Tag: Salesforce

Digital Adoption:
How do you know when users have fully adopted your Salesforce system?
You’re probably aware of the adage: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and measuring Digital Adoption on your Salesforce system is somewhat difficult.
Without good Digital Adoption, you’re unlikely to achieve the full ROI on your investments in Digital Applications.
One approach is to run surveys, but these are often subjective; you could measure outcomes, but this doesn’t tell the story of how the results were achieved; you could measure errors but typically, not all errors are reported.
The fact is that these are areas that should be measured anyway.
Smart organisations use automated systems to monitor and analyse critical application paths of users. Only then can we obtain a true picture of:
- Timings – the median and outlier timings for the path, tasks and process
- Abandonment rates – how many users get so far and then abandon the task
- Loop-backs – how many users re-input data into fields in order to complete the path or process
Running the monitor and analysis on many hundreds or thousands of individual tasks and processes allows you to gain the perfect picture of how users are engaged in the application. Only then can you set KPIs and SLAs at realistic levels.
If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch for a conversation on how Performa IT can help your Salesforce users to fully adopt their systems.
John Stinchcombe
Senior Business Development Director

Tel: +44 0117 230 2390
Web: http://performa-staging.co.uk/
04/10/2022
Lightning Experience Pages
Users can often experience issues with Lightning experience pages load times. Within this article we explain how Salesforce® Lightning pages work and issues affecting these pages.
Within Salesforce® Classic, web pages are generated via the Salesforce Instance and then displayed on a user’s desktop or mobile device.
Salesforce® Lightning pages work in a different way, they are loaded component by component. These components can contain subcomponents adding to the complexity of measurement of finished load times.
Lightning pages are sensitive to a user’s browser or device. It is important to ensure that a user’s browser is kept up to date, unused browser plugins or extensions are disabled and supported browsers for Salesforce Lightning are used – click here for further information, or contact us for help.
Complex Lightning pages with a large volume of custom fields, components, visual force pages and customisations can adversely affect EPT – Experience Page Time.
Other factors impacting Lightning pages include devices that don’t have sufficient processing power, memory and resources.
Salesforce Administrators/Developers have a number of tools at their disposal to measure the efficiency of Lightning Pages:
1. Lightning Usage App which can be obtained via the App Launcher in Salesforce
Further information can be found here.
1. Use of The Salesforce Lightning Inspector, a Google Chrome DevTools extension. This is a deep dive inspection app providing information to understand sequence events and firing link here Salesforce Lightning Inspector Chrome Extension
1. Further Salesforce tools which have been extended to mobile pages in the Spring 22 release, are the performance guide for lightning pages viewable in page setup.
Salesforce recommends the following best practices for configuring Lightning Pages, to name a few:
- Reduce large number of fields and custom components
- Complex page configurations
- Heavy impact related lists with multiple object relationships
- Optimisation of visual force pages
For more information click onto the Trailhead Badge – Lightning Experience Performance
Or Salesforce Help – click here
If you are suffering with performance issues and page load times on your Salesforce® instance please drop us a line, we are happy to discuss how our talented development team can solve your problems and give your performance a tune up!
Source: Salesforce
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29/04/2022
Back up your Salesforce© CRM with Performa
We believe that people do things for the best of intentions and let’s be honest mistakes do happen from time to time. This could be in the form of a user carrying out a mass update or changing a simple Salesforce© picklist value which has a knock on effect throughout the system. To get data or the original configuration to its prior state could be a potential nightmare if you haven’t got the right processes in place.
Here at Performa IT we strongly recommend having a backup strategy in place, this drastically reduces risk and also wins you brownie points with your Quality & IT managers, what could be better than that!
There are two forms of backup for a Salesforce system, namely:
Metadata is the nuts and bolts of Salesforce e.g. Apex code, page layouts, assignment rules, approval processes.
Data, this is the records that are held in Salesforce e.g. Accounts, Contacts, Leads and the very important Opportunities.
There are a number of options to carry out backups, for example;
Salesforce Data Export
Extracting data via Dataloader I/O
Downloading reports from Salesforce
Or an Appexchange product
All of which have their advantages and disadvantages.
Here are some questions below to give you a flavour of what you need to consider!
- What is the cost in time and money to your organisation if you had to reinstall that data?
- Is taking a weekly or monthly backup sufficient?
- What is your retention period for keeping data?
- How would you comply with a right to be forgotten request?
- How would you know if a downloaded report or extract has become corrupted?
As a Registered Salesforce Partner we have a number of options to suit your organisation and budget. If you would like to find out more please contact us today, our team will be happy to assist you.
