Blog – Fluido

Building on CPQ: Sales, R&D, and Manufacturing

Alexandra Petrova — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 09:34:28 +0000

Increased operating and market variables bring increased complexity in managing products. The data kept on each product can be complex and wide-ranging too, including: marketing material, items and product structures, pricing, wiring diagrams, mechanical drawings, end-user and maintenance instructions. All this means that product data management practices must be excellent to keep companies agile and competitive.

But personnel might have different ideas of what the product is, depending on which department they’re working in — for example, in sales, manufacturing or product development. This is the silo effect in action.

Siloed systems can result in delays, missed opportunities and inefficiency through:

Quotations that take a long time to create, because the sales team needs support and information from other departments.
Extended delivery times, when products are sold that the manufacturing department does not have in stock.
Uncoordinated roll-outs of new products and product features.

CPQ connects the dots

Configure Price Quote systems provide a single source for product information between business departments and the IT systems they are utilizing. Having the right CPQ product — and having it set up correctly — can revolutionize business operations:

Accurate quotes can be created without product experts — even junior sales personnel can confidently handle this task.
The need for sales support is minimized.
Factory orders are specific and clear — no uncertainty over how to build the product.
Product quality is maintained with standardized solutions.
Lead times for sales and manufacturing is reduced.
Smooth control over roll-out and wind-down of products and product features.

Fluido is here to help

At Fluido, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits that CPQ can bring: it makes doing things the right way become the easy way. CPQ offers out-of-the-box comprehensive features, which can be further tailored to meet any company’s requirements.

The Fluido CPQ team has broad experience in delivering consistent quality and better efficiency to our international manufacturing customers. We can create a working proof of concept to demonstrate the possibilities of CPQ. Contact us to get started!

Want to learn more before implementing a CPQ project? Tune in to our next webinar already this Wednesday!

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Fluido 4.0 – Powered by Infosys

Antti Turunen — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 12:38:24 +0000

Our journey here

We founded the Fluido in 2010 with a goal to become the #1 salesforce partner in Finland. The customers were in dire need for a company like us to invest in the market, to deliver game changing services and to create customer success. Looking back, this was Fluido 1.0. When we reached this goal, we set our sights for Fluido 2.0 – a leading Salesforce services provider with customers in all Nordic countries. In 2015 we reached the Platinum partnership level with Salesforce and the investment from the CapMan Growth -fund and Salesforce Ventures laid the foundation and created the path for what we are today. Fluido 3.0 is one of the fastest growing teams enabling transformational customer success in the Salesforce ecosystem and the leading Salesforce partner in the Nordics employing 240 experts in customer experience and Salesforce technology.

The opportunity for today’s enterprises is enormous as we are moving full speed in the era of the customer powered by the digital wave. As our customer engagements have grown substantially, to even a global level, taking our team, scale and delivery model to a next level while maintaining our agility has become very evident. With Infosys, we are able to respond to these market demands. We are now ready for Fluido 4.0 – the leading European customer success and Salesforce specialist operating globally to deliver outstanding digital customer experiences for international clients. We will see the Fluido team go to places we have not been before with new offerings, learning opportunities and market expansion.

The perfect match

When we were learning about each other with the Infosys team, each time we discussed about the mutual opportunity to help our customers, the temptation to join forces became more and more compelling. Today our organizations have minimal geographical overlap and the offerings from both sides complement each other perfectly. While Fluido delivers measurable business results to customers and a unique company culture to its employees, Infosys brings a broader set of capabilities and an extensive global reach.

We will maintain Fluido as team and brand and now we have an amazing global talent pool available for our customers in Europe and globally. With the Infosys investment in Digital Studios globally and their previous acquisitions of Brilliant Basics and WONGDOODY , the Fluido team and our customers will have an amazing opportunity to grow and create unique customer experiences across Europe.

