Lane Four

Author: Stephanie Damgaard

  • Why Take a Custom Web Service Approach with a Critical Salesforce Integration?

    Why Take a Custom Web Service Approach with a Critical Salesforce Integration?

    We’re working with a client to support an integration with a commercial application. I have recommended we create a custom web service supported by salesforce, but they asked a reasonable question: “Why couldn’t we use the Salesforce API directly instead of having someone build the web service?”

    Here’s why I recommend the custom web service approach when dealing with a critical Salesforce integration. First you can absolutely use the standard REST API, and nothing stops you from doing this today. Just note, if the REST API is being used, the connected app needs to be created regardless of approach.

    I recommend the custom service approach, especially when product development teams are involved, for the following reasons:

    Prevent tightly coupling databases

    • When the standard API is used, the API queries and writes to each object and field as if you’re querying and writing to the database directly. This tightly couples the two applications, meaning a change to Salesforce can and will cause the integration to fail. See below for the fact that these failures will not be logged or allow for an alerting mechanism. Updates to the parent campaign structure will then require the product development team to be engaged to accommodate these changes.
    • A custom service built on the API will prevent this coupling of the systems because you don’t need to know anything about the Salesforce data model, field names, etc. you’ll get a json file that is abstracted from the Salesforce data model. This makes developing the services on your side much easier.
    • Along with the below testing, monitoring and alerting functions, this is the only way to ensures changes to Salesforce will not break the integration.

    We can provide a nested response in a query:

    • A custom service is the only way we can provided nested information in the json response, for example an account ID will be given and we’ll return the account info and nest a repeating set of child information into this single json file.
    • The standard API requires a call per object with the destination responsible for re-assembling object relationships. This means you need to call 1. the account 2. the child record and 3. the child’s related data. You then need to process all this data to re-assemble it into a usable way, I feel a single json file with this data nested is much easier to work with.

    Error handling for database update calls

    • The standard API does not naturally log errors as they’re returned in the API response. This means service requests are not logged anywhere in Salesforce, making error reporting in Salesforce impossible.
    • This means 100% of error handling  must be done by the external application. You will get errors like record update fails, missing ID’s, validation rules, additional automation failures which roll back the entire transaction, etc. To prevent you from creating routines for all these error types, I argue to receive the json file by a service handler. This way the class can manage the database errors in Salesforce, and if an error can’t be reconciled, the data can be stored in a log file and alerted / reported.
    • This decouples the two applications, and means the application doesn’t need to worry about issues that would cause a database write / update to fail, without this the dev team will be responsible for creating a fairly robust error handling application in the destination application.

    Web service monitoring

    • In Salesforce it’s difficult to test if the standard API will receive an api call successfully and return an expected query or allow a database update. This is not the case for a custom web service where a test method can be created to test the operation of the service on-demand. This test can then be scripted to create an alerting function if the service will not successfully return data or allow the update to the campaign record.

    The custom service is built on the API:

    • These services are essentially built on the Salesforce API. Salesforce gives the ability to create these custom classes to address the points above, not re-creating the API.

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  • Lane Four at TOPO Summit, April 12-13, 2017 in San Francisco

    Lane Four at TOPO Summit, April 12-13, 2017 in San Francisco

    We’ve stressed the importance of bringing Sales and Marketing teams together to maximize your Account-Based strategy, and TOPO Summit strives to do just that. With two days of learning from the world’s best sales and marketing organizations, thought leaders and technology vendors the agenda focuses on seven important topics in revenue including Account-Based, Marketing Ops and Tech, and Sales Effectiveness. We’re thrilled that Lane Four will be sponsoring the event, which takes place April 12-13 in San Francisco.

    We’re looking forward to the Account-Based sessions as well as Sales & Marketing Ops and Leadership. And, of course, We’re looking forward to connecting with attendees, speakers and other sponsors. We’ll be demoing the Lane Four product at TOPO Summit. If you’re an attendee, we invite you to stop by our booth and learn how to make your org ABM-ready. Hope to see you there!

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  • Lead Re-Assignment Could – and Should – Be Much Easier

    Lead Re-Assignment Could – and Should – Be Much Easier

    If you’ve ever had to re-assign a stack of leads within Salesforce, you know how difficult it can be without the right tool. Often, companies are forced to pull their records out of Salesforce, plug them into Excel, update their (usually complex) rules manually, and then move the updated data back to Salesforce. And if this process doesn’t sound all that gruelling, try doing it with 60,000 leads that need to be re-assigned. It can easily take a week to complete the process.

    That’s why it’s key when choosing a lead automation tool to have one that handles re-assignment as well as it handles assignment.

