5 ways to survive a conference stand!

September 6, 2016 By Carol Challis

We hosted a stand at the Salesforce World Tour in Melbourne. It was a national event and over 10,000 people came along to learn more about the power and possibilities of cloud technology. Everyone worked hard to engage and inform visitors and we’d like to share a little about what we learned that might help your organisation at your next conference stand.

Arriving early to check the technology!

Be prepared

Give yourself enough time to have all the items you need for your stand ready to go.
Allow at least two months (if not longer) to order in any items that you require on the day.
Double check arrangements and the location of your stand beforehand. If you have the opportunity, check everything is in place the day before.
Test any technology beforehand to make sure everything is connected and working.

Be giving

Offer items that have value or are useful.
Make sure they match the values of your organisation.
Ensure they have enough information to direct visitors back to you.

Be social

Make sure you use the conferences official hashtag in any social media communication.
Schedule your social media so that posts are appearing during the day without interrupting your conversations with visitors.
Choose the right kind of social media for your business and conference. Check with the organisers if they have a preference.
Imagine the flow of the day and send appropriate messages. Try to match in with the conference program.
Avoid over-selling your product or service. Aim to be informative or entertaining or inspiring. Be relevant to those reading your posts.

Be the best you can be

Create a stand that looks like a direct reflection of your organisation so check that it matches your image.
Consider organising corporate wardrobe with your logo showing clearly.
Use large, portable banners to create catch the eye and sell your image.
Consider using technology to sell your messages (ie slideshow and/or product demonstrations).

Be in the moment

Ensure that everyone is full of energy and enthused about being at the conference.
Offer timely breaks for meals and rests.
Remind staff to stay hydrated or provide water.
Offer high energy snacks or lollies.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Smile!

Optimising Salesforce business processes

November 23, 2015 By jchallis

The Cobbler’s children have no shoes

It’s often said that a The Cobbler’s children have no shoes, or noted that a builders own house is never completed.

We at AAkonsult have always been ones to drink our own campaign and by this I mean use ourselves as good examples of how organisations should be using Salesforce. Right from day one, all employees used salesforce for their contacts, managing activities, opportunity pipeline and more. We ran our proposal and invoicing from MS Mail merged documents and then sent them with nicely formatted email templates that had links to Salesforce content delivery.

But with all good things in life, there is often a better way of managing things. When we started out and doing a smaller number of proposals, it was quite manageable to do the mail merge and have it emailed to you, then to save that to a shared folder, upload it back into Salesforce through Content Delivery, copy the link back onto the opportunity, select the email template and send.

Not only was this process quite a bit for us to do, but our customers would then receive the document, print it out, scan it and email it back to us. This would often take them a while to do and often they gave it a lower priority as it was difficult.

As with all business planning cycles, we picked up that we had been providing much more efficient processes to many of our customers than what we were doing internally. This was achieved through automation and simplicity of using Conga.

We set about setting up all of our templates using Conga for merging of proposals and Sertifi for electronic document signing. Now, with a one click button, we are able to generate a document, store that in salesforce and send it to our customers. Often, we get a fully signed document through Sertifi returned within minutes.
We no longer feel like the Cobblers children, but the masters of efficiency.

Keep it clean

September 16, 2015 By jchallis

Six Ways to Cleanse your Data

How clean is your data? Do you have duplicate records or different abbreviations or spelling mistakes or fields containing unrelated information? Did you know that the state of your data can have a big impact on your Salesforce implementation and business reporting?

AAkonsult Payments has built-in features that help keep your data clean such as data matching, address look-ups and reconciliation. Your data will never get dirty again! But in the meantime we’re going to address common data problems highlighting their impact and how to remedy the problems. Let’s start with some basics.

Database Concepts

A database is a collection of related entities such as accounts, contacts and departments. As depicted below, each entity is represented by a table (or object) that has fields and values.