Our focus is Salesforce

Our vision is to Bring Customer Data to Life. Until now our focus has been solely on Salesforce based solutions. Moving forward we will remain true to our heart and passion in Salesforce and we will continue to maintain our leadership position in Europe. Working with Infosys will give our vision a holistic approach and their expertise and services will help our customers increase efficiency and insight by automating their core systems powered by AI, creating seamless integrations across systems and truly transform the way businesses connect with their customers.

Fluido culture and values

Fluido has always been about people and we have a unique culture and values embraced by our employees, customers and partners. Our values drive our daily behavior and help us work and respect each other. Going forward we want to maintain this. I have also learned that Infosys shares the same passion on customers, people and continuous learning as Fluido. Together with the Infosys teams we will be in a unique position to help our customers seize the opportunity of the digital wave in the Nordics, Europe and globally.

Finally, I would like to thank Fluido customers, partners and employees who have gotten us to this significant milestone. Together we all have great opportunities ahead of us.

We are riding the Digital Wave at a significant moment in history!

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Fluido Favorites: Summer’18

Alexandra Petrova — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 11:58:58 +0000

On a GDPR note:

Make Users’ Personal Data Unusable by Salesforce at Their Request
You can now completely scramble and anonymize customer data inside your Salesforce by calling System.UserManagement.obfuscateUser Apex method. It could be useful if a customer requests their data to be completely wiped.

Some other great enhancements:

Full content push notifications – a great enhancement to the mobile app!

Report Builder in Lightning! While it might still feel quite like the first release, it now offers a much-improved user interface, gets rid of changing the summary/matrix report formats, and looks a lot more modern. There are also (finally!) subfolders in report folders.

Mass quick actions! This feature enhances editing multiple records in a list view.

Campaign, Queue, Territory, Team Filters in List Views. A great enhancement that brings a useful classic feature to Lightning!

A simple thing with a great impact – since Summer’18 now supports inline editing of related picklist values, one can finally make a Sales Path with Lost Reason!

Einstein Next Best Action: Use Strategies to Recommend Actions and Offers
This new feature allows you to integrate business rules, predictive models, and data—both inside and outside of Salesforce—to deliver the right offer at the right moment to the right person.

Marketing Cloud Summer’18 Release Highlights:

The June 2018 Marketing Cloud and Social Studio releases occur on June 23, 2018.

Advertising Studio: Integration with LinkedIn. Activate your CRM data on the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn. Use Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Pardot data to make LinkedIn advertising more effective.

DMP + Email Studio: Bidirectional Email Activation – lets you use and enrich data between the systems and create and activate audiences in different channels (e.g. in emails, on a website, in display advertising).

Journey Folders: Store journeys in folders so they’re easy to find. You can organize your journeys immediately after creating and saving them. Or add journeys to folders from the Journey Builder dashboard at any time.

Litmus Preview Integration: Litmus Email Previews lets you preview your email across 70+ browsers, devices, and clients. With it, you can access previews of Marketing Cloud emails directly inside the email creation flow. This enables you to easily create, preview, and test Content Builder emails across multiple email clients.

Some favorites in Summer ’18 for Lightning development:

Debug mode can now be set as user-specific (currently it’s org-wide).

Component Library is now available at https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/component-library or in each org https://.lightning.force.com/componentReference/suite.app

A bunch of new and modified base components has been added!

aura:waiting,doneWaiting,doneRendering events are deprecated. See more: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer18/release-notes/rn_lc.htm

Some interesting features of the new Apex classes’ methods in Summer ’18:

One can now get RecordType Developer Name from Schema without doing SOQL.
For communities, a passwordless login method now exists.

Apex is getting a Switch statement in Summer ’18!

That’s it for now; we hope you will enjoy these new features and enhancements for Salesforce CRM and other products as much as we do!

