Insights
When you’re starting a business, whether it’s large or small, preparing your team for success is a daunting task. With the amount of SaaS tools on the market, it’s easy to get inundated by offers and promises of “immediate success” and “best in class” but really this just leads to a fractured tech stack, confused employees and a wasteful subscription bill in the thousands each month.
That’s why at Relay we turned to Notion very quickly to serve as our main hub for everything. When I say everything, I really mean everything. HR, IT, Project Management, Development, Design, Marketing and Business Operations all live and breath within Notion. Instead of hopping from application to application, we can now have one source of truth for all our current projects that everyone can reference.
So what is Notion? Think of Notion as Excel, but if it was designed in 2020 instead of 1985. Even then that might be selling it short. At the heart of Notion, it’s really a Wiki. All your notes, documents and designs can all live in Notion and it can be as standard as a word processor. But if you think of Notion more as a workspace instead of an application, that’s where the power comes in. Product Roadmap? Task List? Design Repository? Content Calendar? That can all be built in Notion. It’s as powerful as your imagination.
At Relay, creating custom Salesforce applications takes focus and streamlined communication. That’s exactly what we focused on when building out our Notion workspace.
Each “page” is a different department. This is work in 2021. No longer do you have to walk over to each department to ask a question. It’s all there in one space. For new employees, this makes onboarding simple as can. All the information they could need is at their fingertips in one place without hopping applications wondering how to do something. Efficiency is paramount to our projects and to our success.
What gives us confidence that Notion is here to stay is their robust community. Whether it’s the bustling hubs of Gumroad or aNotioneer or even the Notion official template gallery, finding a template that will fit your company's needs could not be easier. This will save you hours of build time, and could even save you lots of money over monthly subscription fees. That’s how we replaced Jira with aNotioneer’s Jira replacement or replaced Confluence with NuttLab’s fantastic Project Management Template. Thousands of dollars a year saved by migrating our processes to Notion.
At Relay, we build Salesforce solutions that just work. Solutions that save you and your company time, money and wasted effort over the course of months or years. That’s exactly what Notion did for us. If you’re looking to organize the chaos of your small business, look towards Notion and never look back.
Labor First has been providing customized health benefit solutions for the retiree market for over 15 years.
With the help of Sales Cloud, Community Cloud, and the AppExchange, the company has achieved 100% customer retention while growing into the largest privately owned healthcare exchange for the multi-employer marketplace.
“There was a bursting need for someone to come into the senior market and not only help structure healthcare solutions for them but also advocate on their behalf for the rest of their lives, so they could really make the most of the retirement experience” - John Dulczak, Chairman & CEO.
From prospecting, generating carrier quotes, benefit comparisons, and enrollments, everything is done on the Salesforce platform. When they chose to move their paper based member enrollment process online, they chose Relay to make sure the initiative was successful.
The new healthcare exchange and enrollment solution was design for Salesforce Community Cloud and integrated with their existing Salesforce solutions to provide a 360-degree view of their members.
The new Community helped them deliver personalized experiences to their customers in a secure and mobile-ready application. Plan participants can quickly log in with their information already preloaded, thanks to the Customer 360 approach. They can select from eligible plan offerings that are tailored for each organization and member according to their location, demographics, and plan options.
Participants can get instant rate quotes, compare plans side by side, and set up automatic premium payments. With Service Cloud, dedicated advocates are available to connect with members for one-on-one help in completing the process.
“We had no idea we could build something like this with Community Cloud. Earlier estimates to build a solution from scatch exceeded a million dollars. Relay design the community solution for a fraction of the cost and we were up and running in 3 months.” - David Zawrotny, COO
The Notion API is finally here
It's a long time coming, but the Notion API is finally available for public beta — ready to expand the Notion ecosystem in a big way. The implications for its use and how it can interact with other applications could be absolutely game-changing for many companies.
If you missed our previous post on Notion, consider it to be the all-in-one database manager that can do pretty much anything and everything. Asset lists, company wikis, spreadsheets, client portals and way, way more. The introduction of the public API expands the capabilities of Notion even further than that.
What can you do with the new API?
An API allows developers to make two applications talk to each other and essentially share data across platforms. With them, you can automate processes between systems or augment them with new capabilities.
The possibilities are endless, but due to the blank slate database structure of Notion it allows for real creative solutions for common issues.
