Salesforce SharePoint Integration – Salesforce is the world’s #1 cloud-based CRM giant offering comprehensive CRM solutions to millions of leading brands across the globe. However, when it comes to document management, Salesforce was not exclusively designed to be a Content Management platform. Instead, it is an integrated CRM solution that gives all your departments, including sales, service, marketing, commerce a 360-degree view of customers to deliver omnichannel and personalized experiences that your customers expect. Microsoft SharePoint, on the other hand, is a robust and feature-stuffed document management and collaboration platform that enables companies to manage archives, documents, reports, and other data that are crucial to business processes. It is extensively used as a secure document repository for intranet portals, websites, cloud-based services and much more.

Integration between these two systems captures the essence of both Salesforce and SharePoint to make all files available on a single interface while significantly driving down costs of maintaining two individual platforms. Salesforce SharePoint integration enables Salesforce users to effortlessly access and manage office documents including spreadsheets and presentations, share posts, join groups, instantly share huge files, collaborate better and much more.

Salesforce SharePoint Integration Vs Salesforce Chatter

Alternatively, you can use Salesforce Chatter to share files and data across your organization. Salesforce Chatter is an exquisite enterprise collaboration platform that allows employees across the organization to share and collaborate seamlessly using the platform. It supports feeds, profiles and groups to allow data sharing and communication among Salesforce users. It reduces the number of emails you send and receive by communicating with colleagues through tools within Chatter such as news feed, group forums, file sharing, and online chat. In fact, according to a Salesforce report, Chatter reduces email by a staggering 30%.

However, Chatter free users have limited rights. Though you can view Chatter profiles, join groups and post updates, you cannot see Salesforce data and records or edit document right in Salesforce. This could be a hindrance for collaboration between Salesforce users and employees without licenses. You can overcome this by buying more Salesforce Sales Cloud licenses (starting at $25 per user per month). However, there are two main cons here – high license costs and limited capabilities for collaboration with external stakeholders and internal departments that don’t use Salesforce.

To get around this, companies can use SharePoint as their enterprise collaboration tool and Salesforce as their CRM. This enables cross-departmental collaboration to happen within the SharePoint intranet and external stakeholder collaboration using the extranet part of SharePoint. When a company decides on this option, it is critical that they carefully choose the right Salesforce SharePoint integration partner to facilitate frictionless user experiences in the future. 

Article Resource: DemandBlue Blogs

Salesforce Developer training advances your skills and knowledge in building custom applications on the Salesforce platform using the programming capabilities of Apex code and Visualforce UI framework. It covers all the fundamentals of application development through real-time projects and uses cases to help you clear the Salesforce Developer Certification. Enrol now and get certified.

Objectives:

• Salesforce CRM and its functions.
• Working with Salesforce Cloud.
• Deploying Reports, Dashboards and portals in Salesforce.
• Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL).
• Data validation, app customization, and data debugging.
• Data models, security, UI and business logic.
• Expertise in MVC architecture.
• Salesforce Standard List Controller.

Reach Us At:

https://mindmajix.com/salesforce-developer-training

Congratulations, you’ve made the decision to implement Salesforce CPQ! Now comes the challenging task of choosing the right Salesforce CPQ partner to help fulfill your vision for generating quick and accurate sales quotes. In many ways, choosing the Salesforce solution was the easy part—choosing the right Salesforce CPQ partner is the trickier one. The following are some of the key questions you need to ask yourself before choosing a Salesforce CPQ partner for your organization.

1. Increase Speed

• Check that your Salesforce CPQ partner can deliver solutions that will accelerate the agility of your quoting process. For instance, with respect to your organization,
• How quickly can a representative respond to an initial inquiry from a customer?
• What will be the speed to market for incorporating changes in real-time throughout the deal cycle?
• How many touch-points does your sales team need in order to work through any transaction?
• How much automation do you need in your approval process? Will every quote need to be approved? What will be your % of no-touch/low-touch quotes?
• What will be your Quote to Order booked cycle time?

