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Today it can often feel like you are not just competing with your competition for your prospects' orders, but with the economy and the forces you cannot control as well. Salesforce has brought a new tool to the table and Summit Technologies can’t wait to tell you all about it. The Salesforce Commerce Marketing Insights app connects ecommerce and marketing data to provide out-of-the-box insights to drive commerce outcomes. With this app, marketers can see how their marketing campaigns have impacted ecommerce revenue, including sales, returns, and cancellations. They can also analyze ecommerce performance across platforms and time periods, and tie it back to various marketing tactics. This is especially useful in today's competitive landscape, where it's critical for sales and marketing teams to collaborate and measure the ROI of their marketing efforts. The Salesforce Commerce Marketing Insights tool harmonizes marketing and sales data, allowing teams to track customer relationships from lead acquisition to conversion, sale, and loyalty. The powerful data modeling tool automatically updates whenever new tools or data sources are added to the martech stack or reports. This includes everything from social media advertising and email to in-app activities, commerce cloud sales, and Google analytics. For brands embracing omnichannel marketing, the app allows them to break down performance by channel and understand which interactions move leads and customers towards engagement, spending, and brand loyalty. Built-in out-of-the-box reports and dashboards provide key insights for growing a business, and the app serves as a BI team without the need to hire data scientists. Summit Technologies LLC is excited to help businesses add Salesforce Commerce Marketing Insights to their sales and marketing toolbox. Imagine bringing the power of Salesforce Commerce Marketing Insights to all your go to market (GTM) initiatives! Salesforce Commerce Marketing Insights can power all your Salesforce marketing automations keeping you a step ahead of the competition. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

The two sided goal of a subscription program - to build loyal customers for life and predictable revenue - is high on every business’s list of priorities. Not just B2C businesses. Not just box of the month club businesses. B2B, service based, managed services, all can be powered by subscription management for increased revenue and predictable revenue. Subscription management is one powerful tool to build loyalty and create award winning buying and paying experiences for your customers. And not just customers. Nonprofit sector organizations are equally benefiting from Subscription Management. Subscription management is a business framework that uses tech-driven automation and shared data to optimize how you deliver subscriptions (where customers pay on a recurring basis for access to your product or service). It creates better customer experiences across the buying journey, driving adoption, renewals, retention, and growth. Predictable income and growth in a subscription business requires customers to renew, month after month. A subscription management tool makes this possible. It will enable you to create better experiences that keep customers happy and active. Unlike the challenges inherent in a one off sales business model, revenue in a subscription model depends on keeping customers who pay and time and renew. A subscription management system powered with artificial intelligence makes it easier for customers to continue to receive their subscription right from an app, phone, or connected device without interfacing with your company in a live way, and without waiting in a call queue or for an email response. A subscription management solution helps you deliver customer delight with one seamless experience from purchase to adoption to renewal. This experience is powered by behind-the-scenes processes and technology, automating the flow of data across product catalog management, order management, fulfillment, and billing. That last part — billing — might be the most intimate customer interaction you have. It’s when everything comes to a head: “Did they get the value that was promised? Are they happy to pay?” Growth depends on the answer being “yes.” A subscription management solution can help you get there. Let’s look at how it works from start to finish at Salesforce. Admins can set up subscription products right with one-time product with different payment and pricing models and push those subscription products out over self-serve channels including your website, your app, and more. Customers can select the products they want or use live chat to reach out to a representative. At the same time reps can go into subscription management with the Salesforce tool and update deals, customize order, and push a personalized option out to a customer to make the sale. Customers can make changes through self-service channels and reps (or marketing automation) can nudge them to upgrade or renew their subscription and Salesforce revenue intelligence powers the solution. The Salesforce ecosystem ties finance and ecommerce and digital self-service into a single platform that helps you monetize a subscription income and keep it growing month to month. Salesforce is a SaaS company, they know the subscription model and the subscription business. Subscription based models are growing in both the B2B and B2C world. The pandemic sped up this growth. Financial services companies, communications and media companies, manufacturing, professional services, even Summit Technologies LLC has a subscription based solution that builds the right package, with the right pricing models to tailor subscription based products and services to our and your clients’ needs. Summit Technologies LLC and Salesforce can you meet the goal of creating and growing recurring revenue. Winning with subscriptions means putting the customer at the center of everything that you do. The best subscription management software makes that easy with features such as deal and transaction management to help sales reps close deals fast and grow relationships. Then, billing and revenue management tools — with built-in automation — give finance the power to stay on top of payments. A powerful subscription management tool is going to offer you deal management, dashboards and reports, a unified billing engine, and artificial intelligence. Salesforce has a tool that brings you all this and a tool to offer subscription management through any channel from a single platform.