Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • Salesforce Summer ‘ 20 Release Date + Preview Information

    As of 31st March, Salesforce Summer ’20 has been postponed due to COVID-19, please read this post carefully It might not be summer for us just yet, but Salesforce are heating things up by teasing us with their upcoming Summer ’20 release. As I’m sure… Read More
    The post Salesforce Summer ‘ 20 Release Date + Preview Information appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • 4 Reasons to Pursue a Career in Salesforce: Fun, Happiness, Success & Money

    If you had asked me 8 years ago what Salesforce was, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. Fast forward to today and I’ve lived and breathed Salesforce every year since then. To introduce myself, I’m Ben the founder of SalesforceBen.com. I’m just an… Read More
    The post 4 Reasons to Pursue a Career in Salesforce: Fun, Happiness, Success & Money appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • What Is ‘Apex CPU Time Limit Exceeded’ & How Do You Solve It?

    Have you ever received the message “Apex CPU time limit exceeded” after writing and testing some code? The first time I received this message I wondered what a CPU has to do with my code in the cloud?! After some research, I found out that… Read More
    The post What Is ‘Apex CPU Time Limit Exceeded’ & How Do You Solve It? appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • What Are Third-Party Lightning Components on the AppExchange?

    A Component is a section of your Salesforce user interface that serves a specific function. These are used as building blocks to customize Lightning pages or build apps on the Salesforce Platform (no coding or Developer required!) The way we develop and expand the applications… Read More
    The post What Are Third-Party Lightning Components on the AppExchange? appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • Tips and Tools for Managing Salesforce Data as a Team

    With teams working remotely, it can be more challenging than ever to work cross-functionally and have a unified approach to Salesforce data management. If you’re looking to improve and maintain Salesforce data quality, then we have something lined up for you! In this post, we… Read More
    The post Tips and Tools for Managing Salesforce Data as a Team appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • H is for Heroes and Other Leadership Lessons from Seth Godin

    During this time, I’ve been bringing together leaders who influence us all to share their wisdom in live conversations on LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow me on either platform to find out about my next live broadcast, join us, and ask your questions—we’ll answer them during the broadcast!

    I was honored to bring to you, our audience, a live conversation with the incredible Seth Godin, leadership guide for the ages, influential writer, and author of 19 books, for a candid conversation about what he’s seeing in the world at this time.
    He shared with us some key takeaways from his new ABC book for adults, V is for Vulnerable, which I loved. In addition, he answered questions from our live audience.
    Here are just a few of the takeaways from this conversation.

    1. Make a Generous Ruckus: Make Change Happen Together
    “What it means is that you are showing up in a way to make things better. And if you’re gonna make things better, it means you’re going to change things. If you’re going to change things, that’s going to make some people a little uncomfortable, because change—in addition to making things better—presents the chance that because they’re not going to be the same, it might not be exactly what you want it. So to make a generous ruckus means to show up with right intent on behalf of the people you seek to serve, but to make a change happen and go together.”

    To make a generous ruckus means to show up with right intent on behalf of the people you seek to serve, but to make a change happen and go together. – @ThisIsSethsBlog #leadershipbravery Click To Tweet

    2. Heroes Influence Us When They’re Not Even in the Room
    “You know, heroes and mentors are different. A lot of people wish they had a mentor, you’re not going to get a mentor. Mentoring doesn’t scale. Heroes. Heroes are people that can influence you when they’re not even in the room, when they’re not even on the call. They are models for us simply by the way they live their lives. And if you don’t have good heroes, it’s gonna be hard for you to decide what to do in those moments when your choices really matter.”
    3. Ask: How Do You Contribute?
    “One way to tell if you matter is if people would miss you if you didn’t show up tomorrow to do it again. Right? And the thing is, when hotels come back, the person at the front desk of the hotel is likely going to be replaced by something that looks like an automatic teller machine. Because the people who run the hotel chain will save money by doing that. The question is: will you miss the front desk person?
    Well, most hotel experiences the answer is no. Because they’ve been pushed to be cogs in a in a system get you in get you out as little interaction as possible. But there are definitely some front desk people I will miss because after a long flight and a long hassle and I get there, they’re glad to see me They’re doing emotional labor. They’re showing up as a human, even though it’s not in the playbook. They’re going out of their way to make me feel seen. And if you put an ATM in to take their place, I’ll switch to a different hotel. I agree.
    So the question is: what will you, as a contributor, do so that your job can’t be easily replaced? Because if you can be replaced by someone cheaper than you, or by a piece of software, you will be.”
    4. The Next Big Thing is Still the Privilege of Trust and Connection
    “Twenty years ago, I told people the next big thing was going to be email—that the ability to connect to people around the world with a click when they wanted to hear from you—was the next big thing. That is still the next big thing. It is going to be the next big thing for the foreseeable future. I am not worried about the things after that thing. First, earn the privilege of trust and connection and use it to make things better. That’s the next big thing.”
    Watch the replay above, and be sure to subscribe to my podcast—we’ll be making this interview available as an upcoming episode. Want to join me for my upcoming live conversations? 
    For more episodes of the Daily Dose of OPTIMISM!, subscribe to my blog below or follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
    The post H is for Heroes and Other Leadership Lessons from Seth Godin appeared first on Customer Bliss.

