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Optimize Project Management: Leveraging Quickbooks Projects with Salesforce and Breadwinner

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We are avid users of Salesforce, Quickbooks Online, and Breadwinner, and these three tools play a crucial role in our daily workflow.

If you’re a Quickbooks Online user who also utilizes Quickbooks Projects, we have discovered a powerful way to integrate Quickbooks Online and Salesforce using Breadwinner. This integration enables you to efficiently manage tasks, delegate responsibilities, and monitor project profitability all within the Salesforce platform.

Furthermore, by incorporating Expensify into our system, our consultants can effortlessly track their expenses and automatically associate them with the relevant projects.

So, what are the advantages of this integration? Imagine having a convenient one-stop shop where you can access all-in-one dashboards in Salesforce, presenting a comprehensive suite of charts displaying all your projects in an organized and visually appealing manner. This consolidated view allows for better project management and decision-making.

As a default behavior, Breadwinner synchronizes Quickbooks Online (QBO) Projects with Salesforce as Accounts. However, we have taken a step further by utilizing flows to transform these records into dedicated project records within Salesforce, ensuring a seamless synchronization with QBO.

To enhance the user experience, we have implemented a strategy where “Project Accounts” are concealed from standard view by leveraging Account Record Types in Salesforce. This ensures a cleaner and more organized interface, focused specifically on project-related information.

Looking for some help with Quickbooks and Salesforce integration?  Have a custom, interesting use case?  Reach out to us – we’d love to help!

Unlock the Power of Product Bundles and Order Fulfillment in Salesforce: A Cost-Effective Solution

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Are you eager to harness the potential of Product Bundles and streamline order fulfillment within Salesforce, but concerned about the high costs associated with inventory management, RMA, and fulfillment systems?

Perhaps you’re intrigued by Salesforce CPQ, but don’t require its full range of functionalities.

We’ve developed an innovative approach that seamlessly integrates custom objects, components, and screens within Salesforce, offering you a remarkable solution without the need for costly third-party licensing and recurring expenses. Discover how you can optimize your sales processes while maintaining financial prudence.

We’ll walk you through how this functions within salesforce.com through this video and the below highlights.

Create an Opportunity

    • Add Opportunity Products
  • Opportunity Products can be of type “Standard” or “Bundle”
        • A bundle allows for a pre-defined set of products to be further selected and customized
  • Create a Bundle Configuration
      • Configure the specifics of your product bundle
    • Mark the Deal as Closed Won
  • An Order is automatically generated.
  • The Order Items can be Fulfilled with Serialized, Refurbished, or new individual products
  • Add the Tracking Number(s)
  • Ship the Order

Salesforce CPQ vs. Quoting Tools: Understanding the Key Differences

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On our previous blog post, where we discussed salesforce CPQ and CPQ Alternatives, we touched on some functionality that the tool offers.

 

Salesforce makes a strong push to sell one of the newest products added to its product suite. What was ‘Steelbrick’ and ‘Steelbrick Billing’ and now ‘Salesforce CPQ’, this product incorporates both the CPQ product and the billing product, granting access to billing through a higher-level license. (The billing function of this tool is also spectacular, but for this post, we want to focus specifically on the quoting portion)This product is an incredibly powerful tool, and if you’ve already installed and configured it, you also have a fairly good understanding that what makes it powerful.

 

The ability to customize the product for complex product and pricing rules with the use of minimum or no code is really what helps the product shine.

 

From our conversations with individuals that are both users or prospects of salesforce CPQ, we’ve heard a lot of confusion on what exactly it does and how it could benefit their company.

 

CPQ has often been mistaken as a quoting tool. CPQ is far more than a tool for generating quotes and documents. Some questions to ask yourself before embarking on the CPQ journey are:

 

-Do you sell products that are dependent on the purchase of another product? -Do you have complex discounting rules? -Do you have tiered-, volume-, and usage-based pricing structures?

 

If your answer is yes to one or more of these questions, it is worth looking at the product to see if it meets your needs. Remember, that there is more than one way to approach the problem. Taking a look at the tool’s pricetag vs all of the functionality you will actually be using is where your decision should be made.

 

Remember – The output – the actual quote document at the end of the generation is not the meat of this application. Think of CPQ doing all of the heavy lifting of executing on your pre-defined business rules around pricing and volume. While CPQ does have its own quote configurator tool, you can also choose to leverage a third party tool while still using CPQ.

 

Still confused or looking for more information? Contact us!