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Digital Transformation: the journey begins

Alexandra Petrova — Wed, 23 May 2018 08:51:48 +0000

There are various approaches to the digital transformation challenge. Some companies prefer a top-down approach, where others may opt for a bottom-up strategy to get started, but either way we are probably trying to achieve the same change in the end. Before getting started with your digital transformation, it is useful to understand the big picture of what you want to achieve and how that may affect your company. One good start is to define your overall digital vision — ‘where do we want to be?’ — and communicate this vision clearly to all employees at all levels to ensure everyone understands where you are going. A clear and well-rooted vision is fundamental to the success of your digital transformation — just remember that it is a company-wide process and the time and effort needed should not be underestimated.

So now we have our digital vision. What next?

It is vital to ensure that your organization has the capabilities needed to achieve your vision. Start by assessing your organization’s strategic and operational capabilities to understand what is crucial (or not) to the success of your digital transformation. These capabilities can then be analyzed as to where you want to go (future state) and where you are today (current state, your digital maturity level). When you analyze and define your future state, try to not let your current business constraints limit your vision. When the gap between current and future state is clear, you can define the actions needed to get you in the right direction. During this gap analysis, do not hesitate to challenge existing constraints — some of these may be corporate myths that can actually be solved rather quickly. And keep in mind that a digital transformation is not about reaching a fixed goal — it is a mindset change, based on a vision of the direction where you and your organization want to go.

Your digital platforms and technologies enable your company to develop the capabilities the way you want. Many new technology requirements are customer-driven, and so we see a big change in CRM-related technologies within marketing, sales and customer service. The importance of selecting the right CRM platform has never been more important than it is today.

The strategic and operational capabilities affected by your digital transformation — and which you should prioritize — may differ based on your company, but in general these capabilities may be worth considering:

In the next articles, we will explore how digital transformation affects each of the organizational capabilities. Stay tuned!

If you would like like to hear how IHM Business School got started on their digital transformation journey, join our event in Gothenburg next week — you can sign up for it here.

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From banking to biking: good health for a good cause

Alexandra Petrova — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 12:26:04 +0000

Saija is not an experienced long-distance cyclist. She heard about Team Rynkeby through coworkers, and it set some serious thoughts in motion. Saija realized that everything she dreamed about is worth doing now, not later — and so she decided to apply. “Rynkeby’s approach was attractive,” she reflects, “I liked the teamwork both in exercising and helping our community.”

The exercise challenge

The team exercise started in September last year. Saija admits it was challenging: when the training began, it was quite a lot more exercise than what she’s done before. Soon she was putting an extra 30 percent of her time into exercising, and then an additional 10 percent every week. Now she is exercising 10 to 15 hours a week — and all this while managing a full-time executive position at a bank! The team hosts group sessions twice a week, and the rest of the time team members are exercising on their own. This turns into five-hour Saturday and Sunday practices for Saija. “My family — my husband and two sons — they are my best support team,” Saija says. “Though they have also been wondering how much time this will take!”

She also comments on the positive effects of such extensive training: it demands a lot from her body, but she has managed to stay completely healthy without ever feeling sick. She also enjoys experimenting with different types of exercise: spinning (indoor biking) once a week, outdoor biking starting late March, gym, yoga, walking, cross-country skiing… She says, “The main requirement for your exercise is that 80 % of the exercise is done under 130-140 BPM. A lot of work is needed to be prepared to bike 15 hours a day during the actual event.”

A great team with wonderful people

Saija loves the supportiveness of the cycling team and the team spirit. “It’s great to be part of such a wonderful team! You actually get to know people really well.” She adds, “In one exercise, we walk in pairs and change partners every 15 minutes — and there is usually a lot to talk about. Our coach is also really professional, and that helps me know exactly what I should do to train better.” Saija emphasizes that one doesn’t need to be an athlete to join Team Rynkeby. “There are 9–10 months for you to practice,” she encourages. “Everyone can do it! Even without a background in cycling, this is possible. There is a selection process to join the team, but practically all you need is enough motivation, time to exercise, and willingness to raise money for the cause.” This is how Fluido learned about Team Rynkeby, and got involved as a sponsor.

