One of the most common assignment needs for Salesforce leads and cases is to circulate these via a round robin assignment process. But assignment in the marketing, sales or any other team for that matter does not necessarily stop at these objects. 

A common way to round-robin assign items is by using an auto number field and formula to create a round robin ID, which can be used in case or lead assignment rules or with other automation tools. 

But, this can sometimes be difficult to maintain when users leave the organization or change roles and responsibilities. It may also fall short when you have other process complexities, like handling holidays and PTO.

What if there was another way to manage the assignment of standard and custom Salesforce objects like leads, tasks, or opportunities? 

This blog will walk you through a custom opportunity Salesforce round-robin process. And what’s even better is that this solution can be used for lots of objects in Salesforce, which do not typically have assignment rules (or do!) 

Create Two New Salesforce Custom Objects
A custom assignment process can be created using multiple components and is intended to be more accessible to manage than other solutions with the help of two new custom objects.

To make the assignment of an object more manageable; we first need to create two custom objects; Assignment Group and Assignment Group Members.

Assignment Group

First create a new custom object called “Assignment Group.”

A record of this custom object signifies a group or team that you would like to round robin through to assign specific records (i.e. North America Sales Team). 

Assignment Group Member

Create a second custom object called “Assignment Group Member” and create a Master-Detail Relationship on this custom object so that this is the detail record in the master detail relationship with Assignment Group. 

Next, add a lookup field to the Assignment Group Member to the User object and the following fields:

• “Last Assignment Date” : Data Type: Date
• “Out of Office Start” : Data Type: Date
• “Out of Office End” : Data Type: Date
• “Active” : Data Type: Formula
  • AND(
    Out_of_Office_End__c <=TODAY(),

TODAY()<= Out_of_Office_Start__c )

Create Your Assignment Groups & Members

Now that you have your custom objects built, you can create your Assignment Group Records. You may have one Assignment Group or Multiple; depending on the objects or groups that you like to assign. For example; you may have an Onboarding Assignment Group to Round Robin Onboarding Tasks within the Onboarding team and a Regional Sales Team to distribute opportunities to your Sales Reps in a particular region. 

Once the groups have been created; you can add your Group Members. For a user to be part of the assignment queue, they must be part of the Assignment Group with their own Assignment Group Member record.  

Users must be related to the Assignment Group Member Record through the custom lookup field on the object. Additionally, the member will not be assigned records if the custom checkbox of “Active” is false. This checkbox is calculated based on the formula which assesses whether the current date/time is within the Out of Office Start and End dates.

The last assignment date can be manually edited but is filled in automatically within the Round Robin Assignment Flow.

Round Robin Assignment Flow

The final step to facilitate the assignment for a flow that is triggered when the record you are looking to assign is created (in most cases, although this could be triggered when a field is updated).

Create a record triggered flow

You can set this up by creating a record triggered flow, and selecting the object you would like this to be triggered on. Set your entry criteria for the flow, whether that is for a task with a certain subject or an opportunity at a certain stage.

The second element in the flow is a decision element, which you can select by clicking on the plus under the entry criteria. This decision element has been added to decide the team/group to round robin and branch into two paths based on the opportunity location. If you only have one Assignment Group for this object, you can move onto the next stage without adding the decision element.

Add a Get Records element

The next step in the flow is to add a Get Records element to find the relevant Opportunity group for the North America path. Add a filter to retrieve the Assignment Group record where the “Name” of the Assignment Group equals the relevant Group name which you would like to retrieve and store the first record only and store all fields.

Add second Get Records element

Next, add a second Get Records element after this to retrieve the Assignment Group Members in this assignment group. 

You can do this by selecting the object Assignment Group Member and entering the “Assignment Group” field, with the operator “equals” and the Assignment Group record Id from the previous Get records element. 

Add an additional filter to only return Assignment Group Members that are active (eliminating any Assignment Group Members on Annual Leave or Unavailable for Assignment).

This time, we will still retrieve the first record, but the sort order is key here to ensure that the round robin works as expected and the oldest recently assigned member is selected. You can do this by setting the sort order as “Ascending” and Sort by as “Last Assignment Date.”

