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By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist Journey Builder is a tool that enables marketers to create personalized customer journeys by triggering specific actions based on customer behavior. An entry source in Journey Builder is the starting point for a customer journey, where customers enter the journey from. Each journey must have an entry source, which can be a sendable data extension, a Journey Builder Audience, or an entry event. It's important to note that when a journey is activated, it uses a snapshot of the entry source data extension, so if you make any changes to the data extension after activation, those changes will not be detected by the running journey. To include new fields or make changes to the entry source data extension, you will need to create a new version of the journey. An entry event is the action that prompts one or more contacts to enter a journey. Entry events are recorded in a data source, which Journey Builder monitors on a schedule that you set. Entry events can be specific to a journey or reusable across multiple journeys. You can configure Journey Builder to begin a journey based on any event configured in your Marketing Cloud instance. You can edit or review the configuration of an entry source before activating a journey, but you cannot edit an active entry source. To make changes, you will need to create another version of the journey. When selecting a sendable data extension as an entry source, it's recommended to include fields needed for personalization or dynamic content, to use a single entry source data extension created using a query if the data for the journey is stored in multiple data extensions, and to pre-filter the audience data extension to speed up processing. Additionally, using synchronized data extensions to populate an entry source data extension in journeys that use Sales Cloud or Service Cloud data and Marketing Cloud data is also a good practice. 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.

The digital age has changed the way businesses interact with their customers. To stay ahead in this constantly evolving landscape, it is crucial to reach your customers across all channels and keep them engaged with your brand. This is where Social Studio comes in. As a marketer, you know that social media is the key to building a strong brand identity and establishing a relationship with your customers. It provides valuable insights into your customer's behavior, opinions, and experiences with your brand. This requires you to be constantly active and responsive on social media, which can be challenging with multiple platforms and an increasing demand for quick response times. Social Studio helps you overcome these challenges by providing a centralized platform to manage your social media presence. It allows you to plan and publish content, collaborate with teams, approve content, engage with your audience, and analyze performance. The platform provides advanced scheduling tools, intuitive content creation, and customizable approval rules to protect your brand's integrity. Additionally, Social Studio integrates with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, providing a comprehensive solution for managing your social media efforts. You can manage user roles and permissions, classify images using Einstein Vision, and automate common processes using macros. With Social Studio, you have a single platform to create, schedule, and monitor posts, engage with customers, and analyze performance. Whether you're working with a team or managing multiple accounts, Social Studio streamlines your social media efforts and helps you achieve your goals. Get ready to experience the benefits of this powerful tool! Summit Technologies can help you incorporate Social Studio into your Salesforce ecosystem.

Merging multiple Salesforce instances doesn’t have to be challenging Merging two Salesforce orgs can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it's an essential step when two companies come together in an acquisition or merger. To ensure a smooth transition, it's crucial to focus on key areas like mapping out every impacted process, creating and eliminating fields, protecting important reports, understanding tech stack dependencies, updating integrations, and giving team members the necessary access. A Change Intelligence partner can be a valuable tool in this process, helping ops teams visualize dependencies, understand data references, and protect reports. With Summit Technologies assistance, teams can gain a deeper understanding of both systems and make informed decisions about technical debt and workflows. This can save time and reduce stress during the merger process. By following best practices and leveraging the right tools, ops teams can successfully merge multiple Salesforce instances and create a single, fully integrated system. 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.

In today's digital age, customer data has become a critical asset for organizations to create personalized and targeted experiences. However, the challenge lies in collecting and unifying this data, which is often fragmented across various sources. This is where Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) come into play. A CDP is a software system that unifies customer data from multiple sources, including marketing automation, AdTech, commerce, service, analytics, procurement, production, logistics, compliance, and more, into a single platform for analysis and marketing purposes. By providing a single source of truth, CDPs enable organizations to create more relevant, real-time, contextual, and compliant experiences for their customers. CDPs work as the connector within an existing tech stack, filtering and binding the often siloed and fragmented customer data from across teams into leverageable insights, more profitable interactions, and a platform for customer value growth. CDPs enable multiple business teams from demand generation, brand marketing, sales, customer service, and even product marketing to create more agile marketing campaigns, resonant content-driven experiences, and targeted offers. While CDPs were initially embraced by marketers, their potential goes beyond marketing. For instance, healthcare organizations can leverage CDPs to unify patient data, eradicate data siloes, and provide timely information and tools to help patients along their healthcare journey, resulting in improved outcomes for patients and healthcare professionals. CDPs can also help solve success inhibiting challenges that many organizations face today, such as overabundance of unconnected data, non-optimized work efforts and overall operations that do not align with the customers' needs, inefficiencies and lagging productivity caused by data silos, encumbered and impeded time to market for products and services caused by lack of timely insights, and non-optimized audience experiences leading to poor customer experience and attrition. It's essential to note that a CDP is not a replacement for a CRM solution, particularly for an enterprise organization with a massive customer base. Moreover, a CDP must be integrated with other crucial data-source systems beyond the martech stack to extricate the hidden value in the data held within the organization's platforms. As the cookieless future matures and first-party data becomes the essential foundation for delivering the best possible experiences across audience journeys, CDPs' value will continue to grow. However, for CDPs to live up to their potential, adoption of this essential and strategic tool needs to be expanded beyond marketers. CDPs must become the interconnected source of truth across all departments and interactions, physical and digital, functioning as a cohesive data aggregator with data inflows from other parts of the organization. Only then can organizations leverage the oceans of customer-impacting data and its insights to deliver optimized, hyper-personalized, differentiating experiences. Summit Technologies LLC looks forward to helping you utilize a customer data platform in your Salesforce ecosystem.