Each column represents a field attribute of the data base (eg name or email) and each row holds a single record with values for each field. Obviously, it’s important that the data is clean, uniform and consistent for accurate reporting and business intelligence.

Data integrity issues can occur for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at some common issues and how to fix them or ‘how to clean your dirty data’!

Duplicate data
Non-unique or missing keys
Spelling mistakes and multiple abbreviations
Incorrect formatting for specific fields
Missing mandatory fields
Multiple values in one field

One: Duplicate data

Duplicate data can occur when data merges in Excel go wrong or data is collected from multiple places or even just human error.

IMPACT:

Duplicate data will result in inaccurate reports. Duplicate data will be counted twice. Key information may be spread over the duplicated records. This means that no one record holds all the contact’s information. If you use the email functionality, the duplicate contacts will get duplicate emails.

REMEDY:

Duplicate records can’t just be deleted on mass as they contain vital information that doesn’t appear on the designated original record.

Commercial software tools are available to de-duplicate (often just called ‘dedup’) records. The duplicated records could also be extracted to a spreadsheet and merged manually or merged within the database itself

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to dedup.

Two: Non- unique or missing keys

Keys (or Unique Identifiers) are the foundation of a database system. Every record in a database should be able to be uniquely identified within the table or object that it resides.

IMPACT:

Like duplicate records, non-unique keys can cause a record to be double counted when reporting. If a key is missing the record may not be linked to other records within the database (this is referred to as an orphaned record). In the example below, John Doe is associated to the account ABC PL by the account’s ID number. If this number was missing from John’s contact record we would know which account he belonged to.

REMEDY:

Duplicate keys can be fixed by assigning new unique identifiers to the records that contain the duplicate key. Caution has to be taken to ensure that by changing a key you don’t break an existing connection to another record. In the above example, if two accounts had the ID of 2 and you decided to change the ID of account ABC PL to 3 you will fix the duplicate key issue for the account. However, John Doe’s connection to the account ABC PL is broken as his contact record still refers to the account ID of 2.

Editing keys can be very risky and should only be undertaken by someone who is familiar with database concepts and ideally has a good knowledge of the business and how the data related to each other.

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to change keys.

Three: Spelling Mistakes and Multiple Abbreviations

Unlike duplicate records and unique key issues that have the potential to disrupt the importation of data into Salesforce, spelling mistakes and multiple abbreviations will imported without error but become troublesome when used as a filter in reports.

IMPACT:

Any field that can have text manually entered into has the potential to cause filter problems in reports. For example, if you have a field called state on your contact record that can be edited manually you have the potential for the following to values to represent Victoria:

Victoria
Vic
vic.
Vitoria

If you now want to run a report on all the contacts in Victoria you have to ensure that all these values are accounted for in the report or you will miss someone.

REMEDY:

If you can export the records to excel and sort by the column that has the spelling mistakes or multiple abbreviations you change the values to be consistent.

AAkonsult Payments has an address look-up facility that ensures consistent data entry so that this problem will not occur.

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to change any values.

Four: Incorrect formatting for specific fields

Many fields have specific formatting requirements such as websites, emails, phone numbers, postcodes.

IMPACT:

Emails addresses that are incorrectly formed will cause an error when being imported into Salesforce. Incorrectly formed phone numbers, postcodes and websites can be imported successfully into Salesforce but the usefulness of this data will be affected.

REMEDY:

If you are familiar with MS Excel formulas you can use them to identify field values that are incorrectly formed and take action to fix them.

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to change field values.

Five: Missing mandatory fields

Salesforce needs certain fields to be populated to ensure that the built in functionality of the system can be assured.

IMPACT:

An example of this is that each contact must be associated to one account. Some custom objects created in Salesforce may also have mandatory fields to ensure that vital business information is captured or custom processes can operate as expected.

REMEDY

If a mandatory field is missing a value, it will need to be added. If a value is not known, you can use a consistent default value to complete this field. An example of this can occur if an organisation has a self-service newsletter subscription list. The subscriber may only supply their first name. Salesforce requires contacts to have a last name. If the last name is not known a value of “[Unknown]”, or something similar, can be used to complete the mandatory field.