Reviving the Power of Salesforce Ideas in Lightning

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If you’re a user of Salesforce.com Service Cloud, or just a long-time user of Salesforce, you’ll remember Salesforce Ideas.

Salesforce Ideas, or the Salesforce Idea Exchange, as it’s now called was a feature to allow your customers to come to your website, create new “Ideas” that they have for new functionality or features of your product or service.

These Ideas could then be:

  • Created by your customers
  • Voted Up or Down by your customers
  • Commented on by your customersAllowing them to have a voice into what is on your company’s roadmap.

Better still, internally, you can update the status of the Idea telling your customers that the product or solution was delivered!  Talk about a 2-way communication with your most important asset!

Since Salesforce Lightning, Salesforce does not support Ideas.  Luckily, we’ve implemented Ideas in Lightning for a number of clients that allow for them to still have the same functionality they used to, but now supported in Salesforce Experience Cloud Portals.

Looking for some advice on how to stand up Ideas on your company’s website?  Wish you had that functionality back?  Contact us, we’d love to discuss with you how we can help you overcome these challenges.

Exploring the Capabilities of ChatGPT in the Salesforce Ecosystem: A Look into its Successes and Failures

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Everyone’s eyes are on Artificial Intelligence recently with the release of a multitude of AI products; The biggest one being ChatGPT. The question Salesforce professionals are asking is how does this affect the Salesforce ecosystem?

We ran some experiments internally to see how proficient ChatGPT is at doing Salesforce tasks. The answer is ChatGPT is not going to replace the need for Salesforce professionals anytime soon – However, it will become a tool to boost productivity and efficiency.

While ChatGPT will confidently answer your Salesforce question, it is often wrong and will not follow industry standards. Here are some examples of its successes and failures:

Prompt #1:

In Salesforce, Create a validation rule on the Opportunity Object to prevent users from changing the status from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. If the stage = ‘Closed Won’ or ‘Closed Lost’, prevent the user from changing the status unless it is a Salesforce Administrator.

 

We used the GPT 4 model and it provided this answer for us:

AND(

    OR(

        ISPICKVAL(PRIORVALUE(StageName), “Closed Won”),

        ISPICKVAL(PRIORVALUE(StageName), “Closed Lost”)

    ),

    NOT($Profile.Name = “System Administrator”)

)

This answer was pretty good! There are a few adjustments that could be made to make it better based on the Org, and this is where the Salesforce profession comes in. While ChatGPT was able to provide a decent answer, this validation rule will still need to be tested, validated, and deployed from a sandbox. ChatGPT is not able to do that – yet.

Now, something harder – Creating an apex trigger:

 

 

Prompt #2:

In Salesforce, I am trying to stamp the lead status when a lead is converted to the contact in a custom field called, “Lead Status”. Create a trigger that can do this.

GPT 4’s response:

trigger UpdateLeadStatusOnContactConversion on Contact (after update) {

    List<Lead> leadsToUpdate = new List<Lead>();

    for (Contact c : Trigger.new) {

        if (c.IsConverted && c.Converted_Lead_Id != null) {

            Lead convertedLead = [SELECT Id, Lead_Status__c FROM Lead WHERE Id = :c.Converted_Lead_Id];

            convertedLead.Lead_Status__c = ‘Converted’;

            leadsToUpdate.add(convertedLead);

        }

    }

    update leadsToUpdate;

}

 

This is where ChatGPT still has more to learn. On line 5, This apex trigger puts an apex query in a for loop. This is a big issue that if deployed would cause chaos in a salesforce instance because it could possibly cause a SOQL time out error everytime it runs. It also is stamping the Lead Status onto the lead object and not on the contact object. This is not what we wanted the AI to do.

Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool and will continue to grow stronger. It is going to create many possibilities for the future. However, its Salesforce skills are not quite there with ChatGPT 4. While it can create solutions for simple business problems, it will struggle with more complex business logic.

With the upcoming release of Einstein GPT, we will continue to see AI improve especially since Einstein GPT will be fine tuned to work for Salesforce. However, it will simply be a tool to improve salesforce development. There will still be the need for a knowledgeable person to guide the AI in the right direction.

Simplify Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy with Lead to Account Matcher for Salesforce

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Are you looking to ensure that your sales reps are not calling existing customers or prospects by accident?

Looking for a way to ensure your Revenue Operations (RevOps) are running smoothly with salesforce?

Want to ensure that all your leads for a given company are converted to contacts on existing accounts?