Looking forward to the journey

When asked about her feelings about the upcoming journey, Saija is cautious but optimistic: “Well, yes, the upcoming Paris week is scary, it’s the ultimate challenge! I keep wondering if my condition is good enough, and I’m also worried about getting injured. But on the other hand, this is not the Olympics anyway. The most important goal is to support critically ill children, and I hope we will achieve that!”

100% to children with critical illnesses

An important element of Team Rynkeby’s work is raising money for organisations that support children with critical illnesses. The money is raised from a variety of sources including sponsorships from generous businesses. Team Rynkeby participants cover their own costs associated with participation on the cycling team.

In 2017 Team Rynkeby had more than 5,100 sponsors, who contributed with either cash or in-kind contributions to the project. This meant that Team Rynkeby could donate the entire EUR 8.8 million to organisations that support children with critical diseases in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland.

Team Rynkeby’s principal sponsors, Rynkeby Foods A/S and God Morgon, cover all the primary costs of the project, which means that 100% of the funds raised are donated to the organisations we work with.

Team Rynkeby thanks Fluido and every Team Rynkeby’s sponsor who made this charity work possible. Last year we managed to raise over 0,5 MEUR in Finland alone. The money was handed to Sylva Ry and Aamu Säätiö.

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Supporting building schools and IT education in Ghana

Emilia — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 19:44:37 +0000

In March, I am embarking on a trip together with our friends from Salesforce to Ghana to support the Adanu non-profit organization in building schools and equipping them with computers. At Fluido, we have been supporting Adanu previously by donating our old laptops that were refurbished for kids in Ghana. When the opportunity to contribute even more to supporting this organization came along, I immediately jumped at it; and I am glad that Fluido has also decided to continue supporting this cause.

Regardless of how you look at it, I have been fortunate with my life. Having been born to a middle-class family in Finland, leading a middle-class life myself, and in all likelihood, passing on that middle-class living standard to my offspring. How did I get there? Opportunity.

I have enjoyed opportunities of infrastructure, nutrition, education, migration. None of these have been denied from me. We are an affluent society, with roads and schools and hospitals and sufficient nutrition available for even the poorest of the poor. My family was reasonably well-off; I was well fed, and still am. See my photo.

I have had the chance to educate myself through primary and secondary education, have degree studies in two Universities virtually free of charge, and work in two other countries in Europe besides Finland. Allow me to emphasize: there is nothing especially unique in this for an educated Finn. These are some of the opportunities I have been presented with; these are the ones I have seized.

So, seizing the opportunities available is what takes an individual forward. Providing those opportunities of advancement is what the Adanu project is all about; giving young people the infrastructure and the tools to advance themselves. We cannot make people successful, but providing the opportunity may well be enough. For the school children in Ghana, these opportunities are a whole lot fewer and further between than what we Finns are accustomed to, and so we are trying to make them less so.

Adanu builds schools and provides tools for training IT skills in primary and secondary schools in Ghana. It’s all about local activity. The communities make the main effort; us outside helpers join in the work, and provide support in both getting the necessary equipment and training the trainers so they can take charge. We provide an aspect of the opportunity, in hopes that the local community seizes it and passes it on to the children, which carries them forward to higher education and skills, thus advancing the society they live in. Empowerment is our motto.

This possibility to join Adanu’s effort came to me quite by chance. I was not actively looking for areas where I could help those less fortunate than me, although I was acutely aware that my contribution to the global society was woefully slim. This was an opportunity that presented itself, and with the support of Salesforce and my employer, Fluido, I was able to seize it.

So, dear reader. Opportunity. By reading this article, you make yourself open to the opportunity to join us and provide further support. I seized mine, and I hope you do so too. You can support the Adanu organization on my Facebook fundraiser. Any funds up to 2 000 EUR will be matched by my employer Fluido.