In case you missed the press release on Tuesday, Salesforce had a major announcement. Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, has announced the launch of Einstein GPT, the world's first generative AI CRM technology. Einstein GPT is designed to create personalized content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, making every employee more productive and every customer experience better. Salesforce is no stranger to AI, as many companies had already begun adopting artificial intelligence technology years before ChatGPT popularized it in November. Salesforce's existing Einstein AI was already providing over 200 billion AI predictions per day, but Einstein GPT is a powered-up version of this technology, enhanced by OpenAI. Einstein GPT is open and extensible and is trained on trusted, real-time data. It supports public and private AI models purpose-built for CRM (customer relationship management), and it will integrate with OpenAI to provide Salesforce customers with out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities. With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real-time. Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data. Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers. The integration with OpenAI will allow Salesforce to combine OpenAI's enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology with Salesforce's private AI models to deliver relevant and trusted AI-generated content. This move will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI. Salesforce also announced a Generative AI Fund from Salesforce Ventures, the company’s global investment arm. The new $250 million fund will invest in high-potential startups, bolster the startup ecosystem, and spark the development of responsible, trusted, and generative AI. Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein, Salesforce's AI technology that currently delivers more than 200 billion AI-powered predictions per day across the Customer 360. Customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger powerful, time-saving automations and create personalized, AI-generated content. Launching today are: Einstein GPT for Sales: Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction. Einstein GPT for Service: Generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions. Einstein GPT for Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising. Einstein GPT for Slack Customer 360 apps: Deliver AI-powered customer insights in Slack like smart summaries of sales opportunities and surface end-users actions like updating knowledge articles. Einstein GPT for Developers: Improve developer productivity with Salesforce Research's proprietary large language model by using an AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex. In addition, Salesforce and OpenAI announced the ChatGPT for Slack app. The app provides new AI-powered conversation summaries, research tools to learn about any topic, and writing assistance to quickly draft messages. Customers like HPE, L’Oréal, RBC US Wealth Management, and S&P Global Ratings discuss the value generative AI delivers to improve customer engagement. Einstein GPT is currently in closed pilot.

Finally in our sense and respond model, comes alignment. The align part of the operating model is where you put in place a repeatable and predictable way to align and balance the interests of multiple, engaged stakeholders. This is critical for sustained success. This is not just something you do when it is time to set the annual budget. It is a continuous process that keeps all stakeholders working together toward the outcomes that drive your corporate vision. Appropriate alignment processes ensure timely decisions are made to allocate corporate resources to the initiatives most likely to achieve stakeholder value. Granted, those initiatives may change throughout the course of a fiscal year, but that makes alignment all the more critical. This part of the model ensures teams aimed at strategic imperatives drive real stakeholder value, and achievement is measured in terms of value realized (not just tasks completed). Success and alignment might require you to move beyond a “one-and-done” project model to a continuous sense-and-respond delivery cycle. Traditional project metrics such as time, scope and budget may not be as relevant as business outcomes such as increase in revenue, improved cross-sell or upsell, or a decrease in marketing costs. This might mean that you take on your Salesforce innovation project focused on a roadmap of outcomes rather than line items and milestones. Fortunately Salesforce partners like Summit Technologies LLC think the same way. Remember what we said in the first article in the series: Customer needs and wants are ever changing. In order to be responsive yet responsible, we have seen our most successful customers shift to this funding and alignment approach. It holds teams to the ultimate level of accountability — a business outcome — while enabling them to make pivotal decisions as a result of stakeholder feedback or changes in the marketplace. It requires a new set of operating norms and collaboration across all levels of an organization. While moving to this type of funding model is not a simple change. In order to grow a sense-and-respond operating model at scale, you need three things: an empowering context that encourages actionable insight and creative ideas, the latitude to iterate and test, and the ability to achieve recognition by championing your customers. While adapting to the speed of your customer is an ongoing evolution, constantly fueled by new thinking, the five steps we’ve talked about in this innovation series offer a strong foundation. It doesn’t matter where you are today. The secret is just to start the process, and move toward your goal, one iteration at a time. Modern development teams should be encouraged to rethink their focus: “In this product-focused world, teams don't work on a project; they own a product from concept to decommission. Imagine the difference in quality and in employee engagement when teams own products instead of being treated like resources to be shuffled around.” Having strategic alignment on an innovation project (or an innovation program in general) means that your organization has undertaken innovation with specific goals in mind. You have mapped out what you are hoping to discover, how it matches with the company’s vision and overarching objectives, and have at least a vague understanding that there will be various roads to reach an indeterminable set of outcomes, each with unique yet important milestones along the way. As a Salesforce partner, our success is determined by our client's success. 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/Revenue Cloud, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Marketing Cloud Account Management (formerly Pardot) and Field Service Lightning. Summit Technologies' strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business. Our leadership team has over 40 years of CRM experience designing sales and marketing automation solutions for growing organizations. We actively listen to and work with our clients to craft technology solutions tailored to their specific needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. ​We work with many industries, including: nonprofit, small businesses, higher education, transportation and logistics, insurance, healthcare, retail, telecommunications and municipal and state government. ​

As budgets tighten, marketing departments may shift their focus toward efficiency. Here’s how a smart customer data-led strategy can hit both targets. In times of economic downturn, marketing departments can boost efficiency by harnessing the first-party data collected directly from customers. This data, obtained through call center interactions, mobile app behavior, and loyalty programs, can be leveraged to reduce cost per acquisition, increase customer lifetime value, and serve as an always-on focus group for testing and learning. By understanding customer behavior and preferences, businesses can optimize their marketing campaigns, deepen relationships with current customers, and improve products and services. These investments in customer data capabilities can promote growth and efficiency, even in challenging economic times. This information gained through call center interactions, mobile app behavior, and loyalty programs, among others, can be very helpful during lean business times. Let’s take a look at three areas where these data assets offer a boost: 1. You can reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) during an economic downturn With an unpredictable economic future, limiting the CPA for new customers only becomes more important. Focusing on marketing campaigns fueled by that first-party data can reduce your CPA — improving cost efficiency and growth. CPA is calculated by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers (or conversion events) that you can attribute to that spending. But for many organizations, optimizing this formula has felt like a never-ending quest. So what does first-party data have to do with reducing a company’s overall CPA? A lot. When you have a better understanding of your current customers — with data, you’ll know how to speak to future ones. This first-party data comes directly from your customers, going right into channels you own. Tapping into this data means understanding which channels, campaigns, and offers work for your customer base as a whole and across key segments. And in the (almost) post-cookie age of limited online tracking, these insights are even more valuable. Anyone who has unlocked the power of lookalike audiences within advertising platforms can attest to the value of first-party data. The improved performance on your advertising campaigns can be dramatic. But even a small increase in the number of customers acquired per dollar spent is a powerful way to drive efficiency during an economic downturn. 2. You can increase customer lifetime value Many times the quickest path to greater overall growth and efficiency is deepening the relationship with your current customers. Facing an economic downturn, CFOs and investors focus on maintaining current levels of profit or operating margin. This means keeping costs in line with slower revenue growth. But an effective way to maintain cost discipline without sacrificing growth is enticing your current customers to spend more. The additional revenue generated from increasing the lifetime value and average order value of your current customers costs less than acquiring new customers. That’s because you’ve already paid to acquire these customers. Look for ways to offer greater value to your current customers, such as targeted messages and interactive email forms to provide real-time feedback. Engaging customers you already have a relationship with – and using personalization to give them exactly what they want – is the ultimate efficiency. And you’ll likely get more business from them in the short and long term. 3. You have an always-on focus group There’s one more important benefit of focusing on first-party customer data assets: the ability to test and learn from your customers efficiently. The marketing examples around things like message testing and discount offers might be obvious, but there’s also a giant opportunity for the entire organization to learn and improve. For example, imagine allowing your product team to A/B test versions of a new concept with your customers before a launch. They could gain valuable feedback on things like pricing, packaging, and design. And this can also give your marketing team a better view into how campaigns might perform. Just because you’re facing an economic down shift doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice growth for efficiency. If your organization pushes for cuts because the economy starts to slow, know that investments in customer data capabilities are not at odds with discipline and efficiency. They are indeed a big part of it.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio Topic Profiles To optimize your topic profiles, follow these best practices: Validate your data: After adding keywords, review your results to ensure that your topic profile is relevant and minimize irrelevant posts. Monitor how people are discussing your brand and adjust your topic profile accordingly. Enhance keyword proximity: When entering keywords, use the proximity feature by adding "~" before finalizing. Adjust the proximity by using the slider, with a maximum setting of 20 words apart. For example, setting the proximity to 5 means that both keywords must appear in the same post within 5 words of each other. Avoid generic keywords: If you use abbreviations or acronyms for keywords, you may get off-topic posts due to duplicate meanings. To avoid this, add a modifier to specify the keyword, such as "Healthcare IT" instead of simply "IT." Improve load times: To reduce load times, limit the number of keywords in a topic profile to 60 or less, and avoid using more than 30 "DOES NOT CONTAIN" keywords. Additionally, avoid using short, common keywords or exclusion words such as "and," "the," or "it." Utilize source groups: Set up source groups at the tenant level of your account and make them public for everyone in the organization to use. Apply filters: Refine your topic profiles by filtering regions, languages, and media types. Regularly audit your topic profiles: Minimize the number of topic profiles by auditing their use cases to avoid duplication. If you create a topic profile for a limited use, consider reusing it, and deactivate ones you no longer need.