2. Eliminate Errors and Prepare Accurate Quotes

• Pricing Errors have a very negative impact. If undetected, an overpriced product can mean a lost sale, while an underpriced product can mean selling at a loss.
• Product Configuration Errors: Cost of a configuration error can have impacts such as having to build, ship or install the product again. However, this has a greater impact in terms of rebuilding trust and redeeming your image as a provider of quality products. Ensure that the new implementation done by your Salesforce CPQ partner significantly helps reduce the error rate.

Also Read: Salesforce CPQ named a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Application Suites.

3. Drive Organizational Efficiency

• Will the new Salesforce CPQ instance improve the overall organizational efficiency? What will be your Release-to-Market timelines?
• What will be the cost of introducing a new product or a new offering?
• How much time/effort is needed to release a new pricing? Can you respond quickly to changes in the competitive landscape?
• How fast can you respond to changes in Sales Management and hierarchy?

4. Maximize Deal Size and Boost ROI with the Right Salesforce CPQ Partner

• Can you see improvements in Margin?
• What will be the cost to place and fulfill an order?
• Last but certainly not the least, what will be the incremental revenue generated after the implementation of a Salesforce CPQ tool?
• To establish a successful Salesforce CPQ implementation, it is key to define appropriate metrics and choose an ideal partner who can deliver on those metrics. Here’s to successful Salesforce CPQ implementations!

Article Resource: DemandBlue Blogs

It is high-time that tech companies transform themselves digitally. This can be done only when companies adopt leading cloud platforms that are present in the market like Salesforce. 

Salesforce enables IT organizations to deliver value to their business, albeit in a much quicker and faster way as compared to other kinds of platforms.

Once Salesforce comes into the picture, the next step forward is to adopt a modern DevOps strategy that will prove to be highly useful in increasing speed, providing more value to the business and reducing errors in production. 

There are a certain number of problems that come into effect when Salesforce gets integrated with DevOps, some of which include:

Lack of built-in compliance enforcement Collaboration with others in the same environment becomes difficultNo native version control or source repositoriesThe release process is unstructured 

One of the major problems in DevOps implementation is the lack of collaboration tools. DevOps can turn out to be successful only when there is proper sync between the architects, admins, developers, customers and of course your business. 

Each organization has a different level of maturity when it comes to DevOps process. But for achieving continuous delivery, it is very essential for companies to first improve their internal processes. 

DevOps on Salesforce process usually involves the implementation of the following steps:

Plan Create Package Verify Deploy Release Monitor 

DevOps on Salesforce is usually seen as a seven-stage process with the steps Plan, Create, Package and Verify being the standard ones. The only steps that differ in the DevOps on Salesforce process include Deploy and Release. Companies need not have to worry about monitoring the process since it is completely handled by Salesforce. 

There are five distinct levels of DevOps maturity which every organization, be it a Salesforce development company or a company who is just getting started with Salesforce, needs to look into, before taking the next step forward in the Salesforce with DevOps implementation process. These levels of DevOps maturity are explained in detail below:

Choose and Deploy Changes are made as and when required in any organization, even if it’s production. These changes are made whenever they are deemed necessary and after that, they are immediately moved to another environment. This ultimately results in over-writing and finally a very low-quality of the work process. Due to these reasons, teams manage with only 2-3 software releases in a year into production. 

Version ControlThe version control level serves as a storehouse of external repositories. Managing branches tends to be kind of rapid and it is useful only for developers, not admins. Organizations, in spite of bringing into effect manual quality control, are able to manage only with monthly releases. 

Agile Releases This level proves to be a good intermediate goal for many companies. Release strategies are built around the stories of users and this is the result of the commitment of the organization to the agile process. The environments are kept up to date with more frequent deployments, releases are small and on-time, reviews of manual codes are reviewed with static code analysis. 

Apex tests and validation are put into effect in environments all across the organization. Deployments are accumulated in pre-production, but they are still kept manual. Releasing on the prod domain is still considered a big deal. 

Intelligent AutomationIn this level, admins connect with developers with the help of version control and scratch orgs with the use of 3rd party tools. Automation comes into effect once there are more frequent releases and back-to-back deployments and this process continues up to the pre-production stage. 

