Clint Lee

I want to share a recent real-world use case where Batch Apex was used to achieve our goal.  If you’re not familiar with Batch Apex you can find more here in the Salesforce Development Docs. Business Use Case An organization’s sales team is using Salesforce CRM primarily to manage their Leads, Contacts, and opportunities. This is akin to a retail setting whereby there are multiple physical locations and each location has its own sales team and sales manager (think car dealership).  In this setting, Leads (and/or Contacts) enter through multiple channels such as internet marketing, phone calls, walking through the front door, etc and are assigned to a sales rep based on a round-robin format.  That sales rep becomes the owner of the Lead, but only has protection for a certain period of time before the Lead is redistributed.  The protected period of time is based on the... (more)

Salesforce Implementation Success - Tip #2

In the last post, I wrote about the importance of having a client designate the right internal project manager for the SFDC implementation project.  Staying with the theme of sharing Salesforce.com implementation and consulting best practices I'll share some thoughts today on documenting a client's extant business processes. Let's assume that we have an understanding of the client's basic requirements, so for example we know that the sales team will be the user base and we know that their current tools consist of an on-premise database (or ACT!, Goldmine, etc), Outlook, and spre... (more)

Trigga What?

I do some consulting work for non-profit organizations that use Salesforce.com.  There are so many non-profits that use Salesforce but many often lack the internal resources necessary to truly realize the benefits of adopting it.  It is highly rewarding work and I would encourage you to check out the Salesforce Foundation as one way of getting involved with non-profits who use Salesforce. The Salesforce Foundation has a very successful program that gives non-profits the ability to get 10 donated (free) Enterprise Edition user licenses. This is a great program that offers a huge ... (more)

Salesforce Summer '11 Master-Detail Quirk

The good news about working on the Salesforce platform is that three times a year, while you're lying asleep at night, the little Salesforce elves are hard at work rolling out the newest release. The bad news is that sometimes on a Monday morning you start seeing Apex errors in your inbox. This past release of the Summer '11 upgrade was one of those times for me. I thought I'd share the details to prevent anyone else from banging their noggin' against the wall. Spoiler Alert! The story ends happily with a working solution. The Background We had a portion of Apex code that, when... (more)

Send SMS from Salesforce

Ever send SMS messages to your Contacts and Leads? I recently had a conversation with a fairly new Salesforce customer who wanted to send SMS messages to their leads and contacts.  They had been using another CRM system that gave them this ability and it’s an integral part of the way they communicate with leads and prospects.  The great thing about Salesforce and the Force.com platform is that there are multiple ways to achieve this goal.  A quick search of the AppExchange will bring up a number of options.  Or, if one of these options doesn’t fit your needs you could build it on... (more)