First – respect to Salesforce for their #AppAcademy training. I attended a 2 hour #ISVpartner session this week – absolutely brilliant. Their motto: Your success is our success.
I was talking with a prospective client this week and they came to me wanting to use Salesforce to manage their contacts. They then had a spidery diagram connecting to several different other services: Dropbox, a project manager and several others.
This was a true consultancy moment – you don’t need Dropbox – your storage needs are under 10GB – use Salesforce Files. This fabulous new service works like Dropbox (so, you can sync files between your computers) but it loads them up to your Salesforce Org, where you can link them to Accounts, Contacts or any other Salesforce object.
After a client signs up, I need them to do this then this… 35 steps, so I need a project manager app. So, I pointed them in the direction of Workflows in Salesforce. Their procedures did not change much – having everything in Salesforce saved them time and money.
I also need calendars… Salesforce has calendars… if necessary, you can use the Appirio Cloud Sync (at little money) to sync between Google calendars and Salesforce calendars. It is so good that I use it myself 🙂
Finally, they needed to collect information about their clients in a form and they wanted to do it online. Well they could have used Survey Monkey and dragged the information in… but they don’t change the forms much, so they will get a new Forms object (custom), which they will be able to fill in using Salesforce1… giving them a wonderful, slick interface.
… Oh, and they wanted Salesforce to drag information out of Xero, their accounts package. There is a lovely AppExchange product called #Breadwinner for that. Whereas other products get your information from Salesforce into Xero, this flows against the tide and gets it from Xero to Salesforce. Awesome!
They thought they needed 4 cloud apps, but Salesforce covered all their needs.