The Lead to Account Matcher (L2A) is a Salesforce application aimed at assisting teams that use an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, streamlining the process of relating leads and converting leads into existing accounts in your database.  We offer this tool as a one-time fee; no subscription required.

Match your Leads to Existing Accounts:  Have leads coming into your Salesforce org for companies that already exist as accounts?  Using our fuzzy logic matching, we can match to an account – even when the name is not entered exactly the same.
Convert all related Leads:  When converting a lead to an account, our matcher also looks for matching leads that exist for the company, and allows you to bring over all or none of them, with a click!
Fully Customizable:  Because our Lead to Account Matcher is built using custom settings, we give the ability to change matching thresholds, eliminate specific words from the matching algorithm, and change what fields are displayed on the matching layout. All done through user configuration – no code required.

Watch the video below, and contact us if you feel this tool would be the right fit for your organization.

 

Integrating TaxJar and Salesforce Billing: How We Made It Work

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Having integrated Stripe and Salesforce many times before, we recently came across a use case to integrate TaxJar and Salesforce Billing.

Salesforce Billing is an add-on package that inherits key records and information from Salesforce CPQ. After a sales rep finalizes a quote and orders it within Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce Billing picks up the order record for invoicing, payment, and revenue recognition.

While TaxJar does provide integrations with Salesforce, it is only currently working with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and not with Salesforce Billing.

What our integration does is when Invoices are created, edited or posted, our integration pings the TaxJar API and properly calculates and logs the transaction with the correct tax amount.

Looking to integrate Salesforce Billing and TaxJar?  Looking for Salesforce CPQ assistance?
Contact us – we’d love to work with you.

Boosting Sales and Marketing Collaboration: The Benefits of Using the Integration User for Salesforce-Hubspot Integration

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Salesforce has recently released a new feature that enables an unpaid integration user to be used in your Salesforce org without taking up a seat.

We quickly implemented this feature for a client due to frequent password change issues they were experiencing. Unfortunately, Salesforce’s documentation on this new user license is limited.

Nevertheless, we found that by applying the following permission sets allowed the integration to work seamlessly:

  • API Enabled
  • Modify Metadata Through MetaData API Functions
  • View Setup and Configuration
  • Download AppExchange Packages

Once the permission sets were applied and the Integration User’s credentials were set up in Hubspot, the integration was ready to go. We hope this information is helpful. If you require further assistance with Salesforce or Hubspot-related issues, including integration, please do not hesitate to contact us .

 

 

Salesforce Integration User Licenses: Get Started for Free

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What is an Integration User?

An Integration User refers to an API only user that is responsible for carrying out data manipulation tasks and to access Salesforce data to encourage data security and Salesforce best practices.

If you have more than one system and you want it to talk to salesforce, in the past, you’d have to have a license allocated to providing the authentication between multiple systems.

Why is this useful?

  • Limits user access
  • Increases data security
  • Better traceability of transactions
  • Streamlines system-to –system integrations
  • Can be added to new or existing users
  • Encourages one user per integration
  • Frees up licenses for actual humans

    Essentially, the Salesforce Integration
    User enables an API permission set license that is intended to enhance and/or limit user/object permissions that
    work together with other user-controlled permission sets. This yields customized data sub-set access which in turn increases data security.
    Not to mention that as of March 14, 2023 Salesforce is offering 5 free Integration User licenses and $10* for each license after
    those have been used up 

    Interested in updating your org, or just have questions? Contact us, we’d love to work with you*Pricing subject to change

 

How Box Amped is Revolutionizing Box.com and Salesforce Integration

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We’re excited to show you one of our latest products, Box.com Amped!

Box Amped has revolutionized the way Box.com and Salesforce integrate, providing an enhanced Box connector for Salesforce. With its improved features, Box Amped makes it easier for users to access and manage files stored in Box directly from the Salesforce interface.

Associate any salesforce record to any box.com folder
The box.com connector allows you to associate any salesforce record to any box folder.  Using a simple interface, you visually choose what folder is associated to what record.  Don’t have a folder setup already?  It’s part of the steps to create the folder wherever you need to in your tree heirarchy

Respect for permissions
Leveraging the box.com toolkit API, all folder permissions are respected as to who can view what folder, so data that needs to stay isolated; stays isolated.

 

Extend box.com to salesforce communities
Box.com is a powerful tool, made even more powerful with salesforce communities.  Embed the power of box.com’s folders and security in your salesforce community, making it completely transparent to the user.

Contact us – we’d love to work with you!

Want to see it in action?  Check out the video below: