The Weekend Picklist ?? Top Admin Training Tools, the Spiff Acquisition, and Salesforce Quirks

Every weekend, we’ll be delivering our top headlines – highlights from the previous week for you to enjoy with a cup of coffee!

1. Creating Training Resources: Top 5 Salesforce Admin Tools

Whether your colleagues are new to the team or new to a specific process or functionality, top-notch training is crucial if you want to ensure successful adoption and ongoing productivity. While you can hop on to a video call or ping off a quick Slack message, there are some great options out there to help you scale.

Here are some of our personal faves:?

1. Loom (Freemium)?
2. Salesforce In-App Guidance
3. Iorad (Freemium)
4. Jumpshare (Freemium)
5. Capture to a GIF (Freemium Chrome Extension)

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2. What Is Spiff? Salesforce Adds Latest Acquisition to Sales Cloud

Keep hearing about Spiff? This may be because Salesforce recently completed the acquisition they started back in December 2023. As a leader in sales commission software, the AppExchange partner has been absorbed by Sales Cloud and will be available as an add-on from… now!?

Here’s what you can do with it:?

• Design incentive plans that pay out and reward sales teams, all using a low-code commission builder.?
• Build out different quotes, see the impact on targets and incentives, and view your estimated commissions in real time.

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A message from Affinity

Activity capture that generates actionable insights

Your sales team reaches out to a lot of people. Is Salesforce tracking those interactions? Is the captured data used for anything productive? Basic activity capture can save your sales team hundreds of hours of manual data entry.

Upgraded activity capture takes it a step further, turning your team’s outreach into valuable insights.

Affinity automates activity capture and generates actionable insights natively in Salesforce.

Request a Demo

3. What Is Salesforce Apex and How Does It Work? A Guide for Admins

Who says that Apex is just for developers? While this may be very familiar territory for devs, admins can also make use of Salesforce’s proprietary programming language for all sorts of nifty platform customizations. But first, why is it so great??

Well, as it’s native, you can seamlessly interact with Salesforce data, objects, and processes, allowing for powerful customization and automation. And best of all, with Apex apps handling large volumes of data and complex requirements, you can scale to your heart's content!?

There’s also a truly vast amount of functionality to play with, as Apex allows you to go way beyond the out-of-the-box features – from creating custom business logic and implementing complex workflows to building sophisticated automation processes.

Another important factor worth noting is security, as Apex enforces Salesforce’s security model, ensuring that data remains protected and that access is controlled based on specific user permissions.?

As you can see, there are many, many benefits, so if you’re an admin looking for some clout in coding, it may be time to learn a little Apex.

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4. Unpacking Marc Benioff’s Latest Obsession: Salesforce Metadata

Did somebody mention metadata… Yes! It was Marc Benioff, and he mentioned it a grand total of 26 times during the recent Salesforce earnings call. With AI hogging most of the limelight over the past few years, this feels like an intentional shift towards a new ‘hot topic’.?

So why the change in focus? Does it reflect a specific Salesforce strategy or is it simply an emerging trend? Either way, it’s fair to say that metadata, often described as “data about data”, plays a crucial role in platform performance, security and compliance, data governance, and scalability.?

AI itself has highlighted the significance of metadata in training and validating models, as it provides that all-important context around limitations, biases, and the overall quality of algorithms.??

For Benioff, it seems that metadata is at the center of the conversation. Move over, AI – Dad has a new favorite topic!

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5. Salesforce Best Practices: Feature Quirks You Should Know About

Whether you know them as simple quirks, inevitable errors, or gremlins in the system, there’s never a dull moment when it comes to Salesforce. Over the years, we’ve stumbled upon a variety of headache-inducing quirks. Here are a few to watch out for:?

• Page Layout Changes: When moving, adding, or removing fields on page layouts, you may find that changes take some time to be reflected on record changes. This time lag will vary from org to org, so be patient. Or better yet, just log out and back in again!
• Lightning App Builder – Custom Tabs: When adding a new tab, it will default to “Details”. If you want to use a custom tab name, you need to scroll to the top of the expanded list. Being sorted alphabetically, and depending on the number of objects and apps installed in your org, “D” might be quite far down the list!?
• Lightning App Builder – Disappearing Tabs: Following on from the point above, if you add tabs to a tabs component, they can still disappear even after saving/activating the page. Any tabs need to have components added within them to be ‘sticky’.

And there’s plenty more where that came from!

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