The transition from release to production becomes more dependable and predictable. However, this step is still controlled by IT. Finally, your organization has the ability to report regularly on business value delivery and on-delivery metrics, now that there are automated quality processes in place. 

Continuous Delivery Finally, the organization reaches the stage of continuous delivery and innovation into the process of production. This level of automation requires Salesforce apps to be developed in the exact way that Salesforce designs their services. There should also be full automation of quality gates. 

One important thing that has to be kept in mind is that the deployment into production must not have any sort of impact on users of the already existing version. The release of the software to users must be orchestrated by the business based on the timing given on their schedules. 

The most important part of DevOps maturity is the way you work with the set of tools in the internal processes. You need to choose a vendor that enables you to start at your current level, but at the same time, allows you to offer a complete solution at several stages including the maturity level. 

Salesforce Tableau Integration – Salesforce is known for its acquisitions, always with a strategy to deliver comprehensive CRM features and world-class experiences to its stakeholders. However, its recent purchase of Tableau for an enterprise value of a whopping $15.7 Billion has been an unusual one. Tableau is the biggest acquisition by Salesforce ever, the last one being Mulesoft in 2016 for a cash-and-stock value of $6.5 Billion. Key takeaways from this strategic move are that Data analytics and Data Visualization are going to be two of Salesforce’s core offerings, going forward – key layers that were missing so far in their overall analytics play.

Another reason why Salesforce has targeted this BI Intelligence company is that Tableau has over 86,000 customers under its wings. This also gives Salesforce, a second headquarters in Seattle, the seat of cloud computing giants Microsoft and Amazon. If Salesforce succeeds in offering integrated services on a single cloud platform, it could soon rival leading players like AWS and Azure in their own backyard. Besides the Business standpoint, Salesforce offers a slew of brand-new features as combined capabilities of the World’s #1 CRM platform and the World’s #1 BI Intelligence platform.

Here’s a rundown of what the multibillion-dollar deal of Salesforce Tableau integration has in store for its customers.

Salesforce Tableau Integration Benefits

1. Data Analysis and Visualization to better Understand Salesforce CRM Data

A Tableau integrated framework within Salesforce provides the Data Visualization features of Tableau within the Salesforce instance. Visualizations are presented in the form of dashboards and worksheets, which can be understood even by non-tech professionals, irrespective of their level in an organization.

These visual analysis provide actionable insights at every phase of the sales pipeline. It helps sales reps make more informed decisions across the entire lifecycle – be it prospecting, lead management, pipeline coverage, account management, and more. Complex processes including Big data analytics are used to discover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends and customer behaviors that help organizations make better business decisions.

2. Shift beyond CRM to Offer Analytics-driven Recommendations

Salesforce Tableau acquisition has shifted the firm’s core beyond the CRM product line – Salesforce will be a comprehensive front-office analytics platform of choice for all data. Beyond CRM, Salesforce Tableau integration offers a complete enterprise software that surrounds and owns employee and customer experiences.

Customers will now be able to find everything they need for the front office within the Salesforce instance, accelerating the integration of analytics-driven insights into core business processes. Tableau’s reputation as the World’s #1 intuitive self-service Business analytics platform will also drive user adoption and maximize benefits of analytics-driven recommendations to every user.

3. Salesforce Tableau Integration – Driving Digital Transformation

The Salesforce Tableau integration is also on keeping with the trend that data and analytics are key to Digital Transformation (DX). Google’s acquisition of Looker, another BI Intelligence software company is further proof of that. Tableau puts Salesforce in a competitive position within the largest and most preferred markets being driven by the next wave of Digital Transformation: Artificial Intelligence, Integration and now Analytics.

According to the Salesforce report, “With Tableau Salesforce Integration, Salesforce will play an even greater role in driving digital transformation, enabling companies across the globe to tap into customer data across their entire business and surface deeper insights to make smarter decisions, drive intelligent, connected customer experiences and accelerate innovation”

4. Deliver Seamless User Experience and Increase Productivity

Tableau integration with Salesforce puts Salesforce’s rich customer data to work by providing analytics for everyone in your organization. Users can have the departmental reporting on the same page, saving time and making better analysis of the data of different customer bases.