Salesforce’s Slack team collaboration tool can do so much more than just help teams communicate across channels. The Workflow Builder tool in Slack provides a set of tools to help you automate routine processes inside and outside of Slack without writing a single line of code. The workflows that you build for your business can be as simple or as complex as you require and can even be connected to other apps and services the team uses on a daily basis, not just Slack and Salesforce. The Slack App Directory has over 2,400 apps to integrate with tools you already use. If a pre-built Slack app doesn’t quite meet your team’s needs you can customize it to address the business processes you aim to automate. The key skills required to build a workflow are the aptitude to identify routine business processes that could be automated with a workflow and knowing when to automate by installing an app or building a custom Workflow Builder. There is no coding or advanced skill set required. For the purpose of Workflow Builder, a business process that you can automate is any series of sequential, repeatable tasks that need to be completed to reach a certain goal. When Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021 it became a prominent collaboration tool inside and outside the Salesforce ecosystem. As our workforce becomes more and more remote based, Slack has only grown in popularity and usefulness. Particularly as a result of work from anywhere staffing many companies have every application they use synced to Slack. This enables team members to receive accurate data in one single source of truth and gives everyone access. Coupled with process automations and automated workflows accessible directly from the Slack app, team members spend less time on manual processes. Eight highly recommended Slack automations that come with pre-built templates include recruiting automation, lead automation, deal alerts automation (this let’s Salesforce trigger a deal alert in channel once a project is created), quote to invoice automation, project status automation, time tracking automation (this allows you to input tasks to your timesheet right from a Slack channel), support case management, and hue light automation. The latter is my favorite and you can see it in action here. Slack provides a great guide to Workflow Builder if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and jump right into automations. And Slack’s pre-packaged workflows can help you do just that. Summit Technologies LLC can add custom Slack integrations with any Salesforce project. Contact Summit today for ideas on how Slack can get your team collaborating and automating processes. Slack workflows aren’t just for Salesforce integration. Slack workflows work with Zapier, Centro, Google Sheets, AttendanceBot, Polly, Datadog, Fellow, Automate.io, BirthdayBot, Jira, Workstreams, ToDoBot, Workast, Simple Poll, and more. Workflow Builder allows you to create a predefined set of triggers and steps to automate processes and run them directly from in the Slack app. The trigger initiates the workflow and can be hand selected, set off by an emoticon selection, or run automatically. Once the workflow is triggered in Slack the steps are presented in the order you select to perform any basic task. What could your team automate with Workflow Builder in Slack? Employee onboarding, customer support, reviewing content and communications, sales lead and marketing campaigns, request approval and more. If you can envision it, Slack and Summit Technologies can automate and integrate it for your organization.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist When it comes to personalization, there are two main approaches that marketers can use: rule-based personalization and machine-learning personalization. Rule-based personalization involves creating and manipulating business rules to deliver experiences to predefined groups of people based on segments. Marketers can set up rules to display experiences to these groups, which can be broad (such as all individuals from a specific region) or narrow (such as individuals from a target industry who have not yet downloaded a piece of content and have spent more than a minute viewing a particular category of content on your site). By setting up rules, marketers can deliver personalized experiences that are more relevant to their audience. However, the more targeted, relevant, and granular you want to get with your experiences, the more rules you need to create and maintain. This can become a time-consuming process, especially as your audience and business goals evolve. On the other hand, machine-learning personalization uses algorithms and predictive analytics to determine and display the most relevant content, offers, recommendations, and complete experiences in real-time and at a highly scalable level. Machine learning processes vast quantities of data, detecting patterns in a manner — and at a speed — that humans can’t. With machine learning, marketers can simply set up a single algorithm or an algorithmic “recipe” to automatically provide a unique, relevant experience for each individual. Certain machine-learning algorithms get smarter the more data they’re fed and can even automatically detect and respond to changes in individuals’ buying patterns and behaviors. This approach to personalization can be extremely powerful and efficient, as it doesn't require manual intervention for each experience or segment. Instead, marketers can focus on creating the right rules and feeding the algorithm with the right data. Moreover, as the technology becomes more accessible and its benefits are more widely known, the use of AI across marketing is skyrocketing. According to the most recent “State of Marketing” report, 68% of marketers say they have a fully defined AI strategy — up from 60% in 2021 and 57% in 2020. For personalization, the use of AI, in particular, machine learning, is also becoming more mainstream. Companies can deliver real-time, 1-to-1 experiences at scale, creating individualized experiences within specific segments by combining machine learning and rules. However, it's important to note that all AI is not created equal. Content generators are not the same powerful approach to personalization as humans. Artificial intelligence in segmentation and personalization is a great thing, but many marketers are opting for a more transparent, human-guided approach to machine learning. With this approach, they have insight into and can fine-tune the algorithms that power their campaigns. Both rule-based and machine-learning approaches have their place in a successful personalization strategy, and many marketers and digital professionals use a combination of the two. The approach you choose will depend on your business goals, the size of your audience, the level of personalization you want to achieve, and the resources you have available. Summit Technologies LLC can help you build a powerful Salesforce org with the enhanced personalization tools empowering omnichannel communications. Contact us today.