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist Sales professionals are facing increasingly challenging times as they try to hit targets in a world that is more competitive and resource-constrained than ever before. To add to the frustration, so many of these things are not within our control causing us to feel like we are at the mercy of forces working against us. Supply chain issues, inflation, shifting regulations, and worldwide political instability are all contributing to a sense of uncertainty that is making buyers (both B2B and B2C) more cautious. It's no surprise, then, that companies are looking for ways to improve productivity and efficiency to drive predictable revenue. To support these efforts, sales leaders are focusing on tactics that are within their control. One of the most important is improving alignment between departments and breaking down communication and information silos that can slow down business. Other key tactics include evolving operations to meet the increasing demand for hybrid or virtual selling, for omnichannel accessibility, and ensuring that company data and tools are up to the task. Summit Technologies LLC and the Salesforce ecosystem customize and provide platforms and tools that encourage departmental collaboration and alignment. The Salesforce Customer Data Platform gives a complete 360 degree view of the customer that is accessible to every member of the sales and marketing teams and pulls in data from every interaction with the customer. Another success maximizing key change that companies are making is to engage with customers across multiple channels, whether that's through email, social media, or emerging platforms. Nearly one-third of deals are now closed completely virtually, and top-performing sales organizations are more likely to use online portals to offer self-service options that free up sellers to focus on strategic accounts, new customer acquisition, and current customer satisfaction. Salesforce marketing platforms, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot) implemented by a Salesforce Success Partner like Summit Technologies give you the power to bring omnichannel communication to your martech tool kit and engage with customers when they want, where they want, how they want. To succeed in this new environment, sales reps need to be more than just product pitchmen. They need to act as trusted advisors, with insights and guidance on which products offer the best value to customers. This requires access to the right technology and tools, as well as training and other organizational support. It also requires collaboration with other teams across the company, including marketing, customer service, and sales operations. In fact, 83% of buyers say they are more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments. The Salesforce CPQ Product Configurator assists sales reps with configuring, pricing and quoting the right products and services. Salesforce CPQ handles billing, contract amendments, renewals and more all configured by your Salesforce implementation partner to interface with your existing billing and payment gateways. The Salesforce ecosystem of products is designed to implement quickly and scale and grow with your company as you grow. There is less technical debt, no additional on premise hardware to manage, and your Salesforce implementation partner can assist you with ongoing managed services to reduce in house manpower requirements. As companies focus on building long-term relationships with customers, the role of sales operations is growing in importance. In 2020, 65% of sales leaders said that sales operations were key to defining strategy, up from 54% the previous year. These teams are responsible for analyzing data, optimizing processes, and providing support to sales reps, all of which can help to drive efficiency and improve outcomes. Armed with tools like Salesforce, the number one CRM platform, your business can focus on business and staff up sales teams while letting the platform take on much of the heavy lifting using automations and workflows. Ultimately, the goal of these efforts is to forge long term customer loyalty that leads to recurring sales and predictable revenue. To achieve this, sales reps are using techniques like value-based communication, which focuses on solving buyer problems rather than leading with product pitches. They are also actively listening to customers and staying in touch regularly to ensure that customers know they have a reliable point of contact. In these uncertain times, the key to success in sales is to focus on what you can control and to continuously adapt and improve. By maximizing impact and building strong, trusting relationships with customers, sales teams can continue to drive revenue and achieve their targets. Schedule a consultation with Summit Technologies today and we will analyze your company and advise on the best Salesforce tools for your tool box. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist If you’re a marketer on the planet, you’re no stranger to the term ABM (whether you’re actually doing it or not). Google searches for "account-based marketing" and its acronym "ABM" topped out in the year 2020. Three years later, terms like “account-based experience,” “account-based everything,” and the catchall acronym “ABX,” which shifts the focus from marketing to the entire customer journey, are also on the rise. The big brains at Forrester have already predicted that by 2025, B2B demand generation efforts will focus predominantly on accounts, not leads. And since the events of 2020, that shift has only accelerated. Account based marketing takes all that you know about your best customers to find more customers just like them. To bring an ABM strategy to life, it is essential to have both a CRM solution and a marketing automation platform. The CRM serves as the single source of truth for data and powers your account-centric strategy, while the marketing automation platform engages target markets at scale and in real time. By integrating these two technologies, B2B revenue teams can successfully launch and grow an ABM strategy that enhances customer relationships and drives business value. Successful ABM relies on being account-centric, where buyers are at the center of every interaction. It involves creating highly personalized experiences that combine targeted content and intentional communications across every touchpoint. Today, buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs and provide personalized offers. ABM is designed to interpret and understand buyers on an individual level, so your marketing automatically delivers relevant, personalized content and messages across every channel. To do this effectively, your CRM serves as the key to success, as it is the single source of truth for account data and gives teams a 360-degree view of the customer. You can then personalize engagements for your audience with marketing automation. Use the real-time data from your CRM and input from your sales team to identify the best ABM target accounts, create personalized content for target accounts, and distribute it in the channels they most prefer. Share leads and adjust tactics across marketing, sales, and service teams based on engagement data. Finally, it is essential to measure the success of your ABM campaigns and increase customer retention, track engagement, awareness, and lead-quality metrics. Companies that take advantage of ABM’s potential see impressive results, with 77% of ABM users achieving 10% or higher ROI, and 45% of ABM users seeing at least a two times ROI compared to other marketing efforts. Summit Technologies is your Salesforce implementation partner and our discovery process ensures we build a Salesforce solution for your business that incorporates everything you need, customized for your business model, and nothing that you don’t need. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

