Managing Salesforce Deployments from Outside of Production

I recently finished a deployment that represented a first for me, which also means I learned some new lessons that I’d like to share.

The scenario

Because of a super restrictive data security setup, I, as the consultant, only had access to a sandbox. Production access was limited to a select group of internal users.

The dilemma

What is the best way to manage deployments and live changes when you don’t have access to the destination org?

My first finding

If you’re a Salesforce admin like me, you probably have gotten into the habit of creating, uploading and deploying your own change sets. You probably also have encountered validation errors which require the change set to be updated.

When you’re managing your own change sets, those changes can usually be made on the fly and re-uploaded. But when there is split access, troubleshooting those errors takes on a whole new meaning.

What I’ve found is helpful to quell this issue, is creating much smaller change sets. Unusually create a change set and throw all changes into it in order to deploy one time. In this scenario, though, it’s been most helpful to have very small and specific change sets, each addressing a particular feature. This way, if something fails validation, I can immediately target the feature of that change set rather than having to find a way to pinpoint the issue.

My Second Finding

The biggest deployment issue we’ve seen involved folder sharing. Since I’m a User in the sandbox only, and a folder is shared with me, upon validation, Salesforce will look for my user in Production. It’s not there, though, and that causes the error.

To resolve this, just make sure that any folders you create (or at least before you upload from the sandbox) are shared with a user, role or public group that exists in Prod. A workaround that we’ve done is to set them all to “All Internal Users = View” in the sandbox, upload and deploy as such, and then reconfigure sharing in PROD to account for the real User base.

As the implementation consultant, you’ll usually have admin access to Production but there are scenarios in which you won’t. This will create an additional challenge in order to manage, but if you follow these tips from the start, there’s no reason your deployment shouldn’t go smoothly.

KB Top 3: How to Keep Salesforce Festive During the Holidays

Inherent within every software implementation is the underlying dependency on user adoption. User adoption is multi-faceted and occurs in phases. The first phase is to get users logged into the system for the first time. First impressions are everything so it’s important that the first login goes well. The next step is to get them to continually log in and update the system.

One of the ways I like to encourage this behavior is by adding some flavor to the system in the form of images, GIFs, videos or emojis.

Especially during the holidays, users tend to log in less and spend less time in the system when they do. Now, I don’t claim for these to be the end-all-be-all solutions but they certainly contribute psychologically to building a healthy, fun, and engaging climate around Salesforce. So here are my top three tips for decreasing the Salesforce drop-off that occurs during the holidays.

Add animations for statuses and paths

Before Salesforce rolled out Paths with Lightning, it wasn’t uncommon for me to configure a formula (text) field that used the IMAGE function to conditionally render a photo when a certain criteria was met.

The most fun example was probably when I created a visual representation of a custom lead scoring field for a client. Based on what a given Lead’s score was, a different image would show up, indicating the urgency with which they should follow up. This is what they saw for Leads with low scores, Leads with moderate scores showed this animation, and high-scoring Leads looked like this.

While this alone adds some personality to the system, admins can expand that even more simply by creating a task for yourself to switch those out for new GIFs or images periodically. Eventually, users will look forward to seeing what GIF shows up for them this week/month/quarter. Even this small, seemingly insignificant feeling, contributes to positive user adoption in your org. As the admin or architect, use this in areas where adoption may be low (Note: If your criteria is driven by a picklist field alone, consider using a Path and pasting these animations in the “Guidance for Success” rich-text section).

Notice that the high-scoring Lead animation is from the movie Polar Express, a Christmas movie. Feel free to find fun assets that represent the holidays of your workforce (that means Hanukkah, Ramadan and Kwanzaa, too). Then, switch them to encouraging images of a new year and new beginnings. Basically, give the system a bit of a personality and use that personality to keep people engaging with the system.

Add festive assets to the homepage

Assuming that you have a home page and that it’s the default landing page for most users, spruce it up by adding some holiday cheer to the aesthetic. Since it’s likely the first page people see when they log in, it’s also the first opportunity to build an experience that contributes positively to user adoption.

1. If you have a festive variation of your company’s logo that you use around the holidays, add it to Apps in the App Manager during the holidays.

2. (In Lightning) Add a rich text component to the home page with messaging in festive-colored fonts.

3. Create a new “Holidays” tab and add your messaging and digital assets there if you don’t want to change the current home page too much.

4. Setup a public Holiday Cheer Chatter group and allow users to join. Encourage users to share things like their favorite holiday movie, their favorite ugly Christmas sweater photo, or pictures of homemade holiday treats.

Don’t Force the Festivities

Also, consider making these assets configurable. Don’t force the holidays on people, but rather make it available via Salesforce to be festive. You may want a checkbox on the User record that allows Users to opt out of the “festivities” if they want. And don’t take this personally if people opt out - if it means they get their jobs done distraction free - that’s also a win.

These are just a few recommendations on how to make Salesforce festive but the possibilities are endless. If you’re unsure of how to work these into your organization, consider running these ideas by your Salesforce, and possibly also HR, team to start brainstorming. If you’d like me to take a look and give some suggestions, just hit me up!

KB Top 3: Avoid These Mistakes with Your Salesforce Hires

As the footprint of Salesforce continues to grow, so too will the need for Salesforce professionals. One trend I noticed during 2020 and the pandemic is that a lot of people that lost their jobs turned to the Trailhead platform to skill up on Salesforce. What this means is that there is more competition amongst Salesforce professionals which bodes well for companies looking to build out their Salesforce team.