    Imagine a situation where you’ve got a new rep for the East coast. Your existing East Coast rep is moving over to the West coast. You want to move the existing East Coast leads and contacts to the new rep, but it’s just not a simple process. When first assigning these leads to your initial rep, you were able to do it smoothly. But that same automation tool that helped establish your first rep has little to no ability to re-assign leads, forcing you to delay onboarding your new employee until the leads are in place.

    Now imagine a situation where you’ve reorganized the entire team or changed the definition of certain regions. If you don’t have an automated tool that re-assigns those leads, be ready to either do it by hand or process it in Excel – both processes that are inefficient and can delay your growth efforts significantly, not to mention cause frustration and confusion among reps during the process.

    And databases can quickly grow to include tens of thousands of leads, which makes the manual re-assignment process all the more time-consuming without the right tool.

    That’s why it’s essential to have a good assignment tool that allows you to easily re-assign the leads and contacts based on all of your existing rules, without manual intervention. This process should take minutes, not days.

    It’s a good idea to review your tools now, rather than wait until it’s too late. Usually, when you have to re-assign leads, you don’t have the luxury of time on your side. It has to be done immediately. And if you’re stuck using a tool that can’t handle re-assignment, you’ll experience significant delays. However, if you take the time now to find a tool that can re-assign leads in minute, you will save significant time and headache when re-assignment becomes a necessity.

    Not only can LaneFour make assigning your leads easier, but it can re-assign automatically, keeping all of your carefully constructed and complex rules intact. Give us a try, and see for yourself how we can make your life easier.

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  • Salesforce Automation Should Come From Salesforce Experts

    Salesforce Automation Should Come From Salesforce Experts

    The world of Salesforce applications is super-saturated with what’s known as “integrated applications” – third-party software that pulls data out of Salesforce, crunches some numbers, and puts it back. The companies that create integrated applications are focused on their own tool, and typically don’t know a whole lot about Salesforce itself. Which is a problem.

    To understand why this is a problem, imagine taking your car in to a mechanic. Rather than working directly on your car, this is what he tells you:

    “Oh, yes, I can upgrade your engine, no problem! I’ll just replicate your engine inside another car, and add the upgrade there. Then, I’ll remove that engine and install it into your car. I’m sure it will work, even though I didn’t actually do any work in your car itself.”

    That’s not exactly the kind of thing that instills confidence, is it?

    We choose our mechanics carefully, looking for experts with actual hands-on experience to work on our cars. So why should our choice be any different when it comes to Salesforce automation?

    Salesforce is complex. It has its limitations, and it requires specific rules and parameters to get it to work right, for any business. Integrated apps come from companies that lack the expertise in Salesforce to be of any real help when things need fixing or optimizing. Just like the imaginary mechanic who “upgrades” your car without working on your car, the vendors who pull your entire Salesforce database and crunch the numbers outside of the Salesforce environment are taking a shortcut and not tackling the challenge head on. Any future changes are difficult or impossible to adapt to, because you now have to deal with two systems of record and an ongoing process of replication.

    Unfortunately, many businesses get their Salesforce advice from these non-experts. Simply because these companies built an app that integrates with Salesforce, they assume they know their stuff – but too often they don’t actually do any work within Salesforce itself, and the recommendations they make are superficial, at best, or just plain wrong, at worst.

    I witnessed this lack of expertise on a personal level working at Eloqua. While the tool itself is tightly integrated with Salesforce, I was the only certified Salesforce expert on staff. With 90 percent of their customer base being Salesforce users, I noticed a culture of Eloqua staff recommending actions and best practices that they really shouldn’t have, because they lacked the knowledge their customers needed – causing delays, confusion, and unnecessary resource expenditure.

    On the other side of the industry are the companies building native Salesforce applications – apps baked right in to Salesforce itself. By their very nature, these companies are forced to be Salesforce experts. They work with the software every day, see its ins and outs, get to know what works and what doesn’t. And these are the companies that you should be turning to for advice.

    Lane Four is a native Salesforce application by design. We are certified Salesforce experts, and we bring that knowledge to our product and our customers. Unlike some larger automation tools on the market, we live and breathe Salesforce, and we are dedicated to helping our customers get the most out of Lane Four, and Salesforce as a whole.

    Whether you need high-level strategic guidance or just a few pointers for optimizing automation, we have the knowledge and we’re eager to share how a native application is superior.

    Just like you’d want a real mechanic rather than a “guy who replicates your engine” to fix your car, you want Salesforce experts rather than “people who know about a single Salesforce tool” to build your automation apps.

    Have a Salesforce question? We’re happy to help. And since we know what we’re talking about, our advice will go a long way towards helping your sales team become Salesforce experts themselves.

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  • Making the Move to Lightning: Some Pros and Cons

    Making the Move to Lightning: Some Pros and Cons

    We’ve written before about how businesses need to consider making the move to Lightning as soon as possible. Yesterday’s Salesforce World Tour in New York further emphasized this, with lots of sessions on ensuring migration readiness, and best practices for customer implementations.