We are pleased to announce a new partnership between Summit Technologies LLC and Skyvia. Skyvia is the fastest way to get results from your data, as it’s a cloud-based platform that integrates with local and cloud-based services and applications for you to build ETL, ELT, and reverse ETL solutions. It also provides a range of capabilities, from data analysis to data science and visualization. Key Skyvia Advantages The platform provides rich functionality and opportunities to implement complex integrations. The service implements more complex logic, applying parallel processing, error interception, etc. The interface is user-friendly. Business users can configure data flows visually as there’s a no-code wizard available. Skyvia’s approach has an advantage when it comes to debugging workflows. As a visual tool, users can observe the execution of the task in real-time, monitor the data count, and have detailed information about any errors. The service offers template scenarios with pre-made connectors for cloud-based, on-premise, or hybrid ecosystems including FTP and SFTP No deployment and installation are needed as the service is cloud-based and browser-based. Increased efficiency and cost saving as it integrates with your current business applications and is easy to set up and maintain. Greater access to unified business data through connecting all your services with its no-code wizard. The Skyvia platform provides fully automated and trouble-free data processes and is trusted by thousands of organizations around the globe, among them: Panasonic, GE, Hyundai, GlobalData, BCA, Telenor, etc. Summit Technologies is your Salesforce implementation partner and our discovery process ensures we build a Salesforce solution for your business that incorporates everything you need, customized for your business model, and nothing that you don’t need. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

What is Pardot Optimizer? Optimizer for Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) makes actionable recommendations to help improve email send times, speed up automation processing, and more. This automatic recommendation tool keeps your Account Engagement application running at optimal performance. Optimizer tells you which recommendations are critical which can be a lower priority to you as an admin. How can Salesforce Account Engagement users try out Optimizer? Open Optimizer. In Account Engagement, select Admin and then select Optimizer. In the Lightning app, select Account Engagement Settings and then select Optimizer. Review your recommendations and act as needed. Use the Priority column to determine which recommended actions are the most critical. To pause and prioritize actions, use the table action manager in the Maintenance Resources section. Pause or Resume. Open Optimizer. In Account Engagement, select Admin and then select Optimizer. In the Lightning app, select Account Engagement Settings and then select Optimizer. Under Maintenance Resources, click Table Action Manager. Use the action menu to pause or resume an action. Dynamic lists require system bandwidth every time they update. To preserve dynamic lists you want to keep but don’t need updated automatically, convert them to static. Open the Lists page. In Account Engagement, select Marketing | Segmentation | Lists. In the Lightning app, select Prospects, and then Segmentation | Segmentation Lists. Select the lists you want to convert to static lists. Use the View dropdown menu to filter for only dynamic lists or inactive dynamic lists. Click the table action dropdown menu and select Convert to static. The option to convert to static is also available from the action menu on the record home for each dynamic list. In the confirmation window, select Yes, convert dynamic lists to static lists, and then click Convert. After you convert a dynamic list to static, you must manually add and remove prospects. The list no longer updates based on rule criteria. Optimizer gives you the big-picture view for each of your business units. If items need your attention, they’ll be flagged, plus you’ll be presented with proactive recommendations to take action quickly. Examples include monitoring email send times and visitor tracking. View and manage a list of suggested actions in a table, and prioritize by urgency and potential impact on your org. Use table actions to act on items in mass, for example, ‘add to list’. You can also pause and cancel jobs, to prevent org processing becoming overloaded, and generally have greater control. Gain an ‘at a glance’ understanding with the overall account health score gauge chart (to be confirmed). You may be familiar with Salesforce Optimizer, and thought: “Why doesn’t Pardot have something equivalent?” – well, here you go! This was advertised in the roadmap as ‘pilot’ for Spring ‘23, but Optimizer launched in Spring ‘23, in beta. Note: Beta is the second phase of public testing, this time to a wider, unrestricted sample of customers. Beta features come with a disclaimer that functionality may change between now and general availability – plus, they are typically unsupported or given very limited support. In a nutshell, the Pardot Optimizer helps you get actionable recommendations to enable you to resolve issues and improve processing time. Optimizer is going to show you what’s using system bandwidth in your business unit and let you act to increase efficiency. What does Pardot Optimizer do? It’s a tech tool. Marketers like to optimize their marketing efforts, but this is something for the Martech folks instead. We now have access to 4 Maintenance Resources – tools to bring and keep your Account Engagement business unit in great shape: Table Action Manager Inactive Automation Rules Inactive Dynamic Lists Unused Dynamic Lists. Who Pardot Optimizer for then? As it’s a tech tool for Pardot Administrators, it is only accessible by them. And if you’re a marketing user in Pardot, you must ask to get the Admin privileges to be able to use this new Pardot feature. How can I get the Pardot optimizer? The good news is that it’s already there. To find the Account Engagement Optimizer, just go into pi.Pardot.com, select Admin (or, click the Settings-tab in your Lightning menu if you’re in Salesforce) and from there pick Optimizer. Account Engagement Optimizer – How to access it To get started is literally a click of a button in a dialog popup box. Note: Enabling Optimizer for your business unit is permanent and can’t be undone. Once enabled, on the Optimizer page you can see your recommendations. Then, you can act upon them as needed. There is a column to indicate which recommended actions are most critical. What’s great about the Optimizer is that it’s specific and gives guidance on the following steps to help ensure that this instance doesn’t encounter any processing delays. Marketers should delete or pause these inactive engagement studio programs until they have determined the next best steps to tweak their program.