Example Post-Deployment Checklist Incomplete pre-deployment tasks—Review the pre-deployment update checklist, and complete any incomplete tasks. Chatter—Tell your users to update the bookmarks listed on their Chatter groups. Custom Visualforce pages or custom apps—Replace references to the org’s instance URL with your new My Domain URL. Whenever possible, use relative URLs and dynamically generated hostnames. Einstein Bots—For each bot, regenerate the deployment code and update it on each web page that uses the bot. External software that accesses your Salesforce org—Update the references to your Salesforce URLs within the external software, and log in to Salesforce again. Hard-coded references to URLs—Update hard-coded references to your old URLs, including instanced hostnames, such as na87.salesforce.com. Ideally, generate the hostname via a dynamic method, such as the DomainCreator class in Apex. If you deployed enhanced domains, review the hostname redirections that stop in Winter ’25. If you find any of those hostname formats in your org, update them to the enhanced domain format. Installed packages from AppExchange—Verify package functionality. For your end-user communications, note the features that require users to reconnect. Pinned certificates—Eliminate (recommended) or update the certificates. Firewalls and Proxy Servers—Optionally, remove the hostnames that no longer apply to your org from your trust settings. However, we recommend that you allow those hostnames for redirection until all users and integrations are using your new domains successfully. If the change to your My Domain updates your My Domain login URL, complete these tasks. API Integrations—Update API integrations into your org to use the server endpoint. Download your metadata, and use a command-line interface such as Salesforce CLI. Branding—If your brand changed, update your login page branding Desktop links—Update the desktop link with your new My Domain login URL. DevOps Center—Update the named credentials used to authenticate users that access your org through DevOps Center. Email templates—Update the login URL for your Salesforce org. Enablement Sites (myTrailhead)—If your enablement site’s login URL is your My Domain login URL, contact Salesforce Customer Support to update your Sales Enablement authentication provider. Messaging for In-App and Web—To update your Messaging for Web configuration with your new URLs, republish your Messaging for Web deployment. Knowledge articles served on your *.my.salesforce.com URL—Update hard-coded references to the knowledge article URLs. Identity providers on your login page—Update your identity providers to use your new login URL. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for accessing Salesforce—Update authentication. Named credentials—Review the URL field for your named credentials. If a named credential uses your My Domain login URL, update the URL field with your new My Domain login URL. If users access functionality that relies on an updated named credential, instruct them to reauthenticate. Service Cloud Voice—When you enable Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce uses your My Domain login URL to configure single sign-on (SSO) to Amazon Connect. Changing your org’s My Domain login URL breaks that configuration and disables Voice. Reconfigure Salesforce Voice, or wait until Salesforce announces a solution to allow you to change your My Domain name without breaking the configuration. Single sign-on for accessing your org—Update authentication. Pardot—If your configuration uses the Pardot Connector User, update the login URL that Pardot uses. A personalized version of the Salesforce mobile app published on the Google Play or Apple App stores—If your personalized version of the Salesforce app uses your My Domain login URL, update your app to use your new login URL. Streaming API—Update to use your new My Domain login URL. Third-party connected apps that access your org—Work with the app owners to update the login URLs in their app, including SSO and other authentication methods. Zones for Experience Cloud sites (Ideas, Answers, Chatter Answers)—Update the email notification URL. If the Visualforce URL changed, complete this task. Service Cloud Voice—Add your new Visualforce page format to the allowlist for Amazon Connect. If the content URL changed, complete these tasks. Email and other document templates that use files hosted in Salesforce—Update the embedded content or images. Instruct users to update their local templates. For example, an icon or image hosted in your org and used in email footer templates. Enablement Sites (myTrailhead)—Update your modules and trails with your new badge art URLs. Web content that uses files hosted in Salesforce—Update the content links. For example, an image used on your website or externally published PDFs. If your Experience Cloud sites or Salesforce Sites URL changed, complete these tasks. Authentication that uses your site URL—Verify your configuration. If your setup uses your site URL, update the configuration. Branding—If your brand changed, update the branding for your Experience Cloud site login page. Desktop links—Update the desktop links with your new site login URL. Email templates—Replace references to your old site URLs with your new site URLs. Enablement Sites (myTrailhead)—If your enablement site’s login URL is your Experience Cloud sites URL, contact Salesforce Customer Support to update your Sales Enablement authentication provider. External integrations—Update external integrations that reference your sites. External links to the site—Update all references to the new site URL. Hard-coded references to your site within your sites and custom pages—Update the references to your site URL. Where possible, use relative links or dynamically created hostnames. Knowledge articles served on your Experience Cloud sites URL—Update hard-coded references to the knowledge article URLs. Identity providers on your site login page—Update your identity providers to use your new site URL. Messaging for In-App and Web—If you use Messaging for Web in an Experience Builder site, update your allowlisted URLs. A Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud app—Update your app to use your new Experience Cloud sites URL. Multi-factor authentication for accessing your site—Update authentication. Named credentials—Review the URL field for your named credentials. If a named credential uses your site URL, update the URL field with your new site URL. If users access functionality that relies on an updated named credential, instruct them to reauthenticate. Single sign-on for accessing your site—Update the configuration. Third-party connected apps that access your site—Work with the app owners to update the site URLs in their app, including SSO and other authentication methods. Trusted domains for inline frames—Review and update the list of trusted domains for clickjack protection. In particular, ensure that *.my.salesforce.com is trusted. If a custom domain such as https://www.example.com serves your Experience Cloud sites or Salesforce Sites and the sites URL changed, complete these tasks. The custom domain uses the HTTPS Option: A non-Salesforce host or service serves this domain over HTTPS—Update the target hostname used when forwarding requests from your domain’s proxy or CDN. The custom domain serves the site via a non-Salesforce host or service—Review and update the domain configuration, such as CDN settings and hard-coded references to Salesforce URLs.