Update the owner of the record

The final step in this path is to update the owner of the record to be the retrieved user from this Get element. 

Add an Update Records element to the flow, and select “Use the record that triggered the flow.” Select the relevant field to update — in this case Owner — and select the User from the Get Assignment Group Member User Id element.

See if your flow looks like this

Repeat the steps on the other decision paths as needed. The flow should look something like this, if you have multiple assignment groups to round robin in the flow. 

Additional Considerations

• Consider creating a  custom Rollup Summary on the Assignment Group object to record the number of Assignment Group Members in the Assignment Group. You can also filter this to show only active Assignment Group Members.
• If any changes are made to the name of the Assignment Group record or any additional Assignment Groups created; this must be updated in the Round Robin Assignment Flow.
• Make sure to debug and test the flow before making this live to make sure that everything works as desired.
• You can also add in a Send Email Action to the flow or a Custom Notification to notify the user of the assignment at the end of the flow.
• Ensure that the necessary users have access to the tabs created of the custom object; you could delegate permissions to Team managers to manage the users available to round robin and annual leave.

Great Solution for Complex Salesforce Object Routing Needs

In summary, this solution can help all teams with complex object routing needs or for admins who would like a more manageable solution than other round robin configurations. 

The ability to assign records to users and consider availability in a front end facing way allows records to be actioned in an efficient manner; removing wasted time re-assigning records for users that are on holiday or have left the business. 
If you need further assistance with your business automation needs, feel free to reach out to the Sercante team where we can help you build scalable business solutions.

Original article: How to Create Custom Salesforce Round Robin Processes

©2023 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post How to Create Custom Salesforce Round Robin Processes appeared first on The Spot.

Many organizations assign Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) prospects who are not yet sales ready to a “Cold” leads queue in Salesforce so data syncs and is available for reporting. The problem is that Pardot can’t reassign these leads once they “score up” and many get stuck in the cold leads queue in perpetuity.

In this post, we’ll discuss how leads can be automatically reassigned from the cold leads queue with the help of Salesforce Flow and some Apex code. This solution allows marketing teams to have full-funnel lead reporting in Salesforce without burdening sales with unqualified leads.

To Sync or Not to Sync?

The question of when to sync prospects from Pardot to Salesforce is one that comes up quite often when speaking to my clients. The answers from marketing and sales often differ. And both sides are passionate about it with compelling arguments.

The Marketing Perspective 

I need to show the full impact of my marketing activities and the leads my team is generating. If leads are only synced to Salesforce when they are sales ready, my numbers are going to be understated. That means my budget is going to be questioned — and probably slashed.

The Sales Perspective 

My time is valuable and I’m working on a commission. I don’t want to be distracted by a bunch of junk leads. I need to focus my time and energy on leads who have an interest in what we have to offer. I have a quota to hit!

I’m often pulled into these conversations and asked for my recommendation. Without hesitation, my answer is always the same — it depends. Some organizations need all prospects in Salesforce for reporting purposes and some only want sales ready leads added into Salesforce. Both approaches have merit and are correct based on the needs of the organization.

However, you can have your cake and eat it too! Enter — the cold leads queue.

The Salesforce Cold Leads Queue

My favorite solution to satisfy the needs of my friends in marketing and sales is the introduction of a cold leads queue.

The cold leads queue is the best of both worlds solution. It allows all the Pardot prospects to sync immediately to Salesforce — which allows for accurate lead reporting for marketing while not burdening sales with leads that are not yet ready. The cold leads queue is also a great place for sales teams to find additional leads to call in the event they are running low on MQLs to call.

So What’s the Catch?

Like all good things, there is a catch to using a cold leads queue. By design (and for good reason), Pardot can only assign prospects if they are currently unassigned. Once the prospect is assigned and synced to Salesforce, Pardot can’t change the assignment.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. In our case, we would assign a lead that does not meet our MQL criteria to the colds leads queue (in Pardot), so it will sync to Salesforce. This is perfect as the lead is in Salesforce for reporting purposes and is not cluttering the lists views of our sales teams.

But what happens when that prospect interacts with our marketing campaign and “scores up” to meet our MQL criteria? Houston, we have a problem!