Marketing healthcare products and services, especially in the health information technology space, presents several challenges that require increasingly complex solutions. These challenges include a diverse and complex buyer collective, limited communication between siloed personas, and unique purchasing models for each organization. To overcome these challenges, Summit Technologies LLC helps healthcare marketers meet the need to personalize their marketing efforts and reach multiple stakeholders simultaneously while respecting state-specific compliance and legal mandates. One effective solution to these challenges is an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy that uses real-time data, content, inbound, and outbound methods to target key accounts and decision-makers while remaining compliant. ABM is particularly useful for reaching high-value hospitals and integrated delivery networks. To implement ABM in the healthcare and life sciences industries, marketers should identify their target audience by considering business size, profitability, region, growth rate, and the characteristics of their most profitable customers. Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) ensures that marketers do not waste their time on unprofitable or unattainable accounts. Marketers can create better engagement through ABM campaigns by investing in sales enablement, including cloud-based CRMs, APIs, email marketing technology, and digital asset management. Incorporating digital marketing systems into everyday processes allows for personalized advertising campaigns that engage the buyer, build trust, and create customer loyalty. Finally, to measure the success of ABM, marketers must be able to track the customer's buying journey for both prospective and current customers. ABM analytics, such as overall account engagement and website lift metrics, can help to sharpen marketing and sales outreach, generate high-quality leads, and drive new growth. Overall, introducing ABM is one of the most effective marketing strategies land ideal healthcare customers, and it can help healthcare marketers overcome the complex challenges they face in the industry. Summit Technologies LLC can help you implement an account based marketing approach to landing new customers. Contact us today.

Einstein Lead Scoring is a powerful tool that empowers sales teams to close more deals, faster. As a feature of Salesforce's Sales Cloud Einstein platform, it uses artificial intelligence to analyze historical sales data and determine which leads are most likely to convert into customers. With Einstein Lead Scoring, sales reps can easily identify and prioritize the hottest leads, ensuring that they're focusing their efforts on the most promising opportunities. The system uses machine learning algorithms to analyze data attached to lead records and identify patterns that may indicate a higher probability of conversion. Creating a lead scoring model is simple and straightforward, thanks to the system's automated process. Einstein Lead Scoring analyzes standard and custom fields attached to the Lead object and tests a variety of predictive models, such as Logistic Regression, Random Forests, and Naive Bayes. It then automatically selects the model that performs best on a sample dataset, so there's no need for a deep understanding of statistical analysis or mathematics. Models are updated on a monthly basis, ensuring that they remain accurate and relevant. Leads are scored every hour, and if any changes are made to a lead record, it will be rescored within the next hour to reflect those changes. This ensures that businesses have access to the most up-to-date and accurate predictions for their leads, helping them prioritize their efforts and focus on the most promising opportunities. With Einstein Lead Scoring, sales reps can segment and prioritize leads, and gain insight into the factors that explain why leads are likely to convert or not. The factors are displayed on each lead record, helping sales reps prepare for every call quickly. It's like giving each rep a personal data scientist to take connection and conversion rates to the next level. Summit Technologies is your Salesforce implementation partner and our discovery process ensures we build a Salesforce solution for your business that incorporates everything you need, customized for your business model, and nothing that you don’t need. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to communicate with their customers and prospects through the channels they are most likely to engage with. By using personalization in marketing, businesses can increase customer engagement, build loyalty, and improve conversion rates. In fact, 86% of marketers report that personalization has a strong or extremely strong impact on their relationships with customers. Personalized marketing messages show customers that the business cares about them and is offering products or services that are relevant to their needs. However, many businesses face challenges in delivering personalized messages, including poor data management, lack of organizational alignment, and budget constraints. Salesforce's 360 view of the customer and Customer Data Platform can help overcome these challenges by better organizing data, pulling it out of silos, and creating organizational alignment. Summit Technologies can help implement these Salesforce tools as part of a Salesforce implementation, allowing businesses to see the benefits and positive return on investment of personalization in their messaging. The top five benefits of using personalization and customization in marketing include improved customer experience, increased conversion rates, increased visitor engagement, increased lead generation and customer acquisition, and improved brand perception. The three most popular channels for personalization are email marketing, mobile apps, and websites, all of which can be easily personalized with Salesforce tools. Summit Technologies can help build a customer journey that utilizes an omnichannel communication approach, combining triggered messages based on user engagement, rule-based targeting based on user segmentation, and Einstein predictive analytics based on machine learning. This approach wins customer loyalty and improves brand perception. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement can be customized and scaled to allow businesses to personalize all their communications and target prospects and customers with the right message at the right time. Through our consultative approach, Summit Technologies can build a messaging platform and customer relationship management tool that enables businesses to do business in a way that works best for their customers, and is easy to manage. With our ongoing Managed Services packages, we are there to support businesses every step of the way, including when processes and messages need to change. In the coming years, personalization trends and consumer expectations will continue to evolve. By partnering with Summit Technologies, businesses can benefit from higher expectations of personalization from consumers, dedicated personalization strategies separating brands, data leaders achieving high levels of efficiency through personalization, and beating the competition through award-winning consumer experiences. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

