Elements.cloud Podcast

Sean Ouimette, Salesforce Practice Leader at Mastersolve, 20x Salesforce Certified and Center of Excellence expert, explains the benefits of having a COE. These include clarifying policy and strategy, improving creativity, and identifying organization bottlenecks. He talks about how a COE is a communication vehicle, and way to clarify process. Steps to creating a COE include getting buy-in, engaging all users, mapping applications to goals and analyzing effectiveness of technology architecture.

Jeff Susich, Salesforce Consultant and trainer, shares the lessons from completing over 200 Salesforce implementations. Key lessons for creating and maintaining an outstanding Org are 1. Get senior buy in 2. Don't over complicate it 3. Do great training 4. Ask users the right questions, such as "What do you want Salesforce to do for you?". He also gives great practical tips for Org design.

Matt Blocha, Salesforce Consultant and trainer, shares his vast experience of Salesforce implementations and consulting projects to recommend a range of best practices for creating your own outstanding org.

Best practices:

1. Documentation and config knowledge
2. Have well-qualified Admin/Org owner/Architect
3. Have a center of excellence
4. Have a steering committee for implementations
5. Ensure leadership buy-in
6. Delete things in Org that are unused
7. Do great training
8. Exploit the platform as much as possible. Put everything you can into Salesforce
9. Have consistent naming conventions
10. Use all possible Salesforce tools
11. Utilize a sandbox
12. Use expert consultants
13. Do great testing

Vernon Keenan, industry analyst and consultant, explains the need for layers of Devops and makes a case for paying rigorous attention to making changes to Salesforce Orgs. First, repositories for source code, then release management, developer platforms, pipeline orchestration, observability, the human element, application lifecycle management, and finally corporate management. With lots of concrete details and real-life examples, he lays out a best-practice framework for continuous improvement.

Part of the Elements Center of Excellence Roundtable, Ian Gotts (Elements CEO) and Allen Lovett (SVP North American Sales Lucid LLC) discuss how CRMs can best deliver ROI and efficiency, and deliver the right information to the right roles to enable the best decisions.

Adrian King, Elements Co-Founder, CTO & COO joins Elements Salesforce Admin Jack Lavous to bring to life the Elements on Elements case study, and why it's especially critical to get the Analysis phase of the Implementation Lifecycle right. Do the work now, or pay later. See featured case study here: https://elements.cloud/success/

Justin Donlon, VP of Process Innovation and Analytics at CarGurus, explains why DATA must be a first class citizen for implementation success. He names the three rights of passage for every Salesforce Admin or Consultant: integrating CPQ, consolidating Orgs, and transition to Lightning. He reflects on why these projects get derailed when data is not treated as a first class citizen. "Too often data is used to enable features and functionality. Rather, features and functions should create accurate, quality data"

Revolent Group is a cloud talent-creation agency focused on training great Salesforce Admins, Developers, and Consultants. They not only get people Salesforce jobs, they get people more Salesforce qualified. Laura Levy is VP of Strategic Accounts and Alliances, and Taylor Jones is VP of Customer Success.

Simon is Salesforce's EVP & Chief Innovation Officer. Previously he was Chief Marketing Officer. He joins Alyssa to talk about the challenges and opportunities in the all-digital environment.