An education is a major investment for students and attracting and retaining students is as much a business challenge as it is a recruitment challenge. Fortunately Salesforce recruitment and student engagement solutions integrated with data analytics tools by your valued Salesforce partner can meet the challenge head on. Universities and colleges need to analyze data to answer questions about what has happened, what might happen, and what they can do to nurture connections to help students take action (such as apply, graduate, or donate). With a tremendous mixture of student populations and schools, a university has data and tools available to improve student experiences but where do they start? Can your institution identify which students need extra tutoring or assistance connecting with the campus community? Did increased social media ads lead to more applications for one or more departments? To learn more about data analytics for higher education, read on to see how these schools used analytics to improve student enrollment and health, to improve student support, and to meet challenges head on with Salesforce. Salesforce provides a crm for recruiting financial aid and student success. The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted life for everyone. While the University of Kentucky (UK) was no exception, their ability to quickly and seamlessly transition to remote learning mid-semester during the spring of 2020, still maintaining high levels of transparent communications with its community, was impressive. Planning for the upcoming fall semester, however, brought a broadened set of issues and challenges to be addressed. As leaders assessed their options, they agreed it was paramount that they ensure the safety and health of their entire school community, while also continuing to deliver on the UK brand. Keeping the students they had worked so hard to recruit while delivering on their commitment to providing an exceptional campus experience for residential students was challenging. To solve this challenge of balancing safety and delivering the expected, on-campus experience, UK’s leaders created a task force involving more than 500 people spanning 19 workstreams. Throughout, they maintained an intentional focus on outward communication more than ever before. UK’s faculty, parents, and students were sent targeted “Uplift and Update” emails bi-weekly through Salesforce Marketing Cloud intended to raise spirits, inform people of the latest developments, and to ensure a continued meaningful connection with their community. The entire extended UK family had to be reassured that health safety would be maintained while delivering on the university experience. Three months of research and collaboration led to the playbook for the reinvention of operations at University of Kentucky. Salesforce was at the forefront of the game plan. Salesforce’s Work.com for Education Cloud, a suite of apps, expertise and services packaged together to help institutions reopen safely and then monitor the health of the community post their return, was selected as the technology to support the tracking of daily symptom checks and assessments. With Work.com, UK is quickly innovating to create: Testing and Reporting App so all students can document self-tests and are prompted to take action if experiencing any symptoms consistent with COVID-19 Workplace Command Center to monitor return-to-campus readiness and assess people’s wellness. Emergency Response Management so everyone is prepared to respond effectively and quickly to all scenarios Contact Tracing for tracking health-related interactions to safely and securely minimize the spread of COVID-19 Through all of this, UK leadership continued to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for communications to ensure each of the institution’s audiences—faculty, students, staff and parents—were kept appraised as the university community prepared to return for the fall of 2020. Salesforce solved an unpredictable crisis brought on by COVID-19 and helped University of Kentucky ensure a safe return to campus. Summit Technologies can help your school get more out of your Salesforce solutions, just like University of Kentucky. Several years ago, Taylor University used Salesforce to completely revamp its recruiting model, switching from a geography focus that was based on where a student lived, to an academic focus based on what the prospective student was interested in studying. Utilizing Salesforce Einstein Analytics Taylor University learned that individual counselors did statistically better recruiting prospective students who were interested in some majors than others. This enabled Taylor University to realign their model to have counselors devoted to specific academic areas. The results of that shift were immediate: the Fall 2015 recruitment cycle produced what was then the largest ever incoming class for Taylor University. In the following years, the school decided to embrace analytics further to examine how financial aid could best be utilized during the recruiting and admissions process. Taking this next analytical step required making better use of existing data. Taylor University used a third-party tool called PowerFAIDS for financial aid. The tool was mostly used in a functional manner to generate a financial aid package. The information wasn’t fed back to their admissions counselors, so that they could learn from it and make an informed decision about how to leverage the scholarships to impact an enrollment decision. And the information wasn’t connected to other data sets for thorough analysis. Taylor University already had Salesforce Sales Cloud in place to manage its recruitment and admissions, Salesforce Community Cloud for its online application portal, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for emails and digital communications. Additionally, Einstein Analytics was already being used for reporting and analysis. Having worked hard to bring all student information into one system, it was important to do this for the financial aid data as well. With the Salesforce ecosystem, Taylor University had a solid foundation to create a 360 degree student view. In 2016, the university integrated the PowerFAIDS data with its Salesforce implementation, enabling the school to start using Einstein Analytics to report on financial aid. The reports and analysis that Salesforce generated gave admissions counselors predictive probability numbers allowing them to start thinking about financial aid strategically, rather than just a process to be completed. Einstein Analytics provided insights that made a big difference. With stronger insights into how financial aid and scholarships impact recruiting and admissions – coupled with the other insights that Salesforce can harvest from the school’s data – Taylor University has seen its numbers trend upwards. Taylor University has seen its student inquiry pool increase by 600%. The school has extended the benefits of its Salesforce implementation from the admissions office to the academic enrichment center, which is in charge of student success at Taylor University. Taylor University has realized a 90% retention rate. The data impacting this rate is captured within Salesforce for the academic enrichment center to make use of. They can spot patterns and potential flags that a student might be thinking of withdrawing. When seen, they can take proactive steps to reach out to the student with tutoring, guidance, or even just assistance on how to navigate a higher education institution. Salesforce helped Taylor University improve the overall student experience. Taylor University exposed the students themselves to the power of Salesforce analytics through a popular course that gives them hands-on experience with Salesforce tools. From admissions and financial aid, through various aspects of student life, Salesforce has helped Taylor University become more competitive in the higher education community. Salesforce helped Taylor University become more sales-minded and competitive in the race to attract and retain students. From K-12 schools to community colleges, universities, and graduate schools – Salesforce and Summit Technologies work with institutions of all sizes to deliver the education CRM your school needs to be future-ready. Summit Technologies is a full service implementation partner providing integration and managed services to clients. Demand for connected student services is higher than ever before. Delivering complete student services by connecting every channel, personalizing every engagement, and scaling every process is one of areas Summit Technologies excels. The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences (ASC) is one such success story. The ASC Marketing Department provides creative solutions to help staff connect with their audience and successfully promote their department, center, initiative, program or event. The ASC Marketing Department is tasked with marketing to prospective students with the goal of getting them to apply to OSU and major in one of the majors offered by ASC. After a student applies and has been admitted, ASC Marketing is also challenged with ensuring an admitted student stays connected and ultimately enrolls in classes. The reality is a certain percent of students that are admitted never enroll for classes, thus creating a problem referred to as “Summer Melt”. ASC Marketing wished to have the ability to track their results within the prospecting and recruiting cycles as well as across multiple academic years. They wanted to be able to establish an analytics platform of reports and charts to visualize their prospecting and admit funnels and track the efficacy of their efforts. ASC Marketing also wanted an enterprise-grade multi-channel marketing solution connected to a proven CRM like Salesforce to create marketing content and engage prospects and admits intelligently and dynamically through multiple channels including SMS and email using a journey builder. Summit Technologies analyzed the data coming from internal systems and architected a data model in Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM to house prospects in the Lead object and Admits with their application information in Contacts and Opportunities. Hundreds of custom fields were created to house the data imported into the system. Custom stages were created to track prospect and admit progress through the recruiting and admit process. As the data is coming from the OSU Admissions department on an as-requested basis in a flat file, and an ETL solution is not feasible at this time, Summit Technologies devised a solution to load the data into Salesforce quickly and easily. The solution consists of a MS Excel Power Query spreadsheet to automate the numerous data transformation steps required to re-format the data to one that would be accepted by Salesforce. The Apex Data Loader command line interface was leveraged to reduce the process of data loading to copying and pasting a couple commands to a command prompt. Summit Technologies created 15 different reports and charts that allow ASC Marketing staff to visualize their funnels by data such as gender, in-state or out of state, regions of the world where applicants were located and other criteria. