Implementing CRMS like Salesforce into an existing company can be really challenging if users aren’t interested in using it or resistant to change. I recall the first time I integrated Salesforce into an organization, we had a very difficult time getting the sales staff to actually use it. Eventually we found a way to get staff interested in using the CRM and stop using Google Docs or Excel sheets.
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It’s no secret that Salesforce Lightning is changing the way we develop for Salesforce. At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce introduced Salesforce Lightning and it is proving to change a lot of things we do on the platform and I’m sure it will make things a lot better for users in the long term. If you aren’t already familiar with Salesforce Lightning then you need to read my post called What is Salesforce Lightning.…
In the days of early computing, it was rare that companies would have a way of communicating with their customers that would scale as the company grew. Everything went into different “data silos” that wasn’t necessarily accessible to the right person at the right moment. When I started my career, I worked on phone systems that were mostly being used by mortgage brokers that usually worked off of lists of potential customers in excel.
Usually the brokers had no insight into how things were going or would go unless they kept adding columns for notes each time they called or emailed the person. If the mortgage broker worked on a team or had a manager – it was nearly impossible to coordinate how things were going because everything was based off of the data or papers even that one employee would keep on their computer or on their desk.
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It’s no secret to those that know me that I read a lot and spend a lot of time gathering knowledge and honing my craft. I believe I own and have read most of the books on apex and salesforce that are available right now. Advanced Apex Programming by Dan Appleman is definitely the most advanced book for programming on Salesforce and Force.com. …
Salesforce does three major releases per year which often include hundreds of changes whether they be bug fixes or new features. Staying on top of what is changing is very difficult as the company continues to expand and is consistently enhancing the platform.
As a professional it’s part of our jobs to stay current on what is available in Salesforce and what may change in the next year or few years. …
If you have been programming on the Salesforce/Force.com platform for any amount of time I’m sure you have come into contact with Apex Triggers. If not, Apex Triggers are units of code that execute whenever a database operation occurs. I’ve put together a post about Before and After Triggers that you should read if you aren’t very familiar with how triggers work.
Apex Triggers can get complicated very fast if your company has a very customized Salesforce Org. Apex Trigger Frameworks are a way of offering generic functionality that structures code in a certain way. If you were to use a building metaphor we could say that a framework is the supporting structure of the building – it’s the steel or wood shell that supports the building. Trigger Frameworks are very good at enforcing trigger best practices.…
An approval process is process that is used to approve records going into Salesforce or being modified within Salesforce. Approval processes are commonly used in companies that are publicly traded or highly regulated. Having a knowledge of how setup Approval Processes in Salesforce and how to modify them is incredibly valuable if you plan to work in finance, or government.…
Salesforce supports basically two types of clones a clone and a deep clone. We’ll go over how to notice the difference later in this post and of course how to create both types. Of course, there will also be some example code on how to create both types of clones. …
In Salesforce, quotes are a representation of prices that have been proposed to a customer for products or services. If you aren’t familiar with opportunities, quotes and products please review my post about Designing a Sales Process in Salesforce.
An opportunity may have lots of quotes associated to it but only one quote may be synced to an opportunity at a time. Quote syncing links a quote a specific opportunity which allows updates to update between the Opportunity and Quote. Basically, when an Opportunity is added or removed it can be removed from the list of Opportunity Products without having to write any code. Keep in mind that this means Opportunity Products will be automatically removed and readded. I have been confused a few times by this.…
Salesforce is an incredibly popular product and has a pretty large following in the technical community. Salesforce Administrators, Business Analysts, Developers, and Architects are constantly being required. There’s a lot reasons to consider starting a career in Salesforce development.…
Apex Triggers are very powerful and are easily one of the most important parts of Salesforce because they significantly impact all database operations (inserts, updates, deletes, etc. ) With this incredible power and flexibility there’s a lot of room for problems. In my career as a Salesforce developer, I’ve looked at hundreds of different apex triggers and realized there are a lot of points of failure with apex triggers. This post is a very high level list of best practices and why they are important for apex triggers.
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Salesforce’s multi-select picklist seems like a great fieldtype, but it has an incredible amount of limitations. I strongly recommend avoiding multi-select picklists in Salesforce. I’ve learned this and suffered a lot after incorrectly deciding to use them instead of using a bunch of checkboxes. …
Salesforce has a few different types of APIs that they support that can be used for many different purposes.For example, there’s an API called the Tooling API which is useful for manipulating apex, running tests, or etc. …
It’s no secret, that Salesforce programmers are huge fans of collections like lists, sets, and maps because they allow for much more efficient queries. I’ve decided to put together a post about how to use the Like Operator in SOQl and how to use it with Lists and Sets.…
Overtime, it’s easy for a Salesforce org to accumulate duplicate Leads, Contacts, Accounts and of course Opportunities. Duplicate data usually means that there’s some bad practices in your sales process or that staff aren’t checking to see if a contact or lead already exists. Companies rarely spend a lot of their time focusing on the data and how clean it is within their systems, but data can be a huge asset when making business decisions. Bad or duplicate data can result in a lot of time wasted by sales staff.…
I thought a lot about whether I should make a post about common Salesforce Interview Questions.…
One of the most important parts of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is the the deployment process. In Salesforce, deployments aren’t really much more than copying metadata from one Salesforce organization to another. Salesforce has a few different deployment methods.…
Let’s face it, marketing automation is really expensive. Pardot is a marketing automation tool that is owned by Salesforce. Companies everywhere need to drive ROI out of all their purchases, this post is focused on Getting the Most ROI Out of Pardot. …
Global Picklists solve a really frustrating problem for Salesforce Administrators. Previously, if you wanted multiple fields to have the same values you had to make sure you always updated both fields when you wanted to add or delete values. …
Visualforce was designed to allow us to create functionality for users that has a similar user experience as the Force.com platform. Well designed pages should feel like they were meant to be part of the platform, and should be incredibly performant.…