Since we're intensely focused on Salesforce at Relay, we decided to hone our attention towards the use cases for the Notion API and Salesforce.
Use Case for the Notion API and Salesforce
- Sync contact records from Salesforce into a Notion table
- Import closed deals into a Notion kanban table
- Sync tasks from Notion tables into Salesforce
No longer do you have to manually update both Salesforce and Notion separately to keep both tools in sync as now it will update automatically for you through the API. This removes hours of tedious updating, and more importantly ensures that there is a single source of truth for all your data, whether in Notion or Salesforce.
Notion API + Salesforce Showcase
Limitations of the Notion API
Right now the Notion API is still in public beta which means it can do a lot, but there is a still a bunch of stuff it can not do—yet.
As of today, you need to create a "bot" for the Notion API to interact with and then subsequently invite the bot into the database you want it to modify. It's a bit ad-hoc and doesn't allow you to interact with, say, multiple databases at the same time or perform modifications to top level pages. Right now, it's strictly limited to database updating which is great, but there is definite room for growth.
Next Steps
As you can see, the Notion API opens up the possibilities for applications small and large to communicate with Notion. But at Relay, we are ecstatic about the future between Salesforce and Notion. Both platforms are making their mark in small businesses across the world and now that Notion can communicate with Salesforce, the growth potential is limitless.
Are you interested in using the Notion API with your Salesforce org? Feel free to reach out to us here, and we will be glad to get you started right away.
How a Squarespace & Salesforce Integration Benefits Your Website
Squarespace and Salesforce, when paired together, have the opportunity to accelerate your site to new heights. In this post, we’ll be discussing how we at Relay have the ability to help seamlessly integrate Squarespace into your Salesforce campaigns so you have less to worry about when running your business and more time to focus on your goals and objectives at hand. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions when reading this post by contacting us here and we’ll be happy to help!
You’re Missing Out if You’re Not Integrating Squarespace into Your Salesforce Campaigns
Salesforce is such a powerful CRM and many users do not realize the full extent of its capabilities until they’re given the opportunity to truly see what it's all about. If you own and operate your business through Squarespace, you’re potentially leaving lots of revenue on the table for your competitors when not incorporating Squarespace into your daily Salesforce workflow and amongst your team. The custom Squarespace integration into your Salesforce campaigns we offer is beginning to trend and develop as more and more users catch on, yet you’ll want to be at the beginning of trends, right? Right! Continue reading to explore how we at Relay can provide you with said customized, full service integration of Squarespace into your Salesforce campaigns.
How Salesforce Helps Your ECommerce Site Succeed
Any successful ecommerce site has many, many moving parts. With all of these moving parts, there are many areas which have the possibility of being unintentionally ignored or overlooked. Through a custom, direct Squarespace integration into your Salesforce campaigns with your ecommerce site, you’ll be able to manage all of the moving parts, and then some. No longer will you be missing orders, having difficulties communicating with the warehouse, or even forgoing large orders due to not promoting a special deal you have running at the moment. Our custom Salesforce integration method here at Relay allows you to fully manage the entirety of your organization through key components derived from our unique processes and implementations. Through our certified Salesforce team and many years of experience, we’ve been able to help businesses just like yours achieve great things without having to sacrifice the integrity of your internal systems.
The Benefits of Integrating Your Squarespace Ecommerce Site with Salesforce
As mentioned above, the benefits are plentiful when it comes to integrating your ecommerce site with the power of Salesforce’s CRM. We know your business model is unique, and with this in mind, our customized approach to integrating Squarespace into your Salesforce campaigns will surpass the standard protocols typically enabled amongst other providers. Below are some of the customized approaches we take with each and every client, while at the same time modifying and pivoting our approach to best enable you to have a thriving platform built for success.
AI-Driven Personalized Shopping Experiences
Whether it’s an integrated chatbot, an automated A/B variant test based on user demographics, or real-time adjusted geo-IP targeting; all of these AI-driven personalizations are the foundational building blocks of what you can expect when working with us at Relay. We enjoy helping you realize your true potential as a company, and with the ever developing mechanisms we’re able to produce via our AI directives; you’ll come to discover there’s simply so much more you can do to accelerate the growth of your company.