Please take note, not having an adequate backup process in place could prove to be incredibly costly, it is your responsibility.
07/12/2021
Process Efficiency – 5 Critical Elements to Consider
Do you glaze over when conversations turn to improving efficiency? Do you even know what efficiency really means in the context of business processes?
Organisations know that employee efficiency is one the solutions to productivity and ultimately, this is the reason behind significant investments in applications software.
In theory, deploying a contemporary software solution like Salesforce® along with sufficient, appropriate user training should result in an outcome where employee productivity is increased.
So far so good. Where can and where does this go wrong?
1. The Requirement-Solution Gap. Although many organisations believe that a one-size-fits-all application will deliver efficiency, this isn’t always the case. Efficiency will depend on the “fit” of the application software solution with an organisation’s specific and often unique process requirements. SaaS applications can be more closely aligned to requirements using configuration and customisation. But there will always be gaps that need to be bridged by user’s awareness and ability to manage these mismatches.
1. Organisational readiness. Some organisations operate more dynamic markets, others may have significant changes imposed on them as a result of changing external market forces or through being acquired. Other organisations slowly evolve their processes over time. This conditioning to change, influences the readiness of the organisation and their experience of managing a roll out of a new system.
1. Employee’s ability to change. There are many reasons why this can be a problem. Some users are simply reluctant to change, others find training sub-optimal for their style of learning and others underestimate the level of commitment needed to adopt new applications software.
1. Broken Processes. Some business processes are so poor, they can be described as broken. Employees are obliged to keep these processes working through their innate knowledge, often ignoring policy and making compromises. Generally, these situations are unsustainable and are disastrous from an efficiency perspective.
1. Continuous monitoring and improvement. Improving efficiency must be viewed as continuous project as business processes are influenced by external factors that force changes over time. It’s important that frequently executed processes and their associated paths through application software are continuously and systematically monitored. An adage applies, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. As well as the all-important baseline, real-world measurement for a task, continuous monitoring reveals unforeseen bottlenecks, outliers and exceptions.
What’s the solution?
- Understand all nuances in the target processes and identify gaps between these and the standard software solution. Formally select configuration options, develop customisations and agree any process changes that may be needed to make a good fit.
- Mitigate any shortfall in the organisation’s readiness. In addition to experience and expertise in managing change and delivering solutions, it’s vital to understand and quantify their commitment to the success of the new application. Stakeholder roles such as Program Manager, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Learning and Development as well as Employee Engagement have critical inputs and goals that must be aligned.
- Employees and Change. Work with Learning & Development groups to ensure that training, help and guidance needs are addressed comprehensively. Traditional up-front training should be supplemented with on-demand training “snippets”, and these can and should be accessible from within the target application. Relevant extracts from Standard Operating Procedure manuals should also be incorporated into the on-demand help and guidance set. Any areas of UI ambiguity should be eradicated by deploying context sensitive help and guidance. Finally, if tasks can be automated then do it. Employee’s motivation, energy and morale is sapped if obvious short-cuts can be automated by the application software.
- Broken Processes. A simple rule applies here: don’t proceed until there’s a plan to fix broken processes. New applications cannot be delivered onto inadequate foundations. Once processes are fixed or created from scratch, these can be mapped into the application’s capabilities in the same way as other processes.
Contemporary SaaS solutions include extensive configuration and customisation options which deliver however there are often aspects that may need additional attention.
Specifically, standard help and guidance typically cover the standard application. Data verification and workflow are key areas that can make a huge impact.
Deploying Software Adoption solutions such as Apty can complement customisation and configuration strategies and shorten implementation times. Apty supports a broader range of help and guidance deliverables as well as “deep-dive” Application Usage Analysis that can help you baseline the time and steps required to perform specific tasks and processes. Once these are established, Apty includes a range of solutions to address any issues and supports a continuous improvement approach.
In short, good Software Adoption is critical to Process Efficiency and Employee productivity. Although it’s often overlooked, accelerating applications adoption and user proficiency is one of the keys to successful projects.
Performa IT are experts in delivering Digital Transformation solutions built on Salesforce. Our solutions are predicated on user efficiency and productivity improvements. Contact us to discuss how we can help your business processes to become more efficient and help make your employees more productive.
Contact us
29/11/2021
How to add Lightning Login to your Salesforce Account
After the winter 17 Salesforce release Salesforce introduced Lightning Login, which works in both classic and lightning for Salesforce. Lightning Login saves time, is easy for users and increases security – a win win!
With Lightning Login after you open the Salesforce URL login page, a user will click/enter their username and then tap to approve from their mobile device.