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was connected to Sales Cloud using the connector and a custom domain hosted by OSU was provisioned to send email. Data extensions were created in Marketing Cloud to house prospect and admit data for the purposes of utilizing the Journey Builder to create comprehensive engagement plans. Summit Technologies provided training to ASC Marketing staff for the CRM solution, the data loading process and introduced the team to Market Cloud Email Studio and Journey Builder. Salesforce’s Education Cloud is the CRM foundation that strengthens student engagement with: Mobile Student Portal Appointment Scheduling Wizard Conversational Chatbots Sentiment Surveys The Salesforce ecosystem has a wide variety of fully customizable solutions for Higher Education as well as K-12 education. Summit Technologies LLC can help you integrate Salesforce for better student experiences for the entire lifetime of their relationship with your school.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies LLC Marketing Specialist AI has proven to be an effective solution for addressing the challenges posed by the volume and velocity of data we have available in marketing. In this article, Summit Technologies will explore some of the cutting-edge features offered by Einstein in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that can help marketers optimize their performance and work more efficiently. Let’s face it. In marketing (as in sales) we are always trying to build a better mousetrap. Einstein Social Insights The Social Studio feature in Marketing Cloud enables marketers to publish content, engage in conversations, and analyze social data. With Einstein, this platform becomes even more powerful. Some of the AI-powered capabilities include: Spam detection: Automatically identify and remove spam sites and posts on social channels to maintain the authenticity of your brand's presence. Influencer score: Determine the relative influence of social users by evaluating their reach and engagement frequency on social platforms. Sentiment analysis: Quickly identify the tone and sentiment of customer conversations, enabling marketers to understand their customers' perspectives and prioritize their responses. Marketers can leverage these advanced features to enhance their social strategy and build brand loyalty. For example: Run Influencer Marketing Campaigns: Identify and recruit high-influence individuals as brand advocates using the influencer score and social listening. Deliver Social Customer Care: Use sentiment analysis to prioritize negative brand sentiment and route cases to the appropriate service teams for resolution. Einstein Vision for Social With over 3 billion images being uploaded to social platforms every day, it's essential for marketers to be able to analyze this data. Einstein Vision for Social allows marketers to gain insights and context from images. You can train Social Studio to recognize images related to your brand through deep learning, including products, logos, scenes, and food. By combining this data with other social data, marketers can have a deeper understanding of their brand followers, engage with them, and measure their marketing efforts. Lookalikes Lookalike modeling is a proven tool that identifies common traits and behaviors among current customers and seeks out new customers who share those same characteristics.To the human eye, it is very time consuming. Einstein lookalikes provide marketers with the ability to create rich audiences and segments for modeling purposes using their first, second, and third-party data in Audience Studio. Einstein Journey Insights In today's world, consumers control their interactions with brands more than ever before. Einstein Journey Insights helps marketers understand their customer journeys by tracking all interactions across touchpoints such as web browsing, email, support requests, etc. This tool applies advanced attribution modeling to improve engagements and event sequences leading to specific goals, such as purchasing or leaving a product review. Interactive reports and visualizations show marketers how their planned journeys performed compared to the organic journeys consumers took, allowing marketers to optimize their campaigns. Einstein Content Tagging Creating personalized and engaging messages requires a vast library of content, which can be challenging to manage and organize. Einstein Content Tagging and image recognition technology help marketers keep their assets tagged and organized by automatically adding and updating content tags and metadata every 24 hours. Marketing Cloud Intelligence As marketing budgets increase, so does the need to drive ROI and provide better customer experiences. Marketing Cloud Intelligence provides a pipeline of AI-generated insights using automated regression modeling and statistical analysis methods. Einstein Marketing Insights uses these methods to sift through data and identify high and low performers, including audiences, creative concepts, and underperforming channels. In this way, marketers can make smarter decisions faster and capitalize on what's working while improving what's not. Einstein features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud offer a wealth of opportunities for marketers to optimize their performance and work more efficiently. By leveraging these AI-powered capabilities, marketers can make more educated decisions faster building better brand engagement and higher ROIs. Summit Technologies LLC would love to help you deploy Einstein for Marketing Cloud. Contact us today.

Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform that streamlines operations, increases productivity, and improves customer satisfaction. However, maintaining and optimizing a Salesforce org can be challenging for businesses. To overcome these challenges, many businesses are turning to Salesforce Managed Services. Managed services are an outsourcing model that transfers certain processes and functions to a third-party provider to optimize operations and reduce expenses. This proactive approach focuses on preventing problems before they occur. With Salesforce Managed Services, businesses can access the expertise of a dedicated Salesforce team without the hassle of hiring, managing, and retaining employees. This ongoing support and maintenance solution helps businesses keep their Salesforce org in top condition and in sync with their evolving needs. It also provides the necessary consulting expertise to maximize the platform for maximum business value. With over 90% of Salesforce implementations having enterprise-wide integrations and 60% using multiple Salesforce products, maintaining and optimizing a Salesforce org requires a broad base of expertise and a consulting mindset. By leveraging Salesforce Managed Services, businesses can ensure that they have the necessary resources to fully leverage their Salesforce investment. Contact Summit Technologies today for a Salesforce Managed Services solution for your business.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies LLC Marketing Specialist Legacy billing systems refer to outdated, traditional billing processes that were designed for one-time transactions, rather than recurring revenue streams. Such systems can cause significant problems for companies looking to adopt a subscription-based business model, particularly as they scale. The warning signs of a legacy billing system include the need for re-coding to enable pricing changes, difficulty tracking contract terms and deviations from standard terms, and the requirement for manual intervention to upgrade or downgrade customer orders mid-cycle. Invoicing inaccuracies can also lead to disputes and revenue loss, while multiple product catalogs and SKUs may not be in sync. The traditional revenue process using legacy billing systems involves multiple systems, with spreadsheets in between, from quote to cash. This approach often creates gaps in customer data, making it difficult to track, particularly during the invoicing process. The disconnect between two groups responsible for negotiating and closing contracts and setting up accounts to bill in the billing system can lead to manual intervention, which increases the risk of human error. Such errors can lead to leaving money on the table, causing a significant loss for the business. Customer retention is the key to success in the subscription business model. It involves follow-on transactions like renewals, add-ons, extensions, and swaps that traditional billing systems were not designed to handle. In this new lifecycle, approximately 80% of the customer's lifetime value comes after the first order. Therefore, it is crucial to streamline the billing process for retaining customers, which involves a shift in mindset. Billing is no longer just a back-office function but is now part of the customer journey itself. To bring billing into the new customer journey, companies need to unify their sales and finance teams on the same platform, integrate customer data across all stages, and automate as much as possible. Sales can benefit from having access to purchase and payment history when discussing the next opportunity or add-on with customers. At the same time, finance can automate order data flow from the quote to the bill, minimizing discrepancies and avoiding billing inaccuracies. Summit Technologies has found legacy billing systems can present a significant challenge for companies looking to adopt the subscription business model. Overcoming this challenge requires a shift in mindset, unifying sales and finance on the same platform with a tool like Salesforce, integrating customer data across all stages, and automating the billing process as much as possible. By doing so, companies can retain customers and succeed in the subscription business model.

