Percent complete solutions, Flow demos, customer case studies, and more. Hello from Kicksaw!

Hello friend,

Hope your summer is off to a wonderful start! Kicksaw HQ is busy as ever?— our team is growing and evolving, and it's exciting to watch what used to be just Kenny and myself doing whatever it took to keep the lights on transform into a major player in the Salesforce ecosystem. I really couldn't be prouder of how far Kicksaw has come.?

We've got a really great newsletter for you this month! Our team has a lot to share with you, from Flow demos to case studies to unique, bespoke solutions. Check it all out, and if you have any questions or have feedback on what you'd like to see in this newsletter, just reach out to me or anyone else on the team!

~Kyle Morris, Co-founder

Customer Case Study: Loan Vision

Kicksaw recently collaborated with customer Loan Vision to implement and configure Salesforce Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Account Engagement, and TaskRay . This comprehensive and powerful solution addressed a variety of pain points and opened the door to scalable growth. Learn more by reading their story!

Loan Vision’s financial management and loan-level accounting SaaS helps accounting departments from across the mortgage industry reduce risk, streamline manual processes, lower operating costs, and increase profitability.?

As a growth-minded company with a customer experience focus, they partnered with Kicksaw for a Salesforce and TaskRay-powered solution to increase the efficiency of their day-to-day processes, build a deeper understanding of how to scale their business, and improve both services and support for their clients.

Flow Element: Transform (Beta) Demo

Have you tried out the Transform (Beta) Flow Element yet? Kicksaw Salesforce Administrator Al Reveles has, and he's here to show us just how useful this really handy tool can be! Get ready to save those clicks and ratchet up that efficiency.

The Transform (Beta) Element for Flow?enhances the capabilities of Flows by allowing users to transform data within the flow process. It brings more sophisticated data processing and transformation capabilities to the platform, which is clearly something we can all get behind.?This beta element is ideal for scenarios where data needs to be restructured or processed before being stored or passed to another system, such as formatting user input, preparing data for reports, or transforming data received from external APIs.

In this demo, Al shows us how to use the Transform Element to create renewal opportunities. Check it out!

People Are More Important Than Profits

Part Three of Kicksaw's Ultimate Guide to Company Culture is live and kicking, and it's a good one. With our Co-founder Kyle Morris at the helm, this post explores how focusing on the wellbeing of your people is the best strategy for creating a healthy company culture, and inevitably leads to every company's dream: big profits.

In part one of our four-part series on building a vibrant company culture, we made the case for approaching culture building as an art form. In part two, we talked about the importance of preserving a spirit of innovation. For part three, AKA probably our favorite of the four,?we’re going to take a look at why focusing on your people more than on your profits is the best strategy for long-term success (and will almost certainly net you those big profits as well).?

Satisfied workers who feel like they’ve got some actual skin in the game do better work than folks who feel disconnected from their company. That’s just a fact. A company culture that supports employees’ well-being and is genuinely looking out for team members is better for your company as a whole. Productivity will increase, as will creativity, morale, and a slew of other factors that contribute to sustainable growth and profitability. If you want to make money, look at your culture before getting too mired in any finance data or spreadsheets.

Record Percent Complete Solution

Ever get to that point where you just know, deep in your bones, that there's a simpler solution? That your process could be streamlined? We're betting that your answer is a resounding YES. But finding that simpler solution can be tricky. That's where teamwork comes in?—?many minds make light work, and at Kicksaw, we're fortunate to have a particularly bright collection of minds. Here's just one example of how our team works together to create elegant solutions for our clients.

Hi folks! Kicksaw Principal Solution Architect Brandon LaFave here. Recently, I worked with Kicksaw Principal Engineer Gigi Chan to create a really unique and interesting solution for one of our healthcare clients that I want to walk you through.?

Our client needed a solution to help with their recruitment efforts — they were tracking a lot of fields using a custom application record. The client wanted the ability to report on the percentage of fields completed for a specific record, and the number of fields they wanted included was pretty significant.

We considered a couple of options for them. First, we considered using Flow — initially, this seemed promising. But after consulting with the internal team here at Kicksaw, the client’s Kicksaw Salesforce Admin and I determined that Flow wasn’t a great fit here due to the complexity of the task. We also considered a formula field, but given the number of fields they wanted included, that wasn’t ideal either.

Eliminating these options naturally led us to consider an Apex solution using custom metadata, which then triggered us to broaden our scope a bit — we’ve seen similar requests from clients in the past, so why not create a solution that is customizable per implementation?

Step one was to build a custom metadata type that holds the object and the fields that should be taken into consideration when calculating a percent complete custom field. At this point, we brought Gigi onto the project, and she created an invocable action that takes the S object (and can be used across different objects), queries it, and retrieves the data for all of the fields for that object.

Based on the number of fields contained within the custom metadata type, the invocable action then checks to see how many of those are populated, then calculates the percent complete. In this screenshot, you can see how this particular record is 66.67% complete.

To add a new field to the calculation, all that’s required is to select this option, input the field’s API, and set the S location. Once that’s done, the invokable action will update to include the new field, and the percentage complete will adjust accordingly. ?

To test that the invokable action is working, we just created a simple record-triggered flow. When the record is updated, we call our invocable action which has two inputs: the object and the actual record. Then, we update the record with the return value of the invocable action.

And that’s it! ?A super tidy way to accomplish our goal, with repeatable elements that we can use for customers who need similar functionality. It’s just one example of the many ways the team here at Kicksaw is constantly innovating and working hard to create elegant, scalable solutions for all of our customers.?

If you want to learn more about how this record percent completion tool works, or chat about how Kicksaw can deliver value to your business with this or similar solutions, just reach out to me or anyone else on the team! We’d love to start that conversation.

What Does It Take to Become a Kicksaw Client Partner?

What's it like to work at Kicksaw? Well, if you've been following us for longer than a day or so, you know we aren't secretive about the answer to that question at all. We've covered a few Delivery roles, and last month we took a look at the Account Manager role. This month, we're learning all about what it's like to be a Client Partner!

Kicksaw’s success as a Salesforce consulting firm is due to several important factors. Our diverse portfolio, deep well of expertise, and unique business model contribute, of course, but perhaps the most important factor of all is our reputation. Our reputation is everything — it’s how we get new customers, expand our reach, and grow. Maintaining and pushing our reputation is of utmost importance; it’s a never ending task that requires dedication, focus, and energy. And that’s where the Kicksaw Client Partner comes in!?

The Client Partner helps position Kicksaw as a leader in Salesforce consulting, and they play a vital role in the success of Kicksaw’s client relationships and implementations — it’s an amazing opportunity for a skilled communicator who thrives on building trust with key stakeholders. Communication is the name of the game for the Client Partner. They’re the squeaky wheel who refuses to quit, and we love that about them.

New digs, same unwavering commitment to delivering value

Now, we know most of you probably use kicksaw.com as your homepage and are therefore already aware, but for the handful of folks out there who do not, heads up that our website just got a major, major facelift! It's a beautiful new space for us to share and connect with our clients, audience, and more. Check it out! We're pretty darn proud.?