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Why digital transformation is about giving

Alexandra Petrova — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 07:24:49 +0000

Digital services involve employees across departments, since most of our processes and data are tied into the customer relationship. This affects how we work and collaborate in cross-functional teams, and possibly in the whole ecosystem — and has the benefit of avoiding silos. By following the customer journey across different departments we gain insights and understand where to create value — what are the easy wins from a customer perspective? Ultimately, digitalization is about creating value for the customer: for each point you get from the customer, you need to give two back.

When it comes to architecture and solution design we see the customer profile as the foundation — for most companies, this involves integrations between systems and the gathering of relevant data to a scalable and flexible platform enabling customer engagement. To meet customer expectations, the platform should not only provide the right data to the right people at the right time — regardless of the channel — but also have the ability to be proactive (e.g. journeys) and predictive (e.g. artificial intelligence).

Connecting the data from several backend applications to the processes is a challenge in itself, and therefore ‘thinking big but starting small’ might be the best way forward. With regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the legislation and responsibilities need to be considered. Technology platforms such as Salesforce scale from the early prototype to the final end result.

In a recent seminar we asked the audience where they were on their digital transformation journey. This is a small sample, but it reflects reality quite well based on our conversations with Fluido customers. This is a great opportunity for us all: Inspired by this, we have created a series of workshops together with our partner Next State Labs in Stockholm to help companies take the right steps and succeed in their digital transformation journey.

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How can CPQ solutions boost your bottom line?

Alexandra Petrova — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 07:32:01 +0000

CPQ is currently one of the hottest topics around CRM. Increasingly many companies are improving their operational efficiency by streamlining their lead to delivery processes with CPQ and Quote to Cash solutions. Regardless of the benefits, CPQ investment process often takes a long time, mainly because CPQ is not merely a tool for sales – it’s connected to e.g. product management, sales, delivery, and accounting functions.

CPQ markets have been fluctuating lately, with Oracle first buying Big Machines for 400m$ and more recently Salesforce acquiring Steelbrick (becoming Salesforce CPQ) for 360 m$. This demonstrates the business potential of CPQ. The reasons behind these acquisitions are evident: for example, Salesforce as a platform has expanded its reach from creating demand with Marketing Cloud applications all the way to taking care of the customer life cycle with Service and IoT Clouds. CPQ as a part of Sales Cloud ties up together both ends – bringing product knowledge to CRM, and enabling seamless offer making with the same user experience sales reps are used to when managing their sales cases. That’s the experience and the use case outline, and then there are the numbers: Gartner predicts that CPQ markets are going to grow 20% per year until 2020.(https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/11/05/cloud-based-cpq-continues-to-be-one-of-the-hottest-enterprise-apps-of-2016/#3de9b2b56dc4)

It’s time for the ultimate question: can you really not jump on this train? At this point, CPQ can still provide competitive advantage, but most likely after some years you will just have to have it.

What is CPQ and what can it bring to your organization?

Configure, Price & Quote – that’s what’s included. Additionally, the term Quote to Cash extends functionality to also cover order and invoicing processes. CPQ applications provide the product & pricing knowledge and automate quotation generation, so the people creating quotes wouldn’t need to be product experts. What’s better, CPQ with guided selling features can guide users towards the right configuration by asking questions and automatically fetching information from customer characteristics. The following graph from Salesforce demonstrates the Quote to Cash process, the tools for which are provided by the Salesforce platform.

You might ask “So what, this can be made in existing applications?” That’s true, but the benefit of the CPQ is that all this information is located in the same system – and further, when CPQ is part of the Salesforce, all the information is usable in reports and transferable through existing interfaces.