Artificial Intelligence may seem a bit mysterious, maybe a little magical, when you first hear about what it can do. The truth is that the AI that powers business applications really boils down to a few small parts which, when combined in innovative ways, delivers real value for businesses. One way to think about artificial intelligence is as ingredients that come together to create a perfect recipe for your business. Combine the ingredients one way and you get one dish. Combine the ingredients in a different way and you get a different dish. These simple ingredients can lead to an impressive variety of solutions for your business needs. Let’s take a look at the four main ingredients that are part of any good AI platform: yes-and-no predictions, numeric predictions, classifications, and recommendations. Yes-and-No Predictions The first ingredient is yes-and-no predictions. Yes-and-no predictions allow you to answer questions like, “Is this a good lead for my business?” or “Will this prospect open my email?” AI helps you answer these questions by scanning historical data you’ve stored in your system. Yes-and-no predictions generally come in the form of a probability (for example, “Mary Smith has a 67% chance of opening this type of email). But sometimes probabilities are converted into scores. Scores are just a different representation of the likelihood of “yes”; they can be represented as numbers on a numeric scale (for example, 0 to 100) or even as the number of stars on a five-star rating survey. Keep in mind that these scores are just showing the same probability in a different way. Numeric Predictions Next, are numeric predictions. Numeric predictions often power predictive forecasting solutions (for example, “How much revenue will this new customer bring in?”), but they are also used in other contexts like customer service (for example, “How many days will it take us to resolve this customer’s issue?”). Numeric predictions also use your historical data to arrive at these numbers. Classifications Next, we have classifications. Classifications frequently use “deep learning” capabilities to operate on unstructured data like free text or images. The idea behind classification is to extract useful information from unstructured data and answer questions like, “How many soda cans are in this picture?” It can even take a statement like, “I’d like to buy another pair of the same shoes I bought last time,” and use that to kick off a workflow that can look up the last shoe order and place the same pair of shoes in their online shopping cart. Classification using deep learning is very robust, even when the unstructured data is arriving in different forms. Take the previous example of shoes. You could just say, “I want another pair of those shoes” or “Give me another one of those.” No matter how the request is phrased, the underlying deep learning engine built into an AI platform can generally understand them all, in much the same way that your brain can. Another type of classification—which may or may not use deep learning—is called clustering. This type of AI ingredient gathers insights from your data that you may not otherwise have noticed. For example, if you are a clothing vendor, AI might learn that both rural older men and urban twentysomethings like to buy a certain type of sweater. Where your intuition might tell you that these are two totally different groups, the data shows they behave similarly with respect to the products they buy, and you may want to market to those two groups in a similar way. Recommendations Last, are recommendations. Recommendations are key when you have a large set of items that you’d like to recommend to users. Many ecommerce websites apply recommendation strategies to products; they can detect that people who bought a specific pair of shoes also often order a certain pair of socks. When a user puts those shoes in their cart, AI automatically recommends the same socks. Recommendations are not just for products. Marketers use the same technique to recommend content like whitepapers to business users. Employers might use recommendations with their HR recruiting system to recommend job postings to job candidates. Workflow and Rules Workflow and rules aren’t technically part of AI, but they’re an essential part of how AI is used. Take the following example. Let’s say that AI predicts a given customer has a 25% likelihood of not renewing their contract. Just knowing this is not enough—you need to do something about it. That’s where workflow and rules come into play. In this example, your workflow might mean kicking off a retention campaign when the AI predicts that a customer is unlikely to renew. With these four fundamental AI ingredients, you can produce custom AI applications that meet a variety of business needs.