Digital transformation has traditionally been a major focus for IT leaders, but in recent years, data security has taken center stage as the top challenge facing organizations. This shift is driven by the rapid digital transformation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses' responses to it, which have expanded the IT landscape and made it easier for cybercriminals to access sensitive data. Data, including personally identifiable information, intellectual property, marketing strategies, and other sensitive content, is among the most valuable assets a company possesses. Failing to adequately protect this data exposes the organization to a range of threats, including hacks, ransomware attacks, regulatory fines, lawsuits, and system outages. To address these challenges, organizations must focus on securing their endpoints, which are often the weakest link in their cybersecurity programs. Research has shown that attackers frequently gain access to company networks through endpoints such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The increasing adoption of digital transformation has also changed the landscape of cybersecurity. As businesses adopt more digital technologies in pursuit of new business models and improved customer experiences, the threat surface expands and the frequency of cyberattacks, data breaches, and other cyber events increases. SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) technologies play a central role in digital transformation and security. Business applications that incorporate, analyze, and coordinate client data are essential for organizations embracing digital transformation, but many lack the resources or infrastructure to design and deploy their own custom apps. The Salesforce Lightning platform offers a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that allows businesses to quickly conceptualize, build, and deploy custom applications. It combines SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) technologies with database models, APIs, integration services, visual development tools, and reporting and management services, and includes easy-to-use drag-and-drop app design tools for users of all skill levels. The Lightning Process Builder also enables organizations to automate complex and repetitive tasks for improved speed and accuracy across the organization. In addition to investing in technical solutions, organizations should also focus on educating their employees and customers about digital security. Providing resources, training, and sharing responsibility for educating consumers, especially those who may not have easy access to digital resources, can help close the gap in digital security. Supporting non-traditional paths to careers in STEM and cybersecurity, and promoting diversity and inclusion within the cybersecurity workforce, can also help ensure that a wider range of perspectives are represented in the development and implementation of security measures.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist Heroku is a cloud platform that enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and developers to build, run, and operate applications easily. There are several reasons why SMBs and developers use Heroku for app development and operations: Lean team and budget: Heroku's simplified developer experience and fast deployment process allow a single developer or small team to deliver new apps and features to market quickly. The fully managed platform also means that developers can handle day-to-day app operations without the need for dedicated DevOps expertise, saving on headcount costs. Language support: Heroku supports a wide range of modern app development languages and frameworks, giving developers the freedom to choose what works best for their apps and teams. In addition, Heroku Buildpacks allow developers to work with languages and customizations beyond the natively supported ones. Reliable performance and secure data: Heroku is a trusted platform for building business-critical apps, providing a reliable and secure runtime environment for all apps. It also maintains compliance with PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC standards, making it suitable for regulated industries. Simplified deployment: Heroku's easy deployment process allows for rapid iteration and continuous delivery, enabling SMBs to quickly bring new apps and features to market. Scalability: Heroku enables SMBs to easily scale their web and mobile apps as their business grows, without the need for additional infrastructure or resource planning. Overall, Heroku is a powerful platform that allows SMBs and developers to build, run, and operate applications efficiently and effectively, without the need for dedicated DevOps expertise or a large team.

It’s no surprise that social media is evolving the customer experience. As a marketer, you’re probably aware that social media now accounts for a third of all time people spend online (according to a recent report published by Global Web Index). There’s more expectation than ever for businesses to go beyond the expected product or service in order to deliver a customer experience that truly differentiates. This is where the power of Social Studio can help. Meet Social Studio Publish Wouldn’t it be nice to have one central place to manage all of your social accounts? Social Studio Publish gives you one place to manage all of your social content. You can: Draft content. Share content. Schedule content to publish. Review content drafted by others. Approve content for publishing. Access images. Plus, you can access all of this from your desktop or in a mobile app using Android or iOS. Navigate Publish In Get Started with Social Studio, you learned that a workspace is where you add, customize, and configure all the social media accounts you’d like to monitor. You can access a workspace by clicking a workspace tile when you log into Social Studio. After you click a workspace, you’re taken directly into Publish for that workspace. Here’s where you create and publish content for the social accounts that are authorized for that workspace. The main navigation for Publish includes these options. Create Content icon Create a new post for a social account. Calendar icon View scheduled and past posts. Filter by account or status. Drafts icon Access drafts of posts. Edit or share the content. Performance icon Review performance statistics for your posts. Tasks icon Find a list of tasks assigned to you for approving content. Shared Content icon Access and use content that is shared across the workspace. View details and statistics for the content. The Publish Calendar When you navigate into Publish, the first page you are taken to is the calendar. The workspace calendar is a centralized location to plan, schedule, and even create content. Each workspace has its own calendar so that workspace members can view and collaborate on content without needing to filter out other business unit content. As a workspace member, you can do the following with the calendar. View all published and scheduled content. See who created the content. Preview the content. View post details. Add and review calendar notes. Filter the calendar by social account, post status, media type, author, or label. Select to view the calendar by day, week, month, or detailed list. Pro Tip for Calendars To create a global calendar view that shows all published posts in Social Studio, create a workspace with all the social accounts in the tenant. The global calendar shows only previously published posts. Posts from other workspaces that are scheduled to publish in the future will populate in the global calendar after they are live. Have a Message? Leave a Note! Calendar notes are a helpful way to add reminders to the calendar, post questions to other team members, or leave messages. Any workspace user can add a note of up to 256 characters for past or future dates. To create a note, click the desired date and time slot on the calendar. Click Note. Enter a title. Set the date and time for the duration of the note. Enter a description. Save the note. The new note appears on your calendar with the details you provided. You can edit or delete notes.

