Tech Tips: How Salesforce Can Support Work-From-Home Sales Teams

How does the ‘new normal’ apply to your Salesforce platform?

The ‘new’ manifests itself as the rapidly shifting processes that the technology platform supports in these times of dramatic change. User functions are shifting overnight, and the product and development teams that support them must quickly adjust. As a cloud platform, operating remotely on Salesforce is well within the realm of ‘normal.’ It can be used anywhere with Internet access, so whether it’s working from home or on the Salesforce Mobile App, the technology itself stands unaffected.

How can Salesforce rescue a sales team that is trapped at home?

While most everyone has adopted modern remote toolsets, being “trapped” at home is a very different predicament, especially for a sales function that often thrives on personal interaction. While it can’t replace a solid handshake, a stronger use of certain Salesforce tools can help a salesperson wrap their head around this predicament. Leveraging the Tasks and Events objects, for example, can bring to the surface what needs to be accomplished immediately, and set benchmarks for the future of relationships. To take it one step further, maybe this is a time to push your product team for that integration to Outlook. Using collaboration tools like Chatter and Quip within Salesforce can assist a team in feeling connected and supported, even while isolated.

How can your Salesforce organization quickly pivot to support new sales or service processes?

Perhaps these circumstances have presented an opportunity for your business? Spin up an opportunity record type with a new sales process around it, and you’re on your way to turning lemons into lemonade. Are your customers facing new challenges and your service function needs to adjust? Enhancing case functionality with a new record type, or skills-based routing to ensure these customers are getting the help they need, could do the trick. It could also be an opportunity to implement Live Agent to more quickly support your customers.

Lastly, what can your product and development teams do while at home?

Our favorite modernization at CapTech has been around DevOps, as this toolset in the Salesforce ecosystem has exploded in the last year or so. DevOps includes items like moving towards a source-driven paradigm, getting your developers out of the developer console and into VS Code, and using the Salesforce CLI for testing, logs, and deployments. Maybe it is time to explore third-party deployment or backup tools like Gearset, Copado, or AutoRabit.

Some other items to consider include:

• Set up a governance process or 'Center of Excellence' to ensure there is clarity around who gets a say in the direction of your instance.
• Review your integration patterns and look to move to event-driven or declarative paradigms.
• Finish that lightning migration… or if you have it, transition Aura components to Lightning Web Components.
• Clean up old managed packages that may be running unnecessary automation.
• De-dupe and clean up data.
• Clean up automation with one trigger per object that calls handler Apex and stick to one Flow or Process Builder per object. Bonus points for combining declarative and programmatic tools through embedding LWCs or invocable Apex.
• Move old configuration that is stored in objects or custom settings to Custom Metadata Types so that they can be source-driven and deployable in your new DevOps paradigm.

Lastly, don’t forget Trailhead, Certifications, and Success Communities. If we all view this as an opportunity, the possibilities for Salesforce are endless.