Wave6 Insights

Working in the Higher Ed space, or any B2C O2I*[1] organization, can present the Salesforce Administrator with a headache: how to manage the Account of the Contact record, when the Contact is as important, if not more important, than Account. 

Sure, Accounts are important – we want to know about the schools we recruit students from, the companies where they end up working, the foundations who contribute to alumni relations and the partner organizations we work with.  But we don’t want the Account to dictate how we deal with the Contact. Salesforce, however, mandates that all Contacts are associated to an Account. 

What are the traditional Salesforce configuration options for a Higher Ed?

• Person Accounts: A ‘standard’ Salesforce function which rewrites the data model, turning the Account record into a ‘Contact’.
• Administrative Accounts: Create an Account for every Contact record.
• Household Accounts: Create an Account for the Contact, their spouse, parents, siblings, as required.
• Bucket Accounts: Lump all the Contacts into a single account.

Salesforce recently introduced a handful of new ways to show off your knowledge. Whether your expertise is in the Sales, Service, Marketing, Analytics or App cloud, Salesforce has a cert for you!

One of the new certifications will actually be one of the options replacing the previous Force.com Developer Certification. The new Platform App Builder Certification has very similar concepts and offers both a full exam and transition exam for those holding the older dev cert.

Now, for the transition options. The previous Salesforce Certified Force.com Developer exams are officially gone. (Previously obtained certifications are still valid and, as of now, recognized by Salesforce). Since these exams are no longer available, this means the new Platform App Builder Certification is the way to go if you are a functional developer.

Are you putting more time into new opportunities? Or are you focused on selling more to existing accounts?

It's pretty common for sales professionals to chase after new business when new leads roll in. It's the thrill of the chase all sales professionals possess.

The problem is it can cost 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell more to an existing customer.

But, selling more to an existing customer can be difficult without the right strategy and tools.

As Salesforce pushes out updates for the Salesforce for Outlook extension, users will individually need to run the update to get to the latest version.

I hope the following steps will make it easier for you to complete the update yourself!

Follow these 6 steps to complete the update:

After a crazy winter like the one we just had, I can’t be the only one looking forward to springtime. Just think, flowers in bloom, birds singing everywhere…and yet another wonderful release from Salesforce!

Just in time for spring cleaning, Spring ’16 offers plenty of new features to expand the offerings of its wonder:  Lightning Experience.