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to change field values.

Six: Multiple values in one field

Database design best practice dictates that one field should contain one “piece” of information related to that field.

IMPACT:

For example, an address field that contains a value of “123 Main Street, Melbourne, 3000, Victoria, Australia” actually contains 5 pieces of information. It would be very hard in this situation to create a report of all contacts in Victoria. A better design would be to have a field for street, suburb, post code, state and country. All values in a field should contain information related only to that field. For example, the postcode field should only contain postcodes. Putting a state or other value in the postcode field decreases the usefulness of this field for reporting or any mail merging you may want to do

REMEDY

A tool like MS Excel can be used to split data into multiple fields and identify information that doesn’t relate to the field

NB: Please make a copy of the data before you start to change field values.

We trust this post will help you clean your data so that all your future reports in Salesforce will be accurate and useful in your organisation.

Chatter – why should NFP’s use it?

September 8, 2015 By jchallis

When we discuss Salesforce’s internal communication called ‘Chatter’, there’s always the same question asked from most NFP’s

Why should we use it?

Followed by:

I have a small team and cannot see the benefit when we can talk to each across the room.
It’s just another application to manage and keep control.

So let’s look at these questions to explain why Chatter should be used to NFP’s.

Using Chatter can:

Encourage collaboration within the team
Store conversations with the record (not lost in an email)
Reduce meeting times
Adopt users to Salesforce
Control what you want to hear about your organisation.

Let’s look at these in detail.

Collaboration

Nearly everyone within an organisation will perform a variety of roles some of which are within their position description and others that are not. So by allowing users to view, share and communicate easily within a database and ask for feedback/help with click of a button is going to help relieve each staff member the stress as they feel like they are within a community.

Conversations stored with record

How often have you had to delve into your email to find important information relating to an account/contact or a campaign? By using Chatter, the information is stored within the record. When you click into that record, you can view the information and search upon it too.

For example, Chatter is used when a donation has been made and there is a discussion on whether the donor requires special attention. The conversation is within the record and can be viewed by the manager when looking up the financial aspects. The communication and decision making process can be analysed and a decision on protocols and tasks can be made.

Meetings

Meetings and reports on dashboards happen on weekly basis, but not everyone is able to be there. Why not start the meeting discussion using Chatter on the dashboard you have created about the teams KPI’s or the amount raised within the last month. When the meeting actually takes place, it can be quick and down to the point of the discussion.

New user adoption

When new users log into Salesforce, they can be directed to the Chatter tab to upload a photo and a little information about themselves. They can then learn about others and join in the conversation within the organisation. Users outside the organisation, such as volunteers can also be assigned their own free Chatter licence so they can be kept in the loop about events and campaigns.

News feed control

You can control your news feed for your organisation by viewing information that only you follow, or people you follow, posts directed at you or all public conversations, keeping you update on the organisation, even you were out of the office for the day or week.

Now to answer questions from before:

I have a small team and cannot see the benefit when we can talk to each across the room. Not everyone (and particularly within small organisations) is in the room at the same time and the conversation can be lost because no record is kept. Chatter post it and it’s saved.
It’s just another application to manage and keep control of. If you build your community and collaboration then users will answer each other questions making it easier to manage!

5 ways to survive a conference stand!

Be prepared

Be giving

Be social

Be the best you can be

Be in the moment

Optimising Salesforce business processes

Keep it clean

Six Ways to Cleanse your Data

Database Concepts

One: Duplicate data

Two: Non- unique or missing keys

Three: Spelling Mistakes and Multiple Abbreviations

Four: Incorrect formatting for specific fields

Five: Missing mandatory fields

Six: Multiple values in one field

Chatter – why should NFP’s use it?

Collaboration

Conversations stored with record

Meetings

New user adoption

News feed control

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