    Aside from the demos and workshops, there were some great discussions about Lightning Experience, too. In a session called “Why Lightning?” Ned Liddell, a partner at Remio, discussed why he initially resisted Lightning, but eventually got on board. Ned outlined a few pros of Salesforce Classic: First, it’s so comfortable, it feels like an old friend. I totally agree: At this point, I could move around Salesforce with my eyes closed. With each new release of Classic, the interface was tweaked to get better and better. And Lightning isn’t necessarily better to move around in, at least not at first.

    Second, there are a thousand AppExchange apps, but only 350 or so which are Lightning-ready. Clearly, it’s in its infancy. But if you’re heavily reliant on third-party tools, these may not be available, since it’s only recently that third-party vendors have started to rebuild their products to work in Lightning. Plus, Lightning components, while easy to drag on and off pages, still require coders to make them happen.

    According to Ned, if an organization is primarily made up of people used to Excel spreadsheets, the visual representation of Lightning may not be for them. I would add that, yes, it’s hard to migrate an org that people have been using for 10 years—that muscle memory is ingrained—but it’s not impossible. And this definitely makes the case for starting new orgs in Lightning right away.

    There are other considerations that tip the scales towards Lightning. As Ned said, “This is the future of representation.” The way we communicate, and the interfaces we use, have changed dramatically in the last few years. Lightning reflects this shift: It’s an interface that relies on icons and sections, for example, and not just a dozen related lists at the bottom of a page. Another huge advantage of Lightning is that it’s super-smart: It gets to know a user’s preferences and presents them with information that is most relevant. Finally, this was the important piece for Ned: Lightning allows us to build software quickly and reliably test it. It comes down to efficiency of development.

    Lightning is ready and if you haven’t considered migrating your org, I suggest you start as soon as possible. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be outlining some steps to get you ready—stay tuned!

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  • ABM Is an Old Idea With One Huge Benefit: Forcing Sales and Marketing Alignment

    ABM Is an Old Idea With One Huge Benefit: Forcing Sales and Marketing Alignment

    Account-based marketing has been touted as the hot new thing in sales and marketing strategy. Just a quick Google search will show you hundreds of blog posts proclaiming that this “revolutionary” new tactic that is changing the nature of sales and marketing as we know it.

    But if you look a little more critically at the core activities surrounding account-based marketing, you’ll begin to see that it’s really just an old idea wrapped in new packaging.

    After all, selling to an account is nothing new. Don Draper was doing it when he targeted a certain car or cigarette company, and many of his real-life contemporaries in the 60s and 70s were doing it, too. In fact, it may be one of the oldest marketing tactics there is.

    So why is everyone in a hubbub about this retro idea today?

    A lot of it has to do with the conversation that account-based marketing is causing sales and marketing to have. Marketing is now being measured more closely on the activity it is able to generate among target accounts – largely because the data is more accessible now than ever before. With the advent of social media, website analytics, digital ads and more, marketing teams have a great deal of visibility into their account-specific activities.

    However, this change in reporting structure is causing strain on many sales and marketing teams. The desire for more attribution and better results measurement is there, but the tools simply do not measure up. Most sales and marketing teams are using outdated, ill-conceived tools that don’t show them the data they need to truly track the effectiveness of campaigns. And this causes friction between sales and marketing, with one shouting for more targeted lead generation activity and the other unable to focus in on the activities that are most successful.

    Despite this friction, account-based marketing might actually be the medicine that demand generation-focused companies need in order to cure their sales and marketing alignment problem.

    Marketing must be aligned with sales, because typically marketing does not own the activity of targeting accounts. There must be clear communication between the two departments if marketing efforts are to be successful.

    Account-based marketing is forcing sales and marketing to become more tightly aligned, in both their strategy and execution. And that might just be the major benefit we’ll see out of all of this fuss over an old tactic with a new spin.

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  • Still Manually Assigning Leads? You’re Missing Out

    Still Manually Assigning Leads? You’re Missing Out

    The marketing-sales cycle is unique to every company and is constantly evolving.

    Whether it’s outbound or inbound marketing, cold-calling, print or digital media buys, or building out a layer of SDRs or BDRs, each company has its own fingerprint when it comes to marketing and sales.

    That said, today’s businesses are grappling with problems that wouldn’t have been an issue years ago. Digital marketing combined with effective marketing automation tools is providing a steady stream of new leads in various channels: web, social, email, search, and more.

    With this new influx of leads, a major problem appears when sales reps have to sort through each lead and manually assign them in Salesforce. Assigning leads manually has traditionally been the only way to deal with potential mis-assignment due to duplication, existing accounts and missing regional info.

    It’s time to evolve your lead assignment technology to match the speed of marketing automation—by using an automated lead matching system. Check out 3 key advantages below.