Reassigning MQLs from the Salesforce Cold Leads Queue

I’ve seen this many times. Leads get stuck in the cold leads queue and are not reassigned once they hit the MQL threshold.

Why does this happen? Well, there are a few reasons.

1. People forget that Pardot can’t reassign previously assigned leads and assume that their automation rule is doing the trick!
2. Since reassignment has to be done in Salesforce, the marketing team does not have the proper permissions to do the job.
3. Manual reassignment of leads is not a fun or glamorous job that Salesforce Admins look forward to doing.
4. People just plain forget about leads once they hit the cold leads queue.

So what’s the solution to this issue? I’m glad you asked.

The solution is to use a Salesforce flow and Apex combined to automate it.

Let’s Start With Some Definitions

Apex 

Apex is a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute flow and transaction control statements on Salesforce servers in conjunction with calls to the API. Using syntax that looks like Java and acts like database stored procedures, Apex enables developers to add business logic to most system events, including button clicks, related record updates, and Visualforce pages. Apex code can be initiated by Web service requests and from triggers on objects.

Flow 

A flow is an application that can execute logic, interact with the Salesforce database, call Apex classes, and collect data from users. You can build flows by using Flow Builder.

*Definitiations from the Salesforce Glossary

The Big Reveal

I know I talked about having your cake and eating too at the beginning of this post. Well, it’s time for cake! The trick to using cold lead queues effectively is automating the process of “promoting” leads from the queue and into the hands of your sales team — and here’s how you do it.

• Step 1 – Determine the criteria that should trigger the reassignment of leads that are in the cold leads queue. This could be a Pardot score crossing a threshold or the change in a custom field value.
• Step 2 – Review your Lead Assignment Rules (Salesforce) for accuracy and make and needed updates.
• Step 3 – Create an Apex class to call your lead assignment rules from Salesforce — in sandbox. This is an invocable process and can be called by flow. Below is an example of how this code could look.

  

• Step 4 – Create a test class to ensure code coverage. You’ll need to have 75% code coverage in sandbox before your code can be pushed to production.
• Step 5 – Create a record triggered-flow based on your MQL criteria. As an example, your flow could be triggered when a lead us updated and their Pardot score exceeds 150 points.

  

When creating your flow, it’s important that you include an asynchronous path. This will ensure that the flow runs after the changes to the lead record (that triggered the flow) are complete.

The rest of the flow is pretty basic and will look something like this.

• Step 6 – Test and validate. Test your flow first using Debug to make sure it’s being triggered when your lead score is changed to exceed the target score. Once verified, activate the flow in sandbox and test on some actual leads.
• Step 7 – After validating your flow in sandbox, create your outbound changeset. In production, validate your inbound change set (since this change set does include Apex code,  be sure to run all local tests). Deploy once validated.

• Step 8 – Activate your flow and relax — knowing that no good leads are going to go bad in your cold lead queue!

Get Those Lead to Sales!

This post provided a high-level overview of how to automate the reassignment of leads from your cold leads queue. This is a common problem and addressing it is a great way to get some great leads into the hands of your sales team immediately.

If you need a hand setting up the actual process, contact us with your questions.

Original article: Don’t Let Good Leads Go Bad in Salesforce Queues

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Don’t Let Good Leads Go Bad in Salesforce Queues appeared first on The Spot.

As inbound marketing efforts continue to grow across industries, marketers are having to come up with new ways to qualify the best of these new leads. Once they’ve been qualified by marketing, the next challenge is making sure the sales team gets the lead at the right time in their journey to capitalize on their interest. 

With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) you can use prospect scoring and grading together to surface the most relevant leads. Combined with the automation tools built into the platform, you can save time by automatically qualifying leads and routing them to the appropriate sales person or team. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss how these two systems work together and the best ways to automate your approach.

Pardot Prospect Grading

Prospect grading takes place once you have set up your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and have a set of factors to evaluate a new prospect on. The best ICP’s are made up of quantifiable data, like number of employees, industry, job title and location. 

