Matthew Steiner is a Salesforce Consultant and Business Analyst at Endeveran, where they "design and development data solutions that integrate and synchronize your business data with the Salesforce platform, all with an eye on the health and efficiency of your overall systems."
Salesforce is hard not to love. First and foremost it's an amazing platform that was so intelligently developed. I love that it's cloud based which means it's operating system agnostic and for the most part works on most browsers (although it clearly works best on Google Chrome). The structure behind it was intelligently designed as well. Upgrades are AUTOMATED and happen three times a year. They've structured the data and layers to minimize risk when it comes to upgrades. Besides that they do an over-the-top excellent job of communicating and prioritizing the changes. Behind the platform is an amazing company. They push the envelope when it comes to philanthropy and how a business should operate. The icing on the cake is the active and involved community that supports the platform and others around it.
What feature in Salesforce do you use the most (or help others to use)?
Chatter. By far the most genius and under-utilized feature of Salesforce. Although old, email is still an effective method of communication in this remote business world. Where it fails is how to tie information to tasks. So many people use email differently. What Chatter (when used correctly) is puts emails, notes, status, files, everything in a single place all while letting each person involved determine how they manage email.
Clicks before code. It's the Salesforce mantra. Always try to align to Salesforce best practices by using standard objects and fields as much as possible and then declaratively (clicks) build customizations before coding them. It just makes management, performance, upgrades much easier in general.
Salesforce Sales Pipeline Project Management System. I built an end to end solution for a company that allowed Sales reps to work their opportunities in Salesforce, email in Salesforce, keep notes in Salesforce, Sales Reps and Engineers communicated in Chatter, set follow up reminders in Salesforce, keeping it all in one place.
By having this data in Salesforce, our weekly two hour staff meeting was reduced to 10 minutes because didn't have to spend time finding out the status of opportunities.
When the Sales Rep was ready for proposal stage, they were able to dynamically generate a statement of work based on the opportunity data they had already gathered and get it submitted via the cloud to their potential customers who could then sign electronically. Once the deal was signed in turned into an active project that our engineers then fulfilled the actual work with, which communicated relevant status reports, data back to Sales reps, etc. Starting the sales cycle all over.
Are you on Lightning yet? Where do you see Salesforce going to next? How long will Salesforce be this dominant? Plan to use AI/Einstein?
I'm a Salesforce consultant and our organization (Endeveran) uses Lightning. I have another customer that is playing with it in full sandbox. I know most organizations are NOT on it yet, but there will be a huge push towards it in the next year or so as almost all new enhancements are for lightning.
Salesforce is huge but I'm still surprised at how many people I know that haven't heard of it. I only see it continuing to grow for at least 3-5 years. More and more people are becoming familiar with basic admin functions. Most of the work is integrations or more complicated functions.
AI/Einstein is a super cool and powerful too, but it's complicated, expensive, and will take a LONG time for the market to adapt to it.