Lightning login must be activated within the Session Setup in Salesforce and Administrators can control who has access by checking the box ‘Allow only for users with the Lightning Login User Permission .
Once this has been completed in Setup then Administrators can hand over to users to work through the following instructions:-
Instructions on how to add Lightning Login
1. Before starting this process install the Salesforce authenticator app on your phone via the app store.
2. Login to Salesforce on your computer
3. Navigate to your personal settings
4. Click on Advanced user details
5. Scroll down the page to Lightning login and click Enroll.
1. Once the Enroll button has been clicked the enroll process will start, click on the button ‘Register’ button as shown in the picture below, Salesforce will then send a verification code. Copy this from your email and enter into the authenticator app in your phone.
1. Click on add a New Account in the Authenticator app on your mobile phone, copy the two word phrase as shown in the picture below and click the ‘Connect’ button.
Salesforce will send an email to the user to say that you have enrolled in Lightning login and authenticator app instead of a password.
In future all users need to do is enter their username and click Login. The authenticator app will then come into play.
Lightning login can be cancelled at any time by navigating to the personal settings page and clicking cancel.
The advantage of logging into Salesforce via this route is that passwords do not have to be saved in a web browser.
If your org sets a multi-factor authentication policy for logins, the Lightning Login method satisfies the requirement for an additional factor beyond a user’s username and passwords. Salesforce does not separately require users with the Multi-Factor Authentication for User Interface Logins permission to provide a second factor.
Further information can be found here: https://www.salesforce.com/video/1765359/
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.security_ll_enable.htm&type=5
Version Number 1.1
Date 11 August 2021
18/10/2021
How an implementation partner helps you get the most out of your CRM investment.
If you’ve already invested in Salesforce, or are considering doing so, then you probably already appreciate how CRM capability is extremely powerful to grow your business.
You can…
✔️Accelerate sales
✔️Increase revenue
✔️Have a single view of every customer and every interaction
✔️Automate tasks and messaging
…and much more.
While it may be tempting to try and piece together your own CRM capability with free tools, this has several disadvantages.
Such as…
❌ It distracts you from delivering your core business and serving your customers
❌ It eliminates the opportunity for expert guidance and industry knowledge
❌ It limits how you might integrate CRM with other business systems that are important to you
❌ It brings hidden costs that mount up over time
If your business is fairly established and entering a period of expansion and growth, it makes sense to build in the right customizations and integrations that will support your ambitions into the future.
You can quickly realize the benefits of CRM in your business, without the headaches, by working with an implementation partner who will bring the skills, scalability, strategic thinking and solutions to suit your needs.
What tools do you need?
Spreadsheets and free CRM tools may be OK in a small business.
But as soon as your business begins to expand and your team grows, spreadsheets and CRM tools that are not integrated properly quickly become unfit for purpose.
Data is duplicated, scattered, or siloed. Processes are ‘Heath Robinson’ at best according to the limitations of the tools. And in amongst it all, security is compromised.
Sorting out these problems on your own can take an inordinate amount of time that would be better spent focusing on running your growing business.
An implementation partner will typically carry out an assessment of your current environment and processes and offer some recommendations about how to migrate from spreadsheets and apps to a more integrated and secure environment.
You can then be guided to the tools that are the right fit for your business, as well as reengineering processes to be more streamlined and fit for purpose.
Integrations can be set up to eliminate data duplication, and security issues can just be handled.
Customer Experience
Ribeye is a British manufacturer of Rigid Inflatable Boats and high-spec Super-yacht Tenders. They called on Performa IT to help them level up their Salesforce deployment in their manufacturing process.
Martyn Ruskin Ribeye’s After Sales and Customer Experience Manager says: “The business has grown from a small team of boat builders to a small manufacturer aiming at a top end market.
“We were moving into a manufacturing world where high-end customers look at the business from every angle – and want to know if we’re as high-end as they are.
“Our ‘cottage industry’ approach to design and manufacture was unsustainable at this level.”
By working with a knowledgeable implementation partner Ribeye has gone from making small leisure boats for a small audience, to attracting high ticket business from the super-yacht market at the Monaco Boat Show.
[Read the full Ribeye Case Study here.]
What’s involved in implementation?
For a thorough implementation experience you need your CRM delivery partner to guide you through the following stages:
✔️Assessment
✔️Specification
✔️Customization
✔️App Creation
✔️Testing and Refining
✔️Training
✔️Support
These steps call on a variety of skills, expertise and knowledge that it is difficult to acquire on your own, even with an in-house CRM team.
Your implementation partner also needs to listen well and engage properly with the business to win hearts and minds and drive adoption. Once you’ve made the investment you want to make sure the business drives value from it – and this can only happen if people use it!