Continuous Rollouts Without Delays
Squarespace’s integration within Salesforce makes it easy to roll out new updates to your campaigns, directly from the native dashboard. No longer must you tweak campaigns in multiple areas to complete one task. With our fully focused integration methodology embedded within your Squarespace site and Salesforce dashboard, you can have full control over everything within one facet of your entire campaign.
Announce New Promotions in Minutes
Do you have excess inventory which needs to be moved quickly? If so, our integrations help you promote those products which must go now, in mere minutes instead of days. Through our development process, your Squarespace site is able to launch new promotions, products, announcements, etc… all within a few clicks and be well on your way to seeing the results you readily anticipate.
Blend the Digital Store Environment with Your Physical Store Environment
Oftentimes, there’s a huge disconnect between your digital storefront and your physical storefront. Everything from mislabeled SKUs, to incorrect inventory counts, to basic miscommunication can cause rifts in your efficient systems. With our custom approach, no product catalog is too big or too small to be successfully integrated into the custom Salesforce application(s) we develop. With this in mind, the sky is truly the limit and once the initial foundation is built, human errors amongst your team will most likely be reduced to nil.
Streamline Additional Business Operations & Elements in a Scalable Fashion
They say “a rolling stone gathers no moss”. This statement greatly applies to how once you’re rolling towards success, you’ll continue to keep rolling towards additional, future success through streamlined and scalable processes without any extra fluff along the way. Once you reach a certain level of steady growth through our customized integrations, you’ll want to continue said growth via scalability. There’s no better platform to do so (in our opinion) than Salesforce. The customized tools available at your disposal, when properly integrated into your Squarespace site, will allow your business to flourish and grow beyond your original expectations.
Increase Efficiency & Effectiveness with Automated Tasks
Centralized site management and automated tasks can take a lot of the leg work out of the picture and have your Squarespace site operating at peak efficiency. The initial grunt work, performed by us of course, lays the groundwork for unmatched workflows. Automated tasks can be the difference between making the sale and losing the sale. So why not try having us incorporate them into your business model via Salesforce and see how they perform?
Internationalize Your Salesforce Campaigns with Ease
If you’re planning on reaching the global population you may have found previous efforts to be difficult and burdensome. With our custom Squarespace integration into your Salesforce campaigns, internationalization of your business becomes that much easier. No longer must you calculate time zones with custom messaging approaches, apply trending products to certain locales, or manually toggle between different sub-dialects of a national language. With our customized approach, this is all taken care of for you and your business from day one of launching.
Choosing Relay for Your Squarespace & Salesforce Integration
Now you’ve learned what we can offer here at Relay. Feel free to contact us using the form below and we’ll be sure to respond to your inquiry as soon as possible. We look forward to learning more about your business, your projects, your goals, and explaining how our custom Salesforce integrations will allow your Squarespace business to reach new heights and become a pioneer in the digital age.
Sales forecasting is an essential part of any business, yet it can be challenging to create meaningful forecasts. In this blog post, we will discuss a simple method for creating sales forecasts using Monte Carlo simulations. This approach relies on limited data and produces statistically meaningful forecasts with just a couple of clicks. With Monte Carlo simulations, you can model complex scenarios and get a better understanding of the range of possible outcomes and their probabilities.
A sales rep's pipeline includes every open opportunity that they are working on. In most CRM's, like Salesforce, an opportunity has 3 main data points that are used for sales forecasting: amount, close date, and stage. The opportunity stage is often associated with a win probability such that deals that are early in the sales cycle have a lower probability of closing vs those towards the end, which have a higher probability of being won. In other words, opportunity stage forecasting assumes that deals have a different likelihood of success at different sales cycle stages.
For example, if you know that you typically win about three-quarters of deals that enter the 'Negotiation' stage, you can predict that you have a 75% shot for all the deals in that stage. An expected revenue forecast will use this probability to determine an aggregate forecast amount across your pipeline.
Calculating an expected revenue forecast requires very little math:
- For each open opportunity in your quarter, multiply the amount by the stage probability.
- Sum each of the amount/probability products for each opportunity
- Add in the amount of any closed won opportunities
This method is straightforward but creates a sales forecast that is a single-point estimate. In other words, it only gives you a single number and does not take into account the range of possible outcomes. They also often produce forecasts that would not be possible. A deal can either be won or lost; there is never an outcome where your deal can close at 75% of the opportunity amount.