Everybody's talking AI these days. Here's an artificial intelligence round up of some cool and useful tools. Content creation (Copy.ai, Jasper, Surfer) To Do List (Motion) Text enhancement (Grammarly, Wordtune, Hemingway) Image generation (neural.love, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E 2, Illustroke) Note-taking (Mem) Productivity tracking (Activtrak) Video creation (Fliki, Synthesia) Transcription (Otter) Slide decks and presentations (Beautiful.ai) Research (genei)

Sales enablement involves using content, coaching, training, and technology to help reps onboard, improve their skills, and sell better. The pressure is on sales leaders to create enablement that makes a real impact on revenue goals and prove that it works. In a world where sales is becoming increasingly challenging, sales enablement is critical to help sellers face the key challenges they encounter in their work. These include the need for sellers to be experts, the challenge of virtual selling in a hybrid world, and economic uncertainty. To succeed in sales enablement, companies must start by identifying a specific and measurable revenue goal and then develop training that brings them closer to reaching it. They must track progress as sellers change their behavior, and adapt and learn as they pave their way to efficient growth. This involves choosing an enablement goal, defining the behavior change required, shaping the new behavior with new training, and tracking progress. Ultimately, sales enablement has to get personal and be about giving sellers the skills and tools they need to become closing machines. Salesforce has sales enablement tools that Summit Technologies LLC would love to tell you more about. Contact us today.

Sales operations professionals are the experts in process efficiency, but in resource-tight times, leaders are increasingly looking to them to boost productivity throughout the selling organization. Top on sales ops’ list of to-dos: getting sellers on target and back to selling. Reps say more than two thirds of their time is spent on non-selling tasks, taking them away from important customer conversations. Sales ops pros are responding with, among other tactics, tech consolidation and optimization that cuts reps’ manual work, so they can focus on building customer relationships and closing more deals. Salesforce customization and automation tools can help sales reps do more deals while spending less time on administrative tasks. Sales leaders are experts in process and efficiency but antiquated martech stacks still find many sales reps spending only about 28% of their week selling and the rest of the time focused on important but time-consuming tasks like deal management and data entry. Process improvement is important but power driven tools built into your Salesforce org can save more time and empower reps to get back to the business of selling. A key problem for sales orgs to tackle: too much tech. Sales teams are overwhelmed with tools — analytics platforms, account management and forecasting tools, lead management tools, and so on. Many of these are vital to the sales process. But they can be costly, and the sheer volume of resources can create click overload. No wonder two-thirds of sales reps say they’re overwhelmed by all the sales apps. In response, sales organizations are planning to streamline their tech stack. This could enable reps to focus more on the human side of selling, and less time clicking from tool to tool. To promote efficient selling, sales ops can prioritize their consolidation around features most popular with sales organizations: reporting, CRM functionality, and account/contact management, among others. Only 37% of sales professionals strongly agree that their organization fully utilizes its CRM. Inside sales reps in particular have cited major opportunities for improvement. What are the most useful CRM features your sales reps are looking for? Process and workflow automation Data entry automation Intelligent customer insights Integration with internal systems Ability to replace other sales tools and tech Sales operations can address these concerns by customizing Salesforce to: Adapt to hybrid or virtual selling Modernize tools and technologies Streamline processes Improve data accuracy and quantity Salesforce Sales Cloud and Sales Cloud Unlimited simplify your tech stack while boosting sales efficiency. Summit Technologies LLC can help you customize and integrate Sales Cloud Unlimited to enable all your reps to close more deals. Contact us today.