Tableau capabilities on Salesforce data will revolutionize the way organizations understand their data. It will allow availability of secure, meaningful data analytics views, which can be accessed via web browsers or even mobile devices.

Article Resource: DemandBlue Blogs

Salesforce Lightning- The blazing new version of Salesforce that had taken the entire world by storm. Why? Because of it’s easy to use interface coupled with the speed of doing tasks that it enhanced. Let us see how you can achieve a smooth transition in Salesforce from Classic to Lightning. The blog covers the following topics-

Lightning Transition Best- Practices

Define Goals for Transition

Begin with a reasonable list of objectives for the Lightning migration. By laying out objectives and directing a high-level analysis, you’ll set yourself up with a superior comprehension of how your framework would develop with the redesign.

Map Out Workflows

Lay out all current and new procedures and examining them by every team that will be influenced by it. Do this before moving onto making arrangements for improvement. If a group communicates dithering or worry with how things will function in Lightning framework, then this is the ideal opportunity to talk about that.

Run a Lightning Readiness Check

It is suggested that you run a Lightning Readiness check. It can help you to pick on potential unanticipated bugs or organization inconsistencies that you may have missed during the planning.

Test Your Goal

Cross check with the majority of your key partners to guarantee the new Lightning highlights you’ve arranged and assembled will achieve the objectives you have delineated in stage one.

Roll Out Lightning to Power Users

Begin with all progressions to Power Users only. This separates major unexpected issues in a Lightning movement and guarantees the usefulness lines up with what every user group actually needs.

Documentation

You need to guarantee that you have a reference list documented securely to guarantee the new usefulness discharge goes through easily.

Four Step Formula for a Smooth Lightning Transition

Introduce Lightning and Training

Utilize your documentation above to prepare all clients on the new Lightning usefulness before implementing the progressions in the whole association.

1. Preview with Migration Assistant for a good Lightning “test drive.”

Salesforce gives an out-of-the-box Migration Assistant that adds all articles and information to Lightning. It gives you a well-ordered guide on the best way to initiate Lightning Experience for your association and your clients; is a totally innocuous task; and all you need is five minutes to enact all procedure computerization, for example, work process, sharing principles, record types, page designs, and information. You can discover Migration Assistant in the Setup. Salesforce Migration Assistant allows you to make a Preview of Lightning Experience. That implies Lightning Experience isn’t yet accessible for you or your association. Consider it like a decent test drive where you can check “out of the box” Salesforce usefulness and plan for the following stage before complete actuation.

2. Gap Analysis to examine the technical aspects

Run a Gap Analysis and look at the specialized angles. You gave it a shot, and it looks incredible up until this point, however sadly, there are a few gaps between Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. This is your opportunity to discover what was missed in the program change process, for example, missing default Visualforce pages, custom catches with JavaScript setting and a list tab. Notwithstanding when they are there, they look to some degree antiquated. In future discharges, they will cover gaps, yet until further notice, you can utilize this asset to look at what isn’t yet done. Contingent upon the extent of your undertaking or whole association, Gap Analysis can take from a multi-week to two months. No stresses, however. There dependably exists a workaround, and you simply need to discover it.

3. Adoption Team – run end-user testing

Make an Adoption Team and run end-client testing. Pick a decent cross segment of clients in your organization, e.g., clients from different divisions, accomplices, deals reps, designers, and so forth., to evaluate the framework highlights. The clients ought to have some genuine encounter with Lightning so they can enable you to recognize missing pieces and traps in the changed over custom or standard applications. This is where ease of use and cutting-edge analysis come together.

4. Close all gaps, implement all features

It’s an ideal opportunity to close all holes between the two releases of Salesforce as indicated by your needs, and afterward execute all the new incredible highlights that Lightning offers: App Builder, Kanban List View, Sales and Service Console, new Dashboards and considerably more. This progression likewise requires a capable advancement group and joint effort with business to make sense of which pages can be changed over to Lightning segments, and which can be pushed to the following discharge. Slowly you will embrace all Lightning highlights that help your organization be progressively beneficial, close arrangements and cases quicker, and execute modern advancement arrangements in the new stage.