One common scenario that distorts expected revenue forecasts is when your pipeline has opportunities with drastically different amounts. So-called whales, or very large opportunities compared to the rest of your pipeline, can often drive an expected forecast number that would not be possible if those opportunities did not close on time. If 20 of your deals in the pipeline are around $10K each and 6 opportunities are $50K, just 1 or 2 of the bigger deals can easily sway the revenue for the quarter if they don't close on time. Visualizing the impact that each opportunity can have on the pipeline can be a time-consuming effort if done manually.
This is where Monte Carlo simulations come in. Monte Carlo simulations can be used to generate a distribution of possible revenue outcomes and their probabilities instead of a point estimate. It helps us visualize the possibilities across the pipeline and make more informed decisions.
Sales forecasting with Monte Carlo simulations is straightforward. A good monte Carlo simulation will run thousands of trials and randomly adjust variables in a model to determine the probabilities of each outcome. The outcome of each simulation is placed on a histogram, which allows us to visualize the most probable outcomes.
For example, in a pipeline with 20 opportunities slated to close this quarter, we might run 20,000 simulations where in each trial we randomly adjust 15% of our pipeline to close up to 30 days later than we currently expect. Each trial produces a new revenue forecast which is placed on the histogram. The more simulations that produce a similar outcome (forecast range), the more probable it is to happen. At the end of the simulation, we can visually see how probable each forecast is for our given scenario.
Of course, adjusting the simulation settings will produce different results, but in all cases, the insights produced by a Monte Carlo simulation will far outweigh the point estimates produced by an expected revenue forecast. You could choose to run a simulation that only adjusts a small portion of the opportunities in your pipeline, or one that adjusts all open opportunities. Simulations could be even more nuanced by focusing on opportunities with close dates near the end of the month, which are often the most likely to carry over into the next quarter or reporting period.
If you're already using Salesforce and are interested in trying out this approach to generate your sales forecasts, we've developed a simple app called Confidence, which can help you run thousands of simulations on your sales pipeline in just a couple of clicks. You could be generating sales forecast simulations in just a matter of minutes. Take a look at our walkthrough of Confidence below and sign up for free here.
Salesforce Communities are quickly becoming one of the most requested products for our clients. Price points on Community Cloud licenses have been steady coming down and its become a very viable solution for non-profits, who receive deeply discounted licensing.
Recently I've been working on a community based counselor portal solution, that will allow counselors from different nonprofits manage their cases in Salesforce. As we were exploring licensing solutions, we needed to implement some sort of role hierarchy, where cases and records are visible to counselors within the same nonprofit, and nonprofit groups could see data across the board. I knew that Community licenses don't offer role hierarchies, but Community Plus licenses do. I wanted to be able to test this out, so I spun up a partner org in order to investigate.
Elusive Community Roles Configuration
Communities can support up to 3 customer roles. You can configure the number of roles by going to SETUP -> Feature Settings -> Communities -> Communities Settings -> Community Role and User Settings | Number of Customer Roles.
Setting the number of customer roles is an org wide setting, which will impact all communities you have in that org. Once you have set the number of customer roles that communities can have you'd likely head over to the Roles Setup Page to define those roles, but you'd be heading in the wrong direction. Queue the frustration.
After a lot of searching, I found that you don't have much control over the Customer Roles or its hierarchy. When you enable a customer for community access, and a user is created, Salesforce will automatically create up to three roles for the given contact's account: Executive Role, Manager Role, User Role.
For example, if you've configured your org to have 3 Customer Roles, then a contact, or more formally the community user, under Acme Account can have an "Acme Customer Executive", "Acme Customer Manager", or "Acme Customer User" role. When you create the user for the first time, it will auto assign the lowest level Role - the Customer User role. During the user creation process you will not see the Role field at all; its only visible once the user has been created. Once the record has been saved, you can click on the customer user Role Name, to see the newly created Role Hierarchy. This view of the hierarchy is only available through this navigation and Community Roles are not visible in the main Roles Setup Page.
Community Customer Roles Limitations
Here's the summary of the limitations for Customer Roles, so far:
- Customer Roles are limited to a max of 3.
- You can't edit the names of the 3 roles (Executive, Manager, User)
- When enabling a customer user from the contact screen, they are assigned the lowest role on user creation. You can then edit them accordingly.