Once you have determined your criteria, you can provide the information to Pardot, and the system will automatically apply a letter grade (A-F) to prospects as new data is collected. 

To learn more about setting this up, check out Pardot Grading 101. 

For now, let’s take a look at some of the common criteria that marketers use to grade their prospects:

 

• Location – If your organization uses geography to prioritize leads, you can adjust a prospect grade based on what location they provide.
• Industry – Market and sell only to the industries that your business is targeting.
• Job Title – Be sure you’re reaching the influencers and decision makers at an organization.
• Company Size – Be Goldilocks and only reach out to the companies that are just right for you.

   

Try it out for yourself!

Not sure how prospect grading works in the real world? Here’s a chance for you to see how this functionality might work in your own organization.

Tell Us About Your Ideal Lead:

What sized companies do you target?

Small
Medium
Large

What industry do you typically target?

Technology
Service
Other

What department do you sell to?

Marketing
Sales
Services

Who are you typically targeting?

Mid-Level
Manager
C-Level
Grade Lead

D+

Pardot Prospect Scoring

You can use the Pardot prospect score in conjunction with the prospect grade to make sure only the best leads are being passed on to the sales team as qualified. Lead scores are a numerical value that can help you determine how interested a prospect is in working with your company. 

With prospect scoring, you assign points to the actions you decide are the most important. These points are totaled up and displayed as the prospect score and helps you determine how engaged a prospect has been with your marketing materials.

Let’s take a look at some of the actions you could use to influence a prospect score:

• Page Views – Increase a prospect score with every page visit on your website.

• Form Submission/Landing Page Success – Add points if a prospect fills out an important form on your website or landing page.

• File Access – Adjust a score based on a prospect downloading an important file. 

• Email Clicks – Good interaction with your email content may be an important indicator of how interested a prospect is in your offerings.

Let’s see it in action

I mentioned earlier that using prospect scoring and grading together can help to only qualify the best leads and send them to the sales team. Using these two tools can give you a better understanding of the prospects you’re working with and how to market to them appropriately. 

Check out each of the leads below to learn more about how their score and grade impact marketing efforts.

Learn more about Roy

Roy is a great fit for your product or service, but either hasn’t had time to do any research, or doesn’t know that your product exists yet. This lack of activity is why he has a high grade, but a low score.

Recommended Action: Call him or place him on a nurturing campaign.

Learn more about Ryan

Ryan is a student interested in an internship with your company. All of his activity on your site (like browsing your careers page) has given him a great score, but since he is not going to purchase, he receives a low grade.

Recommended Action: Do not assign Ryan to a sales rep.

Learn more about Katie

Katie is enthusiastic about your company, but may not be the best fit for your product. This gives her a decent score, but moderate grade.

Recommended Action: Nurture Katie with a drip campaign to conserve resources.

Learn more about Renee

Renee is a great lead who has been working with your sales team for a while. She has done her research, has a lot of interest in your product, and fits your ideal profile. This gives her a great grade and terrific score.

Recommended Action: Send Renee pricing and bottom-of-funnel resources.

Better Together: Pardot Prospect Scoring and Grading

Prospect scoring and grading can work fine separately, but I think they work best when used together as seen in the example above. 

With automation rules, you’re able to tell Pardot to send prospects to the appropriate sales representative and add them to lists or engagement studio programs when they reach the right combination of score and grade. This helps to ensure only the best leads are being sent to the sales team, and that you’re sending the right information to the right prospects at their stage of the buying cycle.

Don’t be afraid to subtract points or letter grades for bad matches, either! You can use page actions to subtract points from a prospects score if they (for example) visit your careers page. You’re also able to set up grading to lower a prospects letter grade if they’re the exact opposite of your ideal customer profile. 

Let me know in the comments if you’ve got more questions about these two tools, or reach out to us for help with your own prospect scoring and grading strategy.

Original article: Pardot Scoring & Grading Lab

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Pardot Scoring & Grading Lab appeared first on The Spot.

With Salesforce moving to Flow as its go to low-code automation tool, and Workflow Rules and Process Builder planned for retirement, it’s a good idea to migrate your existing automations to Flow. Here are best practices to get started on this process BEFORE you begin migrating.