Customer Experience
British grant-awarding body Energy Systems Catapult engaged Performa IT to resolve information duplication and process inefficiencies. Charlotte Adkins, ESC’s Commercial Support Officer says: “Whenever we have a new requirement Performa IT attend meetings with the users to understand what they wish to achieve.
“They engage with the business all the way through the development process and help with training in new functionality.
“Everyone in ESC is aware of Performa IT and what they do for us, and this helps ensure good engagement from the teams.”
How to get up and running
Your chosen implementation partner will help you get up and running quickly, whether you need a basic installation of the Salesforce CRM or a more sophisticated strategic approach.
Giving you direct access to consultants, developers and administrators, your implementation partner seamlessly steps into your environment and becomes part of your team.
No matter what your entry level with Salesforce you can count on commercially aware, jargon-free advice and guidance that is tailored to your requirements and takes the long view of how CRM fits into your operation.
Here at Performa IT we offer a “Right Start” service to ensure you are investing in the right tools at the right level to maximise the value and potential of Salesforce for your business. This will get you off on the right foot, enabling you to control costs and accelerate investment return.
Customer Experience
Describing his experience of CRM implementation with Performa IT, Stewart Boraston, IT Manager of Property Services company Veritas, says: “The team helped initially in road mapping where we wanted to get to. They took a close look at our existing set up and quickly got to know and understand how we operate.
“As developers Performa IT work in a very agile manner, quickly translating business requirements into system functions that are very test-driven.
“This means that we got moving quickly and didn’t get bogged down in traditional waterfall releases which might no longer satisfy shifting business requirements.”
[Read the full Veritas Case Study here.]
Talk to us today to discuss your implementation needs. We can help determine the best way to get you up and running with the world’s most powerful and successful CRM tool.
07/09/2021
Why Hire A Salesforce Consultancy?
1999 :Salesforce founded as the one of first “born on the Cloud” software application. It offered just Sales Force Automation.
2021: Salesforce consistently ranked as the worlds leading CRM application. Offering a vast range of highly configurable functionality, platform tools and integration capabilities. Combined with a free, comprehensive Trailhead training and a vibrant Community. But this also means that, as with any other big IT system you can create a software disaster. Just now even faster than ever. If you are not careful early quick wins can be replaced by ever harder and more costly development efforts. And misdirected questions about the wisdom of opting for Salesforce.
This is why a good Salesforce Consultancy is worth many times it’s cost. And if you want to get Salesforce right and also get on with IT – Read on.
Hiring a Salesforce Consultancy
Hiring a Salesforce consultancy will not only enable you direct access to scarce Salesforce platform skills and experience. But will help you to build a ready to scale solution when you need it. As well as a pool of resources when you need them. You can also rely on our Salesforce consultancy to give you honest, objective and informed advice on what is increasingly a strategic CRM system and also a wider IT platform.
You may well have an internal Salesforce admin team. A Salesforce consultancy can definitely help them to. By using their extensive knowledge of Salesforce across many different Orgs not just yours. By offering training to your staff. And providing leave and other absence cover. You can rest assured that your Salesforce system is always in good hands.
It could be that you have a highly capable Salesforce Administrator on your payroll but they may not be familiar with or capable of APEX coding or integrations works. Again we can work with them to help deliver complex projects blending our skills with your in house resources. If you do have good in-house Salesforce technical experts. Are their skills are in a lot of demand? You may want to think about what you would do if they were to leave.
So why Performa IT?
Performa IT exists to provide all of the above, honed over the last ten years alongside Salesforce’s own extraordinary trajectory. We offer you direct access to our Salesforce Administrators, Consultants & Developers. With bespoke solutions to maximise the return on your CRM systems investment. Enabling you and your business not only to increase short term efficiency and revenue, but also to underpin your future CRM vision and roadmap. With our large permanent team you can be assured of consistency when relying on Performa ITs resources. We ensure there’s no requirement on your part to train new contractors. Who may come and go, which can often be the case with larger consultancies.
We are an longstanding Salesforce Consultancy, with equally longstanding client relationships. Our team have over 10 year’s experience of Salesforce, across many verticals, sizes of client and projects. We have the capacity to deliver any size project from a 30 minute fix to a 100 + day projects. From basic configuration to complex code. Our team always aim to deliver elegantly designed solutions with both speed and quality. We also pride ourselves on our personable approach and will always take the time to get to know you, your team, your business, its processes and goals. And of course your Salesforce Org (s).