Managing partners and partner relationships is challenging. Partner Relationship Management tools are available but many industries do not refer to the people who help them sell or help them deliver products or services as partners, and fail to realize the value of a PRM tool. Whether you work with value-added resellers, channel partners, agents, brokers, or dealers a Partner Relationship Management tool coupled with Salesforce’s powerful CRM can help you manage the partner relationship. PRM applications built on a broader CRM platform are able to address the pitfalls of custom portals and niche provider approaches that deliver partial solutions. Making CRM actionable for partners and providing for a more collaborative go-to-market approach are key challenges most companies face. For example, partner or channel managers would benefit more from leveraging CRM analytics to gain insights on customer segments, compared to partner coverage and performance. The foundation of any PRM strategy is to provide clarity to both the partner and the channel manager on the joint pipeline and shared business objectives. The technology industry recognizes the value of blending PRM and CRM to create a better experience for partners. Tech companies use this new blended approach to improve partner recruitment, manage partner profiles, intelligently distribute leads, optimize market development funds, and create quotations. Make sure PRM is part of your overall CRM strategy to align your go-to-market strategy with your partner performance and end customer needs. As partner management continues to evolve, it pays to stay ahead of the changes by setting up your indirect sales channel for success. You can do this by always keeping three things in mind: Choose the right channel partners, understand how PRM and CRM work together to make partners successful, and create a winning engagement strategy for your partners. The Salesforce Partner Relationship Management solution is built to drive channel sales and partner performance by easily managing resellers, distributors, brokers and more from a single platform. Salesforce’s PRM tool enables you to quickly create sleek partner portals flexible enough to scale how and when you need them to. Eliminate friction in the channel process through Salesforce automations and self-service tools. Salesforce analytics provide you with key insights to make data-driven decisions. Summit Technologies LLC will help you set up Salesforce’s Partner Relationship Management solution for partner onboarding, channel marketing automation, channel sales automation, channel analytics, and personalized experiences for every partner. A PRM tool puts in place process and practices that help you manage your relationships with partners, no matter what you call them. A robust PRM solution could include Salesforce CRM, Revenue Cloud, Enablement tools, Territory Planning tools, Salesforce Inbox, Revenue Intelligence, Sales Cloud Einstein, Sales Dialer, Sales Engagement, Einstein Conversion Insights, MuleSoft Composer, Salesforce Maps, Einstein Relationship Insights, Customer Success, and Account Engagement.

To revolutionize the healthcare industry and enhance the experiences of all stakeholders, a strong focus on fostering trust through personalization is crucial. Patients do not want to be treated like - or even feel like - they are just a number or a chart. They want to experience a personalized treatment plan. This can be achieved by seamlessly integrating electronic health records (EHRs) and claims data to create a 360-degree view of each healthcare consumer. By utilizing the power of application programming interfaces (APIs), organizations can access complete consumer information in real-time, collaborate effectively, make informed care decisions, and avoid gaps in care. Incorporating cutting-edge healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) platforms equipped with AI and advanced analytics can provide actionable insights that elevate patient and member interactions. For example, Community Health Choice (CHC) in Texas has adopted Salesforce's Health Cloud to provide comprehensive care to its members by fully integrating clinical and claims data to generate a comprehensive view of each patient. Connected experiences can strengthen trust, increase retention, and ultimately drive better health outcomes and business results for healthcare organizations. By implementing these strategies, healthcare organizations can improve the overall quality of care and create a more positive experience for patients, providers, and other stakeholders. Summit Technologies LLC can help you customize your Salesforce org to create experiences for all your patients building trust and long term satisfaction.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist Changes in society and advances in technology are driving change and innovation. Colleges are as impacted by this as any business. Salesforce and Summit Technologies offer solutions for businesses and educational institutions. Salesforce for Education is designed to help higher education institutions adapt and succeed at recruitment and admissions. Summit Technologies has implemented custom Salesforce solutions for many highly respected schools. Higher education is one area that Salesforce has focused on creating powerful solutions with automations and workflows to streamline the recruitment and admissions process, enrolling more students and getting them across the finish line to starting classes in the fall with the least summer melt. Schools have to adapt to greater expectations and needs of prospective and incoming students despite a declining student population, funding challenges, and outdated and siloed data systems. A complete 360 degree view of your student prospects helps schools win at recruitment and admissions. Proactively identifying students’ needs, concerns, and interests leads to more efficient strategies and solutions. Summit Technologies LLC knows that the challenge can feel daunting, and Salesforce for Education will help you tackle it. At the heart of Salesforce for Education is Education Data Architecture (EDA). EDA standardizes the starting point for educational institutions building out a CRM. It provides a core and common data model that supports the entire student journey. Solutions built on EDA share the same open, flexible, and extendable framework that accommodates a range of recruitment and admissions use cases and end-user customization. With EDA, you don’t just get an architecture. You also get pre-configured objects, logic and functionality, and automation tailored for education right out of the box. With the Application object, EDA makes it possible to track information about a prospective student's application to your institution, from submission through decision. You can also generate reports to see the characteristics of your applicant pool. Let's look at some possible uses for the Application object. Admissions counselors can use the Application object to identify the academic program and plan of study an applicant is interested in. The college recruiting team can use the object to determine an applicant’s status and track the