User experience and fast configuration (also available on mobile) are already outstanding benefits of CPQ for sales reps, but from the business point of view CPQ means, for example:

Faster offer making – quote lead time from weeks to hours in utmost cases
Increased quoting accuracy – practically no mistakes in offers & deals – higher margins and higher customer satisfaction
Faster and more accurate sales to delivery process – order from CRM to ERP with one click

…and much more. For example, for high volume and low complexity products the benefits might not come from preventing mistakes in configurations but automating order handling and invoicing, thus saving time and effort. For other benefits, check this article by Forbes that explains results from CPQ adoption study made by Accenture. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/04/17/five-ways-cloud-based-cpq-increases-sales-effectiveness-and-drives-up-crm-adoption/#4c19bf6072e5).

CPQ Implementations – what can make them successful?

How to approach CPQ projects? They offer huge possibilities, but set extensive requirements as well. One approach is “Think big, start small”. If one wants to build a CPQ system that will stand the time and at later date be flexible enough to meet all the requirements of the company, one needs to consider all the required use cases and preferably create a roadmap to the desired state. However, when it comes to implementation, one – and often the most agile – way is to start from the smallest piece, which really makes a complete business case and is as profitable as a stand-alone CPQ solution.

No matter how much and how well CPQ and the processes around it are specified, practice will always reveal new questions and needs. Most probably, it’s more efficient to build a minimum viable solution and learn about the needs by using it than trying to analyse and define everything thoroughly before the implementation.
Starting small and learning to “do the things with the platform” before expanding the use vertically across the product offering and horizontally across the sales & delivery process is one way to approach the change – then it’s not needed to change everything at once.

In a greenfield project, everything starts from defining the sales & delivery process steps to which CPQ is related to, and, afterwards, the use cases around the process. When replacing existing systems, processes might be readier, but naturally the nest system gives an outstanding possibility to rethink them. All in all, implementation processes are different depending on the current state of process & product knowledge of the customer:

For CPQ projects it is typical that the supplier implements the CPQ core functionality and probably some of the product models, then the customer can continue product modelling
Other possibility is of course to source all configurations for the supplier – this requires deep product understanding from the supplier side

At Fluido’s CPQ team we are naturally emphasizing both technology knowledge and sales & product management process expertise. This allows us to take a larger role in configuration & maintenance, if desired.

A key to fluent CPQ implementations is starting with a definition phase, which brings the customer and supplier closer together in terms of product and technology understanding. This is an iterative process: when supplier learns more about customer’s products’ they are better able to define how the customer’s needs could be tackled with the platform-provided functionality. One possible approach to CPQ projects is as follows:

What’s outstanding in Salesforce CPQ is the way it offers comprehensive features out of the box. When complex product modelling (for example, for the manufacturing industry) is needed, it’s also possible to extend the solution with Tacton Salesforce Extension.
We are able to create a working proof of concepts in a short time to demonstrate e.g. user experience and configuration & pricing possibilities. This is something that really helps showcasing to users and management whether the CPQ is something that company needs. Furthermore, it provides a flying start for the actual implementation project.

Find more about CPQ products here!

The post How can CPQ solutions boost your bottom line? appeared first on Fluido.

Fluido Favorites Summer’17

Alexandra Petrova — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 07:48:57 +0000

Lightning Experience

Lightning experience has gone a long way since its first release in 2015 and now we feel that it’s so good that most companies should migrate to Lightning! Here are our favorites for the lightning enhancements:

Global picklists became generally available in Winter’17 and there are some nice enhancements to this feature already! They really make life so much easier and now in Summer ‘17 it’s possible to change restricted picklists to global picklists!

You can now get the Opportunity Stage History as a Related List in Lightning Experience and with this, you can review changes to an opportunity’s amount, probability, stage, and close date right on the record.

Also, Field History Related List is now available in Lightning! Finally, we can track and display the field histories (changes, old value, and new value) for standard or custom objects, regardless of the Salesforce interface you’re using. If you have added the History related list to objects in Salesforce Classic, you can now see them in Lightning Experience as well. You can also set up a field history related list in Lightning Experience directly. This change applies to Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce1 mobile app.

