

Pardot: Snippets Enhancements

Our Pardot customers already know the timesaving advantage of having Pardot Snippets. For those who aren’t using them yet Pardot Snippets are reusable blocks of text, image, date, or links that save marketers time and prevent headaches by rolling out email content changes consistently and efficiently.

With the Spring ’20 update you can now use snippets across any Pardot asset or business unit regardless of campaign. That’s right, they’re no longer tied to a single campaign! Use them in marketing content or for logos, copyright dates, company slogans, legal disclaimers, or other compliance-related content.

Salesforce Data Mask for Sandbox environments

This is a huge upgrade for our clients in the health insurance industry, but it will be a game changer for those in the payment card industry as well as anyone concerned with EU GDPR guidelines. Compliance has just become a whole lot easier!

To protect confidentiality and maintain regulatory compliance, users can now use Salesforce Data Mask to anonymize or delete personally identifiable information in sandboxes. This makes the job of monitoring in house or outsourced Salesforce users that much easier for everyone. And as a bonus you’ll be able to configure different levels of masking depending on the sensitivity of your data and requirements of your industry.

New Salesforce Mobile App Automatic Upgrade

You already know that the Salesforce mobile app helps you work smarter and be in conversation more easily with your entire workforce. The new upgrades to this app users will see a new unified experience making it even easier to transition from desktop to mobile. In addition, you’ll be able to personalize navigation in essentials and prioritize the information you use the most.

Admins are going to love this upgrade too. They’ll have more flexibility and power than ever to help make user experiences the best they can be by optimizing those components you use on mobile.

Salesforce Sustainability Cloud

This is a carbon accounting product for businesses to drive climate action. With Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, businesses now have a trusted sustainability platform that gives them a 360-degree view of their environmental impact and provides data-driven insights that will accelerate the world’s efforts towards carbon neutrality.

Calculate, analyze, and report on your company’s corporate greenhouse gas emissions inventory with an app built on the Salesforce Lightning Platform. The Sustainability Cloud app is built for sustainability managers, company executives, and third-party auditors to collaborate on producing an accurate and insightful emissions inventory.

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Need help understanding any of these features or other features of the Salesforce Spring 2020 release? Give us a call. We’ll be glad to help. Contact us now!

The post Spring ’20 Release Highlights first appeared on Cloud Next Level.