With our deep knowledge and experience we have learnt that a ‘one size fits all’ approach does not work. Especially when it comes to the Salesforce platform. Which is why we tailor our offering specifically to each client depending on their needs and plans. By using our consultancy services you can be reassured that we will be there for you, over the whole lifespan of your Salesforce Org… There is no substitute for knowing your Org & business intimately.
OK – How much is it?
We are always extremely competitive with our pricing and are mostly more cost effective than hiring in house teams. How do we do that? By having both a core team of Certified Salesforce Admins, Developers and Consultants. Combined with a high quality, committed, equally well certified eco-system built up over years. And direct access also means no indirect costs to recover!
Can we help you optimise IT? Get in touch with us here.
07/04/2021
Learn More About Pardot
Pardot has been designed to integrate with Salesforce CRM to allow streamlined data sharing. This allows you to view all your prospects & marketing activities in Salesforce under leads or contacts and use Pardot’s scoring system to group contacts in within Salesforce.
Pardot’s dynamic scoring and grading system produces a numerical and/or visual representation of how sales ready a prospect is. A score is given based on the prospects interaction with your content, be it a website page visit or a form completion. Grading allows you to filter out those prospects who are not right for your business so you can concentrate on those who fit your ideal customer profile, generating more revenue for your business.
Email Automation using Pardot
Pardot has an advanced Drip Feed email engagement studio. It is specifically designed for ease of use and to provide an informed, bespoke prospect journey through a logic driven visualisation. This allows for mass emails to be sent on an automated schedule & based on individual prospects behaviour.
Design bespoke landing pages using Pardot
In need of campaign landing pages? Pardot allows you to generate HTML or custom drag and drop landing pages that provide the look and feel of your brand. Pardot offers a range of templates for easy editing or even screen scraping from your existing web site.
Connect Pardot with your Social Media.
Expand your social reach with Pardot. The Pardot platform contains a multitude of connectors. Extremely useful social media connectors allow you to automate your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile posts. While the Google Analytics and Adwords integration allow for great control over your google accounts.
How can we help?
Here at Performa IT we are Pardot experts. We are also committed to seeing your business succeed. We aim to offer you all the support and expert advice you will need to get the best out of Marketing Automation and increase your business performance. Get in touch with us today to speak about your specific Pardot requirements. Click here.
15/08/2020
Digital Transformation
Businesses have been fired into a new era. For many Salesforce® users this meant a huge change to the way they work. Adapting and learning quickly became a skill everyone required. Businesses using Salesforce® had an upper hand. These businesses harnessed Salesforce® to utilise its full potential to support their growth through the ongoing global crisis.
Allowing your employees to work from home was a huge challenge for many businesses who had not initiated digital transformation. Allowing staff to have access to the companies network isn’t as easy as just allowing them in on their portable devices. Correct security protocols need to be in place, for Salesforce® users licensing permissions needed to be correct to avoid users/staff having periods of zero productivity.
Digital transformation is extremely important for every business, from start ups to multi national corporations.
But what does digital transformation mean for your business?
In short digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of your business with an aim to transform the way your business operates and improve how you deliver your product or service to your customer. Beyond the technology there is also a need for a change in culture, your business needs to adapt a culture that questions processes, questions the way you deliver your product to your customer, experiment and be comfortable to utilise the technology to benefit your business and be comfortable to test what works and what doesn’t.
Using Salesforce® to enable digital transformation in your business doesn’t have to be a daunting task. At Performa IT we are experts in implementing the correct systems, apps and processes that work for your business.
Fancy a chat about digital transformation within your business? Speak to a member of the team today
SPEAK TO US
30/05/2020
What is Salesforce®
Connect to your customers in a whole new way with the world’s #1 CRM platform. Salesforce®.
Salesforce® is an online, scalable CRM that will transform your business.
Salesforce® allows you to save valuable, sensitive information about your customers, your company products, monitor your revenue etc, track & generate leads for your company, manage cases or tickets raised by your customers, manage services supplied to your customers, create websites/apps or portals for your customer where they can register and give you information about them or used by your dealers etc.
It gives you a useable interface where you store such your business data and then modify it to suit your businesses needs. Salesforce can be used to harvest the data as well as perform marketing activities such as sending emails to your customers automatically or manually to inform them about services etc.
Over 150,000 companies, both big and small, are growing their business with Salesforce® from Unilever to Aston Martin and everything in between!
Salesforce® started as Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM company. Salesforce now provides various software solutions and a platform for users and developers to develop and distribute custom software. Salesforce.com is based on multi-tenant architecture.
Performa IT has a team of experienced certified Salesforce.com/Pardot expert consultants and developers awaiting your command to build you the perfect Salesforce solution!
23/03/2020