Lightning Sync for Google

The two-way sync is generally available. You can set up contacts and events to sync between your G Suite account and Salesforce and manage all this from both Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic!

Nowadays we have even more reasons to love Lightning Experience. An assistant that helps us assess our readiness to migrate from Salesforce Classic to Lightning will pop up in setup! It will show us what needs customizing before migrating. You can also use it to show helpful tools: Learning trails, feature comparison charts, ways to preview your customizations in Lightning Experience, and more.

Last but not least, a marketer’s life in Lightning Experience has just been improved! You can now add members to campaigns directly from reports and from accounts! You can also view the campaign influence related list on the campaign object in Lightning Experience, how great is that?

Communities

There’s something in beta that helps you Analyze and Improve Community Performance. The Salesforce Communities Page Optimizer analyzes your community and identifies issues that impact performance. It is a free plug-in available from the Chrome Web Store

Insights: displays an overall performance score + individual scores for various analysis rules
Waterfall: displays all network requests and performance instrumentation data
Timeline: provides a profile of each component’s rendering lifecycle
Charts: trending information about memory and components
Components: displays the life cycle counts for each component on the page
Cost: the amount of time each component was busy processing its logic
Actions: displays a list of all actions performed on the page + their timing

Einstein

Einstein is literally everywhere now. In this version, Einstein Vision is now generally available. To receive 1000 free predictions per calendar month you can sign up for Einstein Vision. Also in Einstein vision you can now create a dataset from a .zip file located on a local drive or upload from a public URL. Without it, making a nice dataset was a one to two days challenge for a laptop.

Social Customer Service

How about Social Customer Service then? There is now a great new feature where we can send a link in a public Twitter feed suggesting to continue the conversation in private message. This is a Twitter feature and is now supported by Salesforce.

Developer stuff

Our developers came up with their favorites for you as well. They picked some of their favorite features, including new and changed Lightning components:

lightning:breadcrumb & lightning:breadcrumbs
lightning:buttonStateful
lightning:relativeDateTime
lightning:tile
force:recordData (Beta)

And some existing components have been changed:

force:recordPreview DEPRECATED
changes to ui:inputDateTime/ui:outputDateTime and to ui:inputDate/ui:outputDate

Lightning Data Service (beta)

Lightning Data Service is now in beta. Use Lightning Data Service to load, create, edit, or delete a record in your component, without using Apex code. Lightning Data Service handles sharing rules and field-level security for you. Lightning Data Service also improves performance and user-interface consistency.

With the move to beta, force:recordPreview has been deprecated and replaced with force:recordData. If you’re using force:recordPreview, you must refactor your components to use force:recordData.

Override standard actions with Lightning components

Finally, you can override four of the standard actions on objects — View, New, Edit, and Tab — using Lightning components on both standard and custom objects. What this does is it allows you to customize your org using Lightning components, including completely customizing the way you view, create, and edit records.

Platform Events & Entreprise Messaging Platform

With Platform Events, you can increase business productivity and efficiency through integrations via events. Event message bus can make it easier for you to build new integrations and simplify existing integrations using a publish/subscribe model, and reduce the number of point-to-point integrations.

Retrieving and Deploying Metadata in Apex code

Previously, accessing metadata required using the Metadata API, but you can now use classes in the Metadata namespace to access metadata components from Apex code.

New Option for Parallel Testing

Use the @isTest(isParallel=true) annotation to indicate test classes that can be run in parallel and aren’t restricted by the default limits on the number of concurrent tests. This makes the execution of test classes more efficient because more tests can be run in parallel.

This annotation overrides settings that disable parallel testing by default. A test class that doesn’t have this annotation is restricted by the default limits on the number of concurrent tests.

PS: Lightning Locker service will affect only Lightning Components from API version 40 and above.