milestones that must be attained in the student application journey. The Test object can associate a test with an application to track a prospective student's completion of required tests. Whether SAT, ACT, GMAT, or LSAT the test object relates to the Application object for tracking purposes. Relationships and affiliations are two EDA objects that contribute to the 360-degree view of prospective and enrolled students at your institution. When your recruitment and admissions team can track prospective students’ interests, extracurricular activities, and personal relationships in a unified view, they can focus their time recruiting students that are the best fit for their institution. Relationships in EDA represent your contact-to-contact connections. Affiliations connect contacts with other accounts in your CRM. Organizations like high schools, community colleges, academic departments, administrative departments, and sports teams are represented as accounts, and you connect accounts to contacts through affiliations. Salesforce.org has developed an innovative, cloud-based approach to recruiting and admissions with the launch of their foundational product, Admissions Connect, built on EDA. It's designed to accelerate innovation and deliver an engaging experience to applicants with personalized and dynamic application checklists. For admissions professionals, Admissions Connect provides a streamlined application review process with an application reader showing data and documents in a single scrollable view, document management, and workflow automation. Additionally, Admissions Connect can be connected to your marketing engagement and analytics solutions to build an innovative end-to-end recruiting and admissions solution. The Salesforce ecosystem offers robust third-party applications and solutions from ISV providers that schools and institutions can use to further build out their recruiting and admissions solutions. On the Salesforce AppExchange, you’ll find solutions ranging from event management to form building to out of the box recruiting and admissions products, all built on the Salesforce platform. The Salesforce AppExchange is your Salesforce app store and it provides you with the tools to extend the functionality of your Salesforce org. Summit Technologies LLC helps schools map out a Salesforce solution to recruitment and admissions and develops a custom tool to streamline the process and get more students enrolled with less manpower requirements. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist Storytelling is a powerful tool in content marketing that can capture the audience's attention and keep them engaged. Here are some elements and techniques to consider when developing a story for content marketing: Characters: Strong archetypes or characters with a well-known pattern of behavior are necessary for any good story. In brand storytelling, the protagonist is typically the target audience, or the story could revolve around a client, putting the customer at the center. Conflicts and resolutions: Content marketing is consumed to solve problems. Create plots in your stories that illustrate your audience's problems while leading them to your recommended solutions. Authenticity and emotion: Relatable stories with a human element resonate with the audience. Use a tone and voice that resonates with the target audience while being appropriate for the brand. Other narrative elements, like keeping a readable rhythm and maintaining the right amount of detail, can keep the audience's attention. Cliffhangers: Teasing the next topic in a content series or creating a two-part piece can maintain some tension and keep the readers subscribed to the next piece. Visuals: Creative design is equally important to copy in storytelling. It's essential to ensure that the visuals complement the copy to tell a full, compelling story. Calls-to-action (CTAs): Providing a call-to-action (CTA) is crucial to guide readers to take the next step after consuming the content. The most common CTAs are links or buttons at the end of a piece of content that directs audiences to do something, like opt-in to a newsletter or contact the business. Before starting to write, do research on the topic to ensure that the story angle is credible. There are two key ways to do this: source your own information and conduct interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs). After settling on a topic, conducting research, and finding a direction for the story, choose the best platform to tell it. Content marketing is not just long-form content; there are many different ways to bring the story to life, such as videos, podcasts, infographics, and social media posts.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies LLC Marketing Specialist and Consultant Leveraging the power of modern technology, the future of customer loyalty is poised for a radical transformation. Gone are the days of clunky, outdated loyalty programs that took years to deploy and required hefty investments. Today's retailers need a nimble and flexible approach to loyalty, one that keeps pace with the constantly evolving preferences of customers and the demands of the market. To achieve this, retailers must embrace a configuration that enables rapid time to market, unparalleled flexibility, and reduced total cost of ownership. This requires a solution that empowers loyalty teams to refine their programs continuously, measuring key metrics such as ROI, member engagement, profitability/liability, partnership impact, and promotion ROI to ensure that the program delivers on its goals. At the heart of this transformation lies a no-code environment that provides unparalleled flexibility in setting up the overall loyalty program, including individual components such as tiers, currencies, benefits, and experiences. Brands can leverage the power of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to build rich member profiles, utilizing progressive profiling, surveys, and reviews to deepen relationships. And with seamless integration with marketing automation tools, commerce storefronts, and assisted channels, retailers can deliver real-time personalization of offers and rewards, leveraging customer insights to create truly memorable experiences. To ensure that members are rewarded for their behavior and engagement, retailers need a flexible rules engine that automates the accruals and redemptions process. And with AI/ML-based predictive tools, retailers can forecast program liability and promotional ROI, constantly aligning the program with its goals. Finally, a flexible partnership management system enables retailers to onboard partners into the loyalty program, expanding program offerings beyond the brand and delivering a truly dynamic and personal loyalty experience across the shopper journey. The future of customer loyalty is here, and it's exciting! With customer data as the foundation, retailers can make smarter decisions, create economically viable and highly relevant loyalty programs, and ultimately, drive customer engagement and improve loyalty. Contact Summit Technologies LLC today for powerful ideas to launch retail loyalty programs that win and retain customers!