Salesforce is retiring the JDK locale formats with the Spring ’24 release. Salesforce recommends that you adopt the new locale formats before they’re auto-activated in Spring ’24, starting in January 2024 for sandboxes and in February 2024 in production. What does this change mean for me? As part of their effort to keep the Salesforce Platform up to date with the latest international standards, Salesforce adopted a new set of locale formats in Winter '20. Locales control the formats for dates, times, currencies, addresses, names, and numeric values. Salesforce currently uses International Components for Unicode (ICU). By default, before Winter ’20 the Salesforce platform used the locale formats provided by Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK). ICU locale formats replace the JDK formats in Spring ’24. To prevent disruption for your users, Salesforce recommends adopting the new formats before they’re enforced. How do I determine whether I’m affected? To determine whether you use ICU locale formats, check the status of the Enable ICU Locale Formats release update. Then verify a user interface setting. Refer to Determine Whether Your Org Uses ICU or JDK Locale Formats. What action can I take? Follow the steps in Adopt the ICU Locale Formats in Salesforce Help. The content provides considerations and instructions to help you determine how the new locales affect you. Summit Technologies can assist you. As with all major changes, Salesforce recommends that you test the new locale formats in a sandbox. Salesforce Help also provides guidance on updating and testing the new formats. The impact analysis and update of API versions and custom code can take some time. We recommend that all customers start this work well before the ICU formats are enforced in Spring ’24. What happens if I don’t take action? In the Spring ’24 release, JDK locale formats are retired and ICU formats are auto-activated. For more information, see Determine How the ICU Locale Formats Affect Your Org. If you have more questions, you can join the conversation in the ICU Locale Formats Adoption Trailblazer Community group. To view all current and past feature retirements, see Salesforce Product & Feature Retirement. To read about the Salesforce approach to retiring products and features, read our Product & Feature Retirement Philosophy.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to streamline their app development process can turn to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions like Heroku. These solutions provide the essential infrastructure, hardware, and servers required to build and run apps, freeing developers to focus on delivering feature-rich and engaging experiences. Heroku is a leading PaaS solution that helps organizations efficiently build, test, run, and manage their applications. With Heroku, businesses can save valuable time, optimize workflows, and ensure rapid deployment throughout the application lifecycle. The platform also offers 24/7 support, uptime monitoring, performance metrics, and troubleshooting alerts to keep apps running smoothly. In contrast, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides a foundation for app development, but puts more responsibility on development teams to manage and maintain the complex infrastructure. This added workload can lead to higher overhead costs for SMBs in the form of dedicated DevOps staff. PaaS solutions like Heroku offer the perfect balance of control and convenience for SMBs, allowing developers to focus on their core strengths while the platform handles the underlying infrastructure and maintenance. Some notable examples of successful apps built on Heroku include Cambly, Steller, and Salesforce's Trailhead.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist In a picture perfect world you slay the lead generation dragon, send gripping emails that drive people through your buying cycle, and close business effortlessly. Wake up! These success stories are just the highlights of what it really takes to create the perfect drip campaign with an ROI that makes you the marketing hero slaying the empty pipeline dragon every day. Picture the perfect drip campaign - a surefire way to build a healthy sales pipeline. Your conversion rates are through the roof and your sales team can hardly close one deal before the next prospect is on the phone begging them to take their order. Drip campaigns are like email touchpoints that start relevant conversations with your best prospects at different stages of the customer journey. They automate the delivery of timely, relevant communications based on an individual's level of current and potential engagement with your emails. Well designed customer journeys touch leads at the proper time when predictive analytics show they will be the most effective. If you’re just getting started in digital marketing, it is crucial that you keep your journey and content paths simple. One journey shouldn’t be so generic as to capture every possible lead and push them to the finish line. Send the right message at the right time and close the deal when the prospect is ready rather than asking for the sale when they are still evaluating the product. Salesforce’s Pardot is capable of creating advanced drip campaigns based on a number of different criteria, but typically requires a high level of expertise to design, implement, and test. Summit Technologies LLC recommends communications between two and four emails long, reducing the margin for error found in more complex journeys. Split test the content and the engagement and then send the most engaged leads to more specific and targeted journeys based on progressive profiling. When it comes to campaign content, always tease your recipients leaving them wanting more information. Provide secondary CTAs (calls to action) for the eager learners. Otherwise the anticipation is created by advertising what content readers can expect in the coming weeks. Stay tuned next time when… Based on our years of marketing experience the professionals at Summit Technologies have proven that campaign journeys along best customer experiences have a huge impact on subscriber engagement, and create a connecting narrative to drip communications. Tell an inspiring story around a common thread throughout a series of emails and see how excited and loyal journey members stay while waiting to hear the next chapter and see what value others have gotten from your products and services. Your potential customers don’t want to be beaten over the head with your messages by a constant barrage of communications. Be sure that your drip campaign and your custom preference center provide recipients with the option to tell you how often they want to hear from you and what they want to hear about. Respect your subscribers, and make it simple for them to update their preferences. While unsubscribe links are obligatory, Pardot also gives the option of activating a public preference center within your drip campaigns, done simply through the inclusion of an email tag. Preference centers empower subscribers to manage and filter the types of emails they receive from your company, reducing their likelihood of opting out of all communications. Summit Technologies LLC will listen to your brand’s selling points. We help you craft and test the best content. Coupled with Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics Summit Technologies designs drip campaigns that hit prospects’ inboxes at the right time with the right message. We will guide you through designing prospect segments and preference center options that let everyone stay engaged with your brand wherever they are in the buying process. And as you fill your prospect database in Pardot we will help you segment out the less engaged leads and move them to slower communication campaigns so they don’t get burned out and unsubscribe. Understanding Pardot’s powerful communication abilities from the perspective of a user, vendor and strategic services partner, Summit Technologies LLC is in a unique position to offer best practice guidance based not only on our own success with the platform but our years of satisfied clients’ success as well. We will get your company up and running with our Pardot Quickstarts, create a picture perfect drip campaign, and coach you through lead generation, wargaming, and conversion. Put the power of Pardot and the experience of Summit Technologies LLC to work filling your pipeline.

Transformation is not an initiative to be started, completed and celebrated, but an ongoing mission to deliver new and relevant experiences, products, and services. Over and over again. In the sense and respond model, a key to the process is monitoring and observing how your innovative product or service is actually being used. Is it solving the opportunity originally identified? Is it creating a whole new set of problems? Is it meeting and exceeding the expectations of the customer and the company? This is critical for closing the value loop and understanding whether or not your solution delivered on its promise, and what enhancements are needed in the next release. The data gathered reinitiates the sense phase, producing an ongoing cycle of engaging with stakeholders in order to deliver value to them. McKinsey and company describes bringing an engaged stakeholder to the process as requiring two equally critical components: voice and value. The voice is the employee’s influence in the larger organization and to what extent are trusted, respected, and sought after for advice. A stakeholder with a strong voice is able to move transformative change to the goalpost. The value is the individual stakeholder’s role in capturing the value including revenue, operating margin, capital efficiency, customer engagement, etc. An engaged stakeholder’s value to the change and the organization is critical to see and quantify the rewards. This is a great time to employ both adoption dashboards in terms of the Salesforce tool and a field user community in terms of feedback. Your dashboards identify employees and departments who have and have not bought into your new Salesforce implementation. Your user community helps you understand why it is and why the result hasn’t been what you expected. Continuous growth and improvement depend on people bringing their best thinking to the table. But in order for employees to share their most candid ideas and feedback, the culture must encourage them to do so. Establish clear feedback channels Invite participation through inclusive problem-solving Talk openly about what did and did not work When communicating important information or changes, provide context Scale, measure, and grow is a little bit like wash, rinse and repeat. As the saying goes you can bathe once. But for maximum effectiveness we recommend doing so regularly. Implementing your innovative change and hoping for the best result likely won’t give you the results you are after. Plan how you will measure your digital transformation progress as you move from iteration to iteration. Ten important digital transformation key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to measure the business value of your innovation are: Return on Digital Investments Employee Productivity Adoption and Performance Metrics Customer Experience Metrics Percentage of AI Enabled Businesses Reliability and Availability Cost-Benefit Analysis Revenue from Digital Technology Percentage of Cloud Deployments Active Usage Metrics In the final installment in this series we will look at how you and Summit Technologies will assess the results and align your Salesforce resources for the next round of enhancements.