New Pardot Features

Finally, we wanted to highlight some of the new features launched in Pardot during the last couple of months. The first and the most important change that also requires action from all Pardot clients is an update for Pardot tracker domain security. Pardot has updated their domain validation to improve domain security. So make sure to follow the instructions sent to Pardot main contacts before the 10th of August to keep your links working! All links will be rewritten to being with http://go.pardot.com if the validation is not done by that date.

Pardot Engagement Studio was the one BIG thing that was released last year and has ever since been updated with essential and useful features. This summer we get to enjoy scheduled start and end times of engagement programs to make sure emails are not sent e.g. on public holidays or to stop invitation process after an event automatically. You can also use scoring categories more efficiently in Engagement Studio.

At the end of last year, Salesforce released the B2B marketing analytics solution which uses Salesforce Wave functionalities. This solution has now been renamed into B2B Marketing Analytics. In addition to a new name, there are also other improvements such as increased date range filtering and CRM IDs being included into datasets.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the hot topics recently introduced also by Salesforce. Pardot has launched the Einstein ABM which uses the powerful AI of Einstein to improve Sales and Marketing activities. This will be exciting!

We hope you will enjoy these new features and enhancements for Salesforce CRM and other products as much as we do!

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Salesforce Xchange EMEA Recap

Alexandra Petrova — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 07:50:06 +0000

Cloud technology has transformed E-Commerce

There is a buzzword that you hear all the time around E-Commerce: Omnichannel.
Omnichannel is about harmonizing the buying experience across different channels (e.g. social, mobile, online, in-store, etc.). Nowadays, customers can collect the product information in many different ways and buy at almost every moment. To remain competitive, brands need to serve their customers at all touch points and show some flexibility: “Buy anywhere. Fulfill anywhere.”

Several years ago, companies would be limited by the technology and have an E-commerce solution for the sole purpose of selling their product online. In-store and online transactions would be managed by different systems and most companies would not have a 360-degree view of their customers. Cloud technology has changed that! Salesforce Commerce Cloud is managing both the Digital and the Store transactions on a single platform making it possible to blur the line between various channels.

Mobile is the main traffic driver

In order for retailers to keep pace with the competition, it is essential for them to realize that mobile has become the main traffic driver. By the end of Q1 2017, more than 50% of the traffic was coming from mobile! *

In fact, mobile is not just simply driving the visit growth, it is also driving the order growth. Salesforce Shopping Index (Q1 2017 vs. Q1 2016) shows that the order growth on mobile was 85%!

As a brand, ask yourself these questions. Do you need a mobile optimized solution for your customers to purchase your company’s products? If you have one, can your customers purchase your products within a few clicks or do you make it difficult for them?

Artificial Intelligence is here

I knew that artificial intelligence was coming. I probably didn’t realize how quickly it was coming! During the conference, I was given a simple demo showing how AI features can be deployed on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform. With a few clicks, you can enable AI and the machine starts learning and taking actions! Product recommendations and predictive sorts are some examples of the already available features.

From the conference, I felt that AI will rapidly become the key differentiator to select a Commerce platform in the future as it can help to boost online revenues significantly.

Can your company afford not to transform?

During the event, I spent a lot of time discussing with different companies who have already been engaged in some sort of transformation journey. I found that most retailers in the fashion industry were already at an advanced stage. In some other industries, companies were looking for additional information to clarify their strategy and were considering what would be their next steps.

How far are you in your journey? Have you started to transform?

After reading this blog, you might have the impression that everything has now become simple! In fact, it has not. Change is always painful and it requires people to modify their habits and learn new things. Technology is now available to support your transformation and Salesforce is a great platform to start with!

Sir Winston Churchill in his famous “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech in 1940, warned the British people of the hardships to come in fighting WWII. I would not go that far when speaking about business transformation, but you should keep asking yourself a question: can my company afford not to transform?

* https://www.demandware.com/shopping-index/

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