Since we last connected, I traveled internationally for the first time since we went into lockdown over a year ago. It was a liberating, and if I’m honest, slightly anxiety-inducing experience. Having rarely left the confines of my home, to being in an airport and on a plane felt novel, like the first time again. My wife and I went to Iceland and traveled throughout the Westfjords in a mini camper van. We put over 1,200 miles on the van in a week. It was a great time and I highly recommend visiting for those who haven’t been to Iceland before. We are both fans of the short story and movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and traveled to Kirkjufell where the scene where Ben Stiller was riding his longboard away from the volcano was shot.
We are back now and I’m feeling refreshed and ready to dive back in. It was exciting to come home to the release of a video interview my teammate, Lawson Condrey, and I did with Sonny Wilkinson of Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Following a successful migration from a legacy CRM to NPSP, as well as moving all of their marketing communications from MailChimp to Pardot, OMRF exceeded their fundraising goal in 2020 – all while working from home during the pandemic.
Onto tools…at Fionta, Slack is our primary workplace communication tool and we use it in conjunction with other enterprise products, including Salesforce. In a recent interview with yahoo!finance, Marc Benioff, the Founder and CEO of Salesforce sounded off on a variety of topics, including the future of Salesforce and Slack. He uses the term “swarm” to describe how Salesforce customers will be able to use Slack to collaborate on and escalate Salesforce cases. We do the same thing here, with client Slack channels being used to collaborate on client work and solve issues that arise during the course of our Salesforce implementations. I envision future releases of Salesforce embedding Slack groups on specific Salesforce records, allowing our clients to swarm high priority records such as donations during end-of-year fundraising. I’m excited to get my roll up my sleeves and see how creative we can get with this new part of the platform.
While the complete redesign of the Salesforce platform around Slack is still over the horizon, a variety of new features are now available thanks to the Summer ‘21 release. Unofficial SF, an excellent resource for admins to keep up to date and extend their use of declarative automation tools, published the highlights. If you’re not familiar with flow, are still using process builders, or just want to learn more, reach out to see how they can be utilized to automate critical business functions.
Finally, I want to highlight one of my coworkers this month – Kailee Quinn. Kailee is Fionta’s Senior UI/UX Consultant. What’s that, you ask? Kailee is brought into projects to ensure that the Salesforce user experience is human-centered and she is an expert on how declarative features of Salesforce impact the user experience, while also really understanding and highlighting the client brand. She was recently asked by Salesforce to help design their brand-new Salesforce User Experience (UX) Designer Certification. If you’re interested in learning more about how Fionta can optimize your end-user experience, please contact us or just hit reply to this email and I’ll connect you.
I hope you have an excellent June and look forward to connecting again in July.
Jordan Berger, Senior Salesforce Consultant