- The roles are account specific but you can't really change the way that each role behaves.
- You must visit a user and click on their role to see the Role setup page for that role, though there is nothign to configure in them.
Next up, I'll be playing with the sharing settings to explore any limitations that Customer Roles might have .
It’s that time of the year again! Last year we counted down the five features of Salesforce that we are thankful for and this year we’re back with five new features we appreciate day in and day out. Salesforce is always adding new features to enhance the customer experience, whether it’s very large such as Salesforce Genie or a tweak along the margins such as adding dynamic actions to show custom flow action buttons in the highlights panel rather than the feed panel. We’re always surprised by what Salesforce will add and this year has been no exception. Let's take a look at Relay's favorite additions of 2022.
Redesigned AppExchange Website
We’ve all been staring at the same AppExchange website for years now and while it’s been very serviceable, a lot has changed since the last time it was given an overhaul. With a new streamlined, sleek interface, you’re now able to find apps quicker using advanced filtering and sorting. In addition, all page loading has been made much faster and you’re able to hop around the website with ease instead of waiting for pages to load. The app pages have been given an overhaul as well allowing you to get relevant information at a glance along with the ability to filter reviews by reviewer badge ranking. We’re big fans and we’re actually looking forward to spending more time on the AppExchange website.
Data Table Beta Arrives!
It’s been a long requested feature, but it’s finally here - Data Tables. The Datatable component has been a very popular Lightning Web Component for a while, allowing developers to add a configurable, sortable datatable on a flow screen. It’s officially here and the integration is just as we hoped. Flows can now have a beautiful table of record data and users can select and view the exact information they want to continue with the flow. We’re very excited to give this new component a lot of heavy usage.
Record Type Filtering for Picklists
Another addition we’re thrilled to see is record type filtering for picklists in Dynamic Forms for Flow. Now when a user selects a value from a picklist in Flow, the following categories will be relevant to that picklist value. This is going to be huge for case creations and allow for much more pointed data when created.
PopUps
One of our absolute favorite AppExchange apps of 2022 and for good reason. Without any code, users can add Flow, Modal, or Toast pop-up message to any Lightning or Community page. Whether you want to add validation to your record creation, or simply create a on-boarding wizard for new customers, PopUps will allow you to do just that. Best part of it all, it’s absolutely free.
Dynamic Gauge Charts
This is a small one, but in our eyes one that is super useful for dashboard creators. The top voted customer idea of the Winter ‘22 release, with 14,000 votes was dynamic gauge charts. This allows teams to view and measure their goals and KPIs on a real-time gauge that changes dynamically over time instead of remaining fixed with a specific number. Your business changes rapidly, so instead of having to update your gauges on ALL your charts each time conditions shift, dynamic gauges will adjust for you.
2022 was a feature packed year for Salesforce, with the acquisition of Slack coming into full focus with Slack-First Customer 360, Slack Canvas and of course the possible revolution of Salesforce Genie. It was hard to narrow it down to just five, but to be honest, we might need to expand next year’s list to ten as we anticipate a very busy 2023 for Salesforce.
We're pleased to announce that SalesPath+ is now available for install on the Salesforce AppExchange. Developed in conjunction with Advanced Sales AI, SalesPath+ enables sales management to deploy its sales best practices across the entire sales organization and enforce desired sales cadence. This includes customizable sales paths, real-time predictive reporting and forecasting to revolutionize your sales team.
One of the biggest challenges for any sales team is enforcing best practice, and correcting bad habits. Through a simple drag-and-drop interface, SalesPath+ allows for Executive Management teams and Revenue Operations teams to create and deploy real-time SalesPaths for any use case, sales type, vertical segment or geographic segment. This includes task management, milestone checkpoints and interactive reporting so sales management can gain clear visibility into their entire sales funnel.
We also know that accurate forecasting and reporting is sore spot for many sales management teams. SalesPath+ proactively forecasts close dates based on known sales cycle durations to provide best-in-class reporting. Easily report on win loss by sales path, team, and sales person. Identify where deals go wrong and average sales cycle times by stages, opportunity type, and size.
If you find that your sales team is often in turmoil and losing competitive positioning, SalesPath+ is exactly the solution to control that chaos. Stop the "End of Quarter Rush", improve sales wins and install SalesPath+ today.
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