Reviewing Your Current Automation Stack

Depending on how old your org is, it may have a lot of legacy configurations from old or obsolete business processes that don’t mean anything for your organization today. Do you really need to bring all of that technical debt along in your migration process? Or would you rather have an opportunity for a fresh start with your automations?

Before jumping in and migrating all of your current automations, this is a good opportunity to develop a migration strategy so that the changes being made now will meet the current and future needs of your organization. 

Develop a Salesforce Flow Migration Strategy

STEP 1: Audit your current workflow rules and process builders

First, inventory your list of workflow rules and process builders and perform an analysis. Here is a template you can use for your audit (click File > Make a copy).

When looking at your current automation, consider the following questions:

• Which automations are active?
• What automations are still relevant?
• How many automations are there per object?
• How complex is each automation?
• Can any automations be combined?
• Which automations make updates to the same record that triggered it?

STEP 2: Decide Which Automations to Migrate

After completing the audit, you will have a better idea of the automations in your org, which are still relevant and need to be migrated, and which can be decommissioned. 

This is also a great time to decide on which you will consolidate. Candidates for consolidation are:

• Automations on the same object with the same trigger criteria. For example if you have 3 workflow rules that trigger from a Lead Status change, these may be a good candidate for combining into a single flow.
• Automations that include field updates on the triggering record.
• Automations that have similar components that could be combined into a subflow that’s called from each flow.

STEP 3: Prioritize Your Migration Plan

As you assess the automations in your org, you will become aware of those that are critical vs nice to have, and which can be combined into a single well performing flow. Use this understanding to prioritize the workflow rules and process builders you want to tackle first.

STEP 4: Get Familiar with Salesforce Flow

If you’re not familiar with Flow, and the types of flows available, this should be your next step before jumping in, to help make informed decisions about your flow strategy.

There are many resources available to help you get started.

You can check out my recent blog post for more information and links to a few great resources. Or this one from Mike Morris that outlines a process to manage Salesforce campaign activation with Flow.

STEP 5: Decide on a Flow Strategy

Ok so you know what workflow rules and processes need to be migrated and which to tackle first. So how are you going to actually migrate them? 

Salesforce Migrate to Flow Tool

• Salesforce provides a Migrate to Flow Tool to help with the process of migrating current Workflow Rules and Process Builder to flow.
  • Support for migrating Workflow Rules is generally available as of Summer ’22.
  • Support for migrating Process Builder is coming and estimated early 2023.
• The tool is very easy to use and does pretty much all of the lift in the migration process, creating the flow with start criteria and each action, and even makes it easy for you to deactivate the old and active the new.
• One consideration is that the current version of the tool will migrate each workflow rule into its own flow. So if you have 20 workflow rules and use the tool to migrate you will end up with 20 flows. Will this work for your org?

Third-Party Migration Tools

• The UnofficialSF site has a tool called ConvertToFlow v2 that can be used to convert Workflow Rules and Process Builder. I personally have not used it but it has been recommended in the community.

Building Flows Manually

If you have identified automations that can be combined, or are migrating process builders, you will no doubt build some flows. Before clicking that New Flow button, decide on:

• Will this be a ‘Before Save’ vs ‘After Save’ record-triggered Flow?
  • Will the flow make an update on the same record that triggered the flow? If yes then a Before Save flow may be the best fit for better performance.
  • Will this flow be invoking an action or creating/updating related records? Then you will want to create an After Save flow.
• Is there an existing flow with the same entry conditions? Can it be updated to include the logic you are currently migrating?
• Is there an existing flow that has the same components involved? Can those components be converted into a subflow to be used in each of the flows?

Step 5: Build your Flow(s)!

Now that you have completed all of this awesome prep work, you are ready to roll up your sleeves and get building!

Questions about using Salesforce Flow? 

Let us know how you’re using Salesforce Flow in the comments section, or reach out to us with any questions.

We’re here to help!

Original article: Automation Facelift: Migrate Workflow Rules and Process Builder to Salesforce Flow

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Automation Facelift: Migrate Workflow Rules and Process Builder to Salesforce Flow appeared first on The Spot.