As I’m typing away on a plane heading home to Dallas, I wanted to take a moment and reflect on our day of “Salesforce Goodness” – the first MVP Summit. A few of my co-MVPs are already putting out some great recaps, so I’ll to take a bit of a different angle. Arrival started with…
The idea for the ShellBlack Whiteboard came to me long ago when I first founded my consulting company (and this blog). In this first episode I tell the story of how a few critical events in my early career as a Salesforce consultant helped send me down the path that resulted in this video series….
It’s official. Hordes of Salesforce MVPs are converging on San Francisco at the end of August 2013 to participate in the very first MVP Summit. This event was put together by our very own Erica Kuhl and Matt Brown (affectionately referred to by the MVPs as our “Den Mom & Dad”). The MVP summit is…
What is Salesforce for Wealth Management? Essentially it’s an app (overlay) – a collection of custom objects, code and analytics that is installed in your Salesforce instance. It’s designed for a single audience – Financial Advisors (Wealth Advisors). It’s a highly tailored view and organization of client information, investments and professional relationships. This blog post…
Why Sync Salesforce with QuickBooks Everyone’s needs are different, but most companies are out to accomplish two things by syncing Salesforce with QuickBooks (1) automatically create Invoices in QuickBooks from “won” Salesforce Opportunities to reduce data entry and speed up cash flow, and (2) provide users in Salesforce visibility to QuickBooks accounts receivable information for…
Inevitably as we consult with our clients we find ourselves facilitating discussions around business processes. There are a quite a few places in Salesforce that support business processes, namely: Lead Status field (Lead Qualification Process) Opportunity Stage field (Opportunity Sales Process) Case Status field (Support Process) Contract Status field (Contract Process) Etc. As you have…
Registration for Dreamforce 2013 has begun and we’re counting down the days! Let’s get the basic information out of the way first. What does is cost? I’ll try to keep this section up-to-date as we get closer to the event. UPDATE (9/20): $1199 registration price ($300 off) up though November 17 (the day before Dreamforce starts…
What are Tags? Tags are words you can associate to records in Salesforce to facilitate search and categorization. Some people think of them as ticklers or “keywords” (a common feature in many SQL based CRMs). They allow Users to find records not by a particular field, but by a word or group of words. Tags…
There is always a client that pushes you to find solutions to problems you didn’t know existed. In this particular instance I had a customer that didn’t like the fact that Email Templates sent from Salesforce came across in email clients as fairly “skinny.” The body of the email was 550 pixels wide. With a…
Continuing our little blog series on how to learn the basics of the Salesforce Data Loader, let’s look at how to overwrite a field that currently has a value and insert a blank or null value. Or, said differently, we’re going to delete the value of a single field using the Data Loader on a…