Safely Aboard Business Processes into Salesforce
Salesforce is recognized as the world’s #1 CRM Platform, with various products giving you the power to put your business thoughts into action. Sales Cloud drives and improves sales productivity; Service Cloud helps your service reps deliver a superior customer experience; Marketing Cloud runs effective campaigns; and Community Cloud engages with your customers and partners. You even have the recently introduced Einstein Cloud, which powers all of the above apps via Artificial Intelligence. And all these solutions are available as cloud-based platforms, so you can not only use them as software but also customize them per your own business needs.
In this article, we’ll tell you how to apply Salesforce to your business processes and different users for a more efficient business. Salesforce can be the automation your business needs or the guard to strengthen your security. It can also be the platform that brings together all aspects of your business under one roof, so that you can play 360 from the same cloud solution—a solution that also powers millions of other users around the world.
There are two major ways of implementing your business in Salesforce—Declarative Customizations and Custom Programming. And we’ll take a look at both here below.
**Declarative Customizations **
Salesforce offers many of its sales, service, marketing, and engagement features right out of the box. In other words, these declarative features are available without needing to write a single line of code and are usually set up by your organization’s Salesforce admins or other relevant sales/service/marketing consultants. Here’s a list of some of the most common declarative features available:
Validation Rules allow you to validate your data before inserting/updating, e.g., populating an email before creating a lead.
Workflow Rules enable you to perform an action/value update when certain criteria are met, e.g., creating a task for a sales rep when a new lead is created.
Security and Sharing give you the ability to specify who sees what, establishing access rights for everyone, e.g., allowing a manager to see his/her subordinates work and records.
Opportunity and Related Features include opportunity splits and revenue forecasts, features that contribute toward sales cloud implementation. Opportunity splits allow you to split the contribution to a deal among multiple users, and forecasts enable you to predict upcoming revenue in the quarter.
Case and Related Features contribute towards service cloud implementation, including case teams and case queues. Case teams let a team of service reps work together on a case. Case queues allow you to assign a case to many users, with it ultimately going to whomever is free.
Campaign and Related Features include mass marketing emails and contribute towards marketing cloud implementation.
Custom Programming
Salesforce is built at an API level. This means that all the out-of-the-box features it provides can be extended and/or updated in ways unique to your business. For this we typically need Salesforce developers who are able to code on Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning. These are the main features available via Salesforce’s custom programming:
Apex Coding is used to drive logic in Visualforce pages and Lightning components as well as for integrations with external systems for the purpose of data syncing.
Visualforce Pages give you the ability to create VF pages to design custom forms, render PDF documents, etc. They are built on server-side architecture.
Lightning Components allow you to use Lightning to provide a responsive mobile first design for various UI elements, such as forms and tables. They are built on client-side architecture and are faster than Visualforce Pages.
Convert Your Business Processes Into User Stories
Salesforce essentially helps you take your business to the cloud platform. And in so doing, it can help you meet and/or even surpass your sales, service, marketing, and engagement goals. You will most likely have a large number of tasks or processes that you want to be enabled in Salesforce. The way to properly manage this is to divide each functionality or task into various small units of work called “user stories.” You can assign these stories to your admins/developers, and then watch your business quickly come to life in Salesforce. This entire system of management via individual units of work follows the same paradigm as set forth by Agile Methodology—the recommended way of building Salesforce applications.
But what business processes can you move to Salesforce? Here we’ll take you through Salesforce’s key products and how they can be put to work for your business.
How You Can Use Sales Cloud
As a sales manager, you can use Sales Cloud to view and report on the deals your sales reps have been working hard on. This includes knowing the status of and progress made on each deal.
As an organization, you can track the ongoing deals and move them through various stages. For example, your sales process may include the stages of Request, Proposal, Confirmed, Contract, and Closed Won or Closed Lost.
As a business forecast manager, you can predict the probability of a deal closing and thus calculate estimated revenue for the next quarter by using Salesforce Forecast Management.