  • We Are Sunsetting Reply, Here’s Everything You Need to Know

    In 2015, we made Buffer’s most significant acquisition and acquired Respondly, which became Reply, our solution to help businesses deliver fast and responsive customer support on social media.
    We originally acquired it intending to diversify Buffer’s core product offerings. While it served that purpose, it has become clear over time that Reply is better suited for larger organizations and is not the best product for Buffer’s core customer base, small businesses.
    For that reason, that we are sunsetting Reply as of June 1st, 2020.
    Our decision to sunset Reply is enabling us to build out a dedicated social media engagement solution, which will eventually be available to all Buffer customers.
    Continue reading for more information on why we made this decision, what we’re building next, and what this means for the future of Buffer.
    Why we’re sunsetting Reply
    At its core, Reply is a very different product from anything else we offer at Buffer. Reply has always been a customer support tool while Buffer focuses on helping small businesses build their brands and grow their businesses on social media.
    When we acquired Reply, we were doing our best to anticipate how the market would shift. Twitter was building out customer service features and there was this idea that customer service could shift onto social media in a big way. We were also uniquely using social media as a customer service platform to grow our own brand and saw an opportunity to enable others to do this.
    While Twitter is still used by some brands and consumers for customer service, the idea has remained niche, more an exception than the rule. We don’t believe customer service did shift to social media in the way we had thought, which is one of the reasons we’ve come to this decision.
    Another thing we’ve come to realize is that small businesses don’t use social media for customer support in the same way as larger organizations. With scale, comes a whole new set of problems, which aren’t felt by small businesses. We felt these pains ourselves, as we uniquely have high social volume as a small company. The result was that while most Buffer customers overall are small businesses, most of our Reply customers have been larger organizations.
    This led to several obstacles when building and growing Reply over the years.
    Often the people using Reply were very different from those using our other Buffer solutions. They usually weren’t even in the same department at a given company. This difference meant connecting core product loops, like answering support tickets on social media and creating new social campaigns, even more challenging.
    Another obstacle was that the strategy that helped us grow Buffer, and the strengths and skillset of our team, are different than what was needed to grow Reply. We’re a product and marketing-led organization rather than a sales-led one. Our most successful times growing Reply were also the times that our Product Manager on that team was leaning into sales and more direct customer onboarding. We’re a team of 89 people at Buffer, and we don’t have the resources to run two very different strategies.
    Our team size also impacted the product experience for our customers. We have been slow to fix issues and add new features, and we saw how this negatively affected our customer’s team’s operations. Reply is that a high-quality customer support tool requires more than our team can provide, and our customers deserve better than that.
    Ultimately, continuing to build and support Reply is not the way for us to have the most impact for our customers in the long term. This was a tough decision to make but we feel it’ll be best for both Buffer and our customers down the line. I’m grateful for all of the people within Buffer who had these conversations, as well as the incredible folks who have been Reply customers over the years.
    What we’re building next
    Reply hasn’t been a good fit for the majority of Buffer customers. To make this more tangible, we had only 500 customers using Reply, while we have over 70,000 paying customers using Buffer. As we look ahead from here, we’re focused on building something that will be both valuable to, and available for, a much larger percentage of our customers.
    Through research, we’ve come to the clarity that what our small business customers need is a dedicated social media engagement solution. That’s what our team is now focused on building as we gradually sunset Reply.
    This new social media engagement solution will aim to better connect our customers to their communities on social media. We’ll be starting by supporting Instagram and surfacing all Instagram comments in one place, and we’re looking to expand to support more social networks from there.
    While Reply was only available to customers who individually signed up for it, this social media engagement solution will become available and accessible to all Buffer customers in the future. We feel we can help a lot more people by making this engagement solution widely available from the outset and this is a strategy we will be expanding across the rest of our offering at Buffer in the future as well.
    While this has been a tough call to make, we’re excited to be re-focusing and fully committing to small businesses. We’re looking forward to taking this new approach, adding a huge amount of value, and ensuring the majority of these improvements are accessible by all customers.

    If you’ve been a Reply customer I want to thank you for having been on this journey with us.
    If you are looking for a tool to replace Reply, we’ve partnered with the social support tools below and they have created offers to make a move more manageable. We’ve been in touch with all Reply customers to pass along these offers.

    Sparkcentral — Sparkcentral enables social engagement teams to deliver frictionless customer service on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, making digital engagement with your brand memorable

    Zoho Desk — is an award-winning context-aware customer service software that helps support teams deliver timely help to their customers across channels like email, phone, chat, social media, and more

    Zendesk — Allows your business to have natural conversations with your customers, without letting them feel what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s sophisticated enough to meet complex needs and simple enough to let you get up and running immediately.

    If you have media inquiries related to this post, please reach out to Hailley at press@buffer.com.

  • Most Wanted Salesforce Features – Full Salesforce Roadmap

    You may have heard about the Salesforce IdeaExchange? It’s the platform that allows the Salesforce community to directly upvote which features they want to see as part of the Salesforce product. Involving customers in influencing the product roadmap has been a core belief of Salesforce’s… Read More
    The post Most Wanted Salesforce Features – Full Salesforce Roadmap appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • CPQ Specialist Certification Guide & Tips

    Mid-level 6-12 months No Prerequisites 200 Table of Contents Certification Introduction For specialists working the full project lifecycle of CPQ implementations. Prove you can design, build and implement CPQ functionality. The Salesforce CPQ Specialist Certification came about a few years ago after Salesforce acquired Steelbrick… Read More
    The post CPQ Specialist Certification Guide & Tips appeared first on Salesforce Ben.

  • Salesforce Backup and Recovery Is Critical to Maintaining Business Continuity During Uncertain Times

    Last Updated on June 23, 2020 by Rakesh Gupta Across the globe, organizations of all shapes and sizes are faced with unprecedented challenges. The current situation has caused us all to react quickly and decisively…from mandating work-from-home policies and restricting … Continue reading →