Conclusion

This is it. All these small tips and steps will help you sail through the ship of the Salesforce Lightning Transition. All you have to do is to be careful. You can hire a Salesforce Consultant to help you with your Salesforce transition.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits – In the digital age, customers are invariably inundated with marketing messages everywhere. Digital Marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to about 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day. There is a tsunami of commercials, print advertisements, Brand labels, Facebook ads, Google Ads, ads on the phone or anything a business can produce to get customer attention and compel customers to buy. In short, if marketers try to advertise their company, service or product –they’ve got a lot of competition for buyer’s attention. If marketers are not strategic, their efforts will be lost among the multitude of other marketing messages out there.

In this highly competitive digital marketplace where marketers compete to deliver superior brand experiences, how can you make your marketing cut through the clutter and gain a winning edge over your competitors? Read on to discover some of the key marketing challenges and how marketers can leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits to overcome them.

Challenge #1 – Gaining Customer Insights

In the digital omnipresence of marketing, sending generalized marketing emails without getting customer insights could be disastrous. Successful Marketers understand customer behaviors and roll out specific responses to those cues. For instance, the customer engagement strategy when reaching out to a customer who abandoned cart needs to be different from trying to entice a new customer to buy a specific product.

Customer insights allow marketers to understand them and predict their actions in a given situation. Marketers can use this information to deliver highly personalized customer experiences, to increase brand engagement and ultimately the conversion rate and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits – Solutions

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides tools and resources to enable marketers to understand the customer and guide their individual journeys. They can learn more about their target audiences’ past and future behaviors. Marketers can then leverage these Marketing Cloud benefits to create and deliver far more personalized customer interactions.  For instance, the Audience Builder helps you build a single view of your customer using data from different platforms including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and others. And Social Studio enables you to hear social conversations with social listening tools. This helps you to monitor your owned social channels and participate in conversations at scale.

Salesforce Journey Builder listens to customer behaviors. Specific triggers drive various actions that guide customer’s individual journeys with personalized messages. Marketers don’t just send out random mass emails. They listen to certain customer behaviors that call for specific responses. For instance, if someone just abandoned their cart at checkout or opened an email, the marketing team can follow-up with appropriate content for the specific buyer.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud continually listens to customer behaviors, enabling marketers to deliver more relevant content and build more successful customer relationships. And integration of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits with the CRM offers deep insights, based on which marketers may power a customized journey for each customer.

Challenge #2 – Driving Customer Experiences

It has become imperative for today’s marketers to be proactive. Rarely do customers go seeking marketers? Successful marketers not only understand the customer but also take the initiative to drive superior customer experiences according to their preferences.

The significance of Predictive analysis cannot be understated in such a scheme of things. Marketers need to find a powerful and invaluable tool to drive Customer Experiences (CX)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits – Solutions

Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits customers in many ways. It assesses a customer’s behavioral history to predict future actions. A customer’s pact actions help marketers predict their future actions, such as unsubscribe, share with a friend or buy. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud then delivers customized customer journeys based on that insight.

If, for instance, a customer always buys items on sale, then they will always receive news about the latest sale. Marketers can drive customer experiences according to real customer preferences and thus, enjoy a greater customer response rate.

Challenge #3 – Deliver Effective Communication

Bland marketing communication does not work in today’s digital age. Getting a customer to open and read a message is hard enough. Customers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day. It is critical that marketers consider the “health” of the customer when delivering content to ensure that the content strikes a chord and the customer takes the desired action.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits – Solutions

Salesforce Marketing Cloud carefully constructs messages based on the specific customer’s satisfaction levels. For instance, a customer who is unhappy with the customer service will be less receptive to email from the brand outlining some renewal offers. Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits include adapting marketing activities based on the signals it receives. This can include pausing marketing activities to the specific customer until a difficult customer service issue has been resolved. As soon as the problem gets sorted, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can follow up with the customer to identify their satisfaction levels. Based on the response, a marketer can decide how best to progress the specific customer’s journey.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud analyses campaign results with precision. The impact of every interaction is evaluated to determine the strengths and flaws in the marketing process. These results are then used to leverage existing methods in real time, as well as strategies going forward.