How You Can Use Service Cloud
As a customer service unit, Service Cloud allows you to assign customer ad hoc requests based on the type of request being made and to which department it belongs. For example, hardware requests would be assigned to the hardware team, software requests to the software team, etc.
As a live agent, you can chat with customers right on your website and resolve or transfer a customer’s request immediately.
As a service agent manager, you can expedite cases not acted upon within a certain period of time, as defined by the customer’s SLA.
How You Can Use Marketing Cloud
As a marketing manager, you can use Marketing Cloud to launch new campaigns for specific products as well as add leads or contacts as members of the campaign. You can also send promotional emails to all associated campaign members and track their email activity. You can even design a custom screen to capture feedback of participants who attended an event at your location.
How You Can Use Community Cloud
As a customer, Community Cloud enables you to log in to the customer portal of a shoe company to find out about new product launches and interact with other buyers. You can also submit and share reviews of its products.
As a partner of the shoe company, you can log in to the partner portal and create or close deals via the main business’ common product inventory.
As a sales manager, you can see reports and performance dashboards of your partners in various areas in order to drive revenues.
As a customer community manager, you can set up a reputation system to reward leaders and active contributors to your community.
The Concept of Requirement Scoping
Salesforce enables you to better drive all the above processes and business goals. And since many of the features mentioned are available out of the box, you can initiate action on these fronts fast. However, it’s also critical to make sure you manage these features in an effective way in order to preserve long-term benefits and prevent any long-term interruptions to your business. You can do this via the aforementioned “user stories.”
User Stories
The right way to manage these new features, as previously discussed, is to create discrete units of work or user stories. Basically, a general requirement is broken down into multiple user stories. It is important to first decide upon what things to cover in a specific requirement as well as choose which user stories to work on in a given period of time—called a “sprint” in the agile world. You then need to assign the user stories to those with the appropriate skill sets. When work on all user stories is complete, the requirement is delivered as a whole combination.
You should first complete work on user stories in a sandbox or test environment before it is moved to a live org. As stated, each user story will be completed by a set of declarative tools. Sometimes, for unique business processes, we might need some custom code based development as well. We recommend keeping a log for each user story to document any declarative/custom components that are added or modified for the change. This log will come in handy when you want to later deploy all user stories related to a particular requirement.
Precautions
If there are discrepancies, where one change might impact another change, you will have to track this early on or risk inadvertently exposing the business to loss. For example, let’s say you add a validation rule that a contact’s email address must not be blank. This might cause existing processes that update a contact’s phone number with some external integration to fail if that contact does not have an email address populated. This would happen since the validation rule would fire after every update/create. Our intention might have been to only enact this validation for new contacts coming in and not for existing ones. But this is not understood by the new rule, and your integration (involving phone and many other fields) is at risk if you don’t do a pre-analysis.
Panaya’s RDx is a software that helps you perform such analysis and prevent risks in Salesforce releases. Its features enable you to create scoped requirements and add custom and declarative components for each requirement. On the backend, RDx continually evaluates each change, automatically giving you a list of existing items that could be impacted by each new change. This impact and risk analysis can then be acted upon. And only once any risks have been mitigated, should you deploy your business processes into a live environment.
Summary
So yes, you can start applying Salesforce to your business processes. And given the variety of features offered by Salesforce, most business processes can be driven on the Salesforce platform fairly quickly. In this post, we discussed the ways in which Salesforce can act as a medium for implementing your business processes. We talked about the need for Requirement Scoping so that you can track what changes were executed for each feature enabled. And we also discussed risk analysis so that you avoid inadvertently corrupting an existing functionality when implementing a new one. All of this is part of proper Project Management and Risk Mitigation, and these can be achieved with external tools such as Panaya’s RDx.
By following the above guidelines and using the proper tools like RDx, you can be more confident that you are safely applying Salesforce to your business processes for smart, efficient results.