The flip side of that is that with more people claiming Salesforce expertise, it’s both more necessary and also more difficult, to find the hire that’s right for your organization. Below are my top three tips for avoiding hiring mistakes when evaluating Salesforce talent.

Understand what you need from your Salesforce person/team and hire for it.

Here is an example of the mistake I see the most often: Susan needs some Salesforce help but is restricted by a budget so she goes out and hires a young Salesforce admin. Two months later, COVID-19 hits and now Susan needs that admin to help strategize how to redesign the system to handle an increase in demand and also a decrease in workforce. The admin spends 50% of their time researching answers, building out Trailhead playgrounds and attending Salesforce webinars. Now you’re paying 50% of their salary for them to learn on the job, further delaying the time before they are useful.

As you build out your team, the most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to understand the differences in the various certifications and where that certification falls on the critical-thinking spectrum. The ADM 201 certification is the bare-minimum and, therefore, requires the least amount of critical-thinking. Tell them what to configure and they’ll do it.

The Advanced Administrator certification taps into a little more critical-thinking but is still largely configuration driven. For both admin exams, questions are phrased more like “is it possible to…”, “what configuration feature does this…”, “how can this desired result be configured?…” etc.

The critical-thinking really comes after that, especially with consultant exams, where the questions are phrased more like “what is the best way to…”, “how can you accomplish this for a client?”, “what would you recommend for someone in this situation…”

If your organization is prepared to hand off project specs and just needs them configured, you’re probably going to be okay hiring an admin. However, if you’re like most people building out Salesforce teams, you expect the system to evolve along with your company and you need someone who can not only administer the system but can also help build a roadmap of what your system will need to look like in a year, and how to get there. It’s not fair to expect this level of critical-thinking of an admin; a business analyst with architecting experience would be ideal but also be prepared to pay a higher salary. Also, be wary of the impact that overloading your Salesforce admin can have on the culture of turnover for that role.

Don’t overvalue certifications.

Salesforce Trailhead has made it possible for anyone anywhere in the world to learn the technical skills of Salesforce. This means that, in theory, someone could get Salesforce certified without ever having seen Salesforce in action. It’s not likely, but it’s absolutely possible. Being that it’s possible, assign some weight to certifications, but it shouldn’t be the end-all-be all.

What I’ve found is that most Salesforce professionals won’t take an exam until they’re 90% sure they’ll pass It. If there’s even a moderate amount of doubt there, they won’t even take the exam. Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t still help you solve your Salesforce problems. It could just as likely mean that the consultant is more than capable but needs the boost of confidence from someone like you seeing their value pre-certification.

This happened with me. For years, I avoided the Platform App Builder certification because I didn’t think I could pass it without a strong background in coding - which I don’t have. I stumbled onto a practice test and did very well and then passed the exam easily my first time. I was more than capable intellectually, just needed something to give me that confidence boost. You knowing not to overvalue certifications could be that boost.

Appreciate variety.

Let’s say you run a real estate company looking build out your Salesforce team. Naturally, you’d want people with experience in real estate. However I argue that you should find someone with tangental real estate experience, at best. First, because there’s a surprising amount of cross-over between industries or sectors in terms of how they use Salesforce. There are obviously nuances but pulling from a variety of skills and experiences will allow you to leverage lessons from other industries that may not be as intuitive.

For example, I did a project for Lionsgate Motion Pictures where Salesforce managed the pre-production process of making movies. It just so happened that the process of matching a script with a writer, reviewing the writer’s script, and alerting finance that it’s time to pay the writer for that draft is actually a very similar process to how the LA Chamber of Commerce matches fellows with interviewers, reviews their custom interview grading rubric, and generates invoices for finance to track tuition. The labels for the fields are all different but the structure of the data is almost identical.

Do yourself a favor and build up your Salesforce team with people who have worked on all different types of projects (Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Communities, both native and non-native Integrations, VisualForce heavy environments, Heroku apps, etc.). Try to build a team that can cover as much of Salesforce’s capabilities as possible. Don’t limit your system to the specific portion of Salesforce that you’re aware of at the time of hiring.

As long as you have a clear understanding of what you need, you understand the factor that certifications play in this type of decision-making, and you build a team with experiences that complement each other, you should go into your hiring season confident that you’ll find the next right addition to your team. If you would like for me to take a look at your org and diagnose what level of Salesforce professional you need, please feel free to reach out.

A Lesson From Using Flows

I spent the better part of the last week working on a fairly complicated screen Flow to create three generations of records from the Account object. After diagramming the desired state and getting comfortable with the expected outcomes, it came time to start building.

I got the Flow built and started testing and unknowingly fell victim to something that even I sometimes forget: to keep it simple. While trying to build out the Flow, I couldn’t get a decision node to recognize a picklist value appropriately.

Long story short, if you can’t figure out the right resource to use for a value within your Flow, maybe there isn’t one. It may be more appropriate to just type the text you’re looking for, rather than trying to tie everything out via relationships.

Instead, I just needed to type the word I was looking for into the value and not link to a resource at all.

I’m admittedly still figuring out all that Flows can do. Seemingly with each Salesforce release, Flows have gotten better and better: to the point that they’re incredibly user friendly now, which hasn’t always been the case. If you’re an expert Flow builder, this article may not have been helpful, but if you’re hooked up on getting a picklist value to show up in other components through the Flow, and don’t know every piece that needs to be configured, give this approach a try.