    Speed

    If you use an automated lead matching system, your sales reps will be able to trust the leads assigned to accounts and spend their time thinking about the account rather than fishing around to figure out where a lead belongs. Speed is so critical to the lead qualification process that the  Harvard Business Review reports that responding within an hour increases your odds of lead qualification by seven times.

    “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead … as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that wait 24 hours or longer.” – Harvard Business Review

    Ensure you’re giving your sales reps and business the best chance at qualifying the lead quickly instead of messing around with manual lead assignment in Salesforce.

    Scalability

    We’ve seen it over and over – as the business grows, the lead management and assignment process gets more and more complicated. Whether you’re separating by geography, company size or another factor, it becomes critical to ensure that leads aren’t being duplicated. How many times has a junior sales rep accidentally re-contacted an already qualified lead? Or mis-assigned the lead to the wrong area?

    What happens if your business expands even further? Your marketing team expands and your lead firehose starts to gush. Are you going to continue to force sales reps to yell at each other across the aisle and spend precious time on more and more leads coming through the pipe?

    Automate it. Let the software do the work and let your business and sales team scale gracefully.

    Assignment Clarity

    Often, your sales team have rules about which leads belong to which reps, and your reps are manually checking whether a lead is new or already belongs to an existing account. This creates delays and frustrations for SDRs who get excited about an influx of leads only to find they need to be assigned to another account.

    An automated lead matching system can create rules that automatically check whether a lead matches an account or other leads, and ensure that it is given to the correct account manager or team. That way, sales reps can focus on the leads coming into their inbox and how to sell rather than wasting time worrying about assignments and duplicates. Whether you want to assign leads based on account data, specialized assignment rules or a round-robin style assignment, a lead matching system will simplify this process so your reps can get moving on what matters: selling.

    Marketing automation is evolving fast. It’s time to consider matching that speed in your lead assignment technology and processes. Give automated lead matching a shot with Lane Four today.

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  • Salesforce Campaign Influence is Now Finally Customizable

    Salesforce Campaign Influence is Now Finally Customizable

    Years ago, Salesforce released a feature called “Campaign Influence” with the promise of allowing you to track campaign ROI directly in Salesforce. Unfortunately, this feature didn’t get any roadmap attention and Salesforce stopped working on it for several years. The legacy campaign influence object wasn’t even in the API!

    One of the huge side benefits of Lightning is that it’s forcing Salesforce to re-imagine some features as they bring existing tools into the new framework. A great example of this is the new campaign influence feature rolled out in Winter ‘17, which is something you should take note of. Let’s take a look at how the “Customizable Campaign Influence” feature works compared to the old “Campaign Influence” model.

    Previously, when there were several campaigns associated with an Opportunity, the Primary Campaign would get 100% of the influence credit; every other campaign would receive 0% of the credit. In essence, this means that all of the revenue from that Opportunity would be attributed only to the designated Primary Campaign. This made it difficult to understand which campaigns were actually influencing details.

    This issue has been addressed with the new release. Now, the revenue attribution is flexible and can be applied across various campaigns. For example, you could set up your model so that 50% of the credit goes to the first-touch campaign and the other half goes to the last-touch campaign. Or you could spread the influence credit evenly across all campaigns.

    This gives you a much better understanding of which campaign(s) played the largest role in moving the opportunity through its stages or in closing the deal. This will allow your marketing team to measure a campaign’s influence accurately, so that you can direct resources to that campaign or similar ones in the future.

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    Setting Up Customizable Campaign Influence

    This new feature works in Classic as well as Lightning. When you enable Customizable Campaign Influence in Setup, “CampaignInfluence” and “CampaignInfluenceModel” are added to your org as standard objects. You can choose the out-of-the-box Salesforce influence model which supports auto-association, or implement custom attribution models to assign credit for opportunities to campaigns. 

    Once that’s set up, assign the “Campaign Influence” permission to the appropriate sales and marketing users, then add the “Influenced Opportunities” related list to the Campaign page layout(s), and the “Campaign Influence” related list to the opportunity page layout(s). Finally, add the “Campaign Results” section to Campaign page layouts, so that users can see the money brought in by the campaign, based on your influence model.

    Setup recommendations:

      • Timeframe should be 90 days
      • Think about campaign types, because you don’t want to reward small initiatives—you want high quality marketing campaigns

    A major consideration:

     

    • Influence is based on the opportunity contact role. So you need to ensure that sales reps are adding relevant people to the Opportunity. However, the reality is, most reps aren’t doing this, which is why I work with clients to determine automated ways of assigning contacts.

    Note on custom models:

    • The plethora of options is great, but, currently, this requires additional setup. For example, you’ll need to set up triggers to determine if an opportunity contact role should qualify for attribution.