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Gemma

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No admins necessary: we finally have a Trailhead superbadge for Sales users of Salesforce! This superbadge is a great way to apply your knowledge to a practical example and get a great Salesforce credential in your own right, without having to be Ms/Mr/etc Technical.

Note that you’ll need to work in Lightning to achieve this (as if any of you still are….?). If you’re not using Lightning, there’s no better time to start, and use your new-found knowledge to encourage your organisation to switch!

Only Fools Rush In

Read Ye the Tips Before Ye Start

  • Read this article as it tells you to (yes, I know we all skim-read the yellow boxes):
  • As with any Superbadge on Trailhead, you’ll do better if you work through the instructions step by step rather than blagging it, scrolling to the bottom and then trying to fix the errors you get from the Check Challenge buttons. You also increase the likelihood of achieving First Ascent – meaning you got every step right the first time!
  • If you completed the pre-requisite badges a while ago, take a moment to review them once more before you start.
  • Don’t use an existing dev org or playground to complete this superbadge. Follow the instructions and get yourself a brand new org designated for this purpose. That’s because it’s all pre-configured and sets you up for success.
  • Hint: I nickname my Trailhead playgrounds so I know what’s in there:

Creating Customer Data

  • Consider entering the data in a few stages. You can import the data or create it manually – up to you.
  • Create Accounts first.
  • Check through the data in the second table and identify which deals should be on Accounts, and which should be Leads.
  • Watch out: there are account records which have Parent accounts.
  • A record can’t relate to another record that doesn’t exist yet
  • Tasks are activities with a due date and status. Watch out: it’s checking for specific word use in the subject line but the instructions don’t actually tell you which words to use.
  • Events are activities with a specific date and time, no status
  • Other notes are better off recorded in Chatter, then you can collaborate with others. So much useful information disappears into “Notes” on CRM systems; I love how Salesforce handles this.
  • When you want to add notes, think about what the note is actually about. Is it about the customer relationship as a whole, or a contact, or a sales deal?
  • CHECK the lead conversion criteria; not all of these are supposed to be Account records :0)

Creating Opportunity Data

  • The sales process guides you on what to create, the wording to be used and the objects to add data to
  • Watch out for the calendar you’ll be adding your events to
  • Sales deal values are in USD. As I’m UK-based, I changed my user currency to USD; I wasn’t taking any chances.
  • Opportunities always need a point of contact, otherwise, how do you know who to engage with?

Miscellaneous People Business Cards

The great thing here is the context on the back of these business cards. This enables you to make decisions concerning where the data belongs.

A few things to think about:

  • Is there an existing relationship?
  • Is there already an opportunity, according to the lead conversion criteria?
  • Who should own the records you create?
  • Don’t forget your notes and activities!
  • Make an assumption where you don’t have the context. If there’s no opportunity there yet, what should we do with the information?

Sticky Note / Your Phone Rings

Taking into account the experience you’ve had so far when working through this challenge, read the instructions carefully.

Remember:

  • You may have new information that needs to be added
  • Don’t forget what happens at each stage of a deal (business process) and add the right data accordingly
  • Discounts affect the tax amount on a quote

Prices can be a bit confusing in Salesforce to the untrained eye. Allow me to help:

List Price

The price per unit in your price book. This means the price your product should sell for according to business rules). Your Salesforce administrators normally create Products in Salesforce, then add them to a Pricebook for a set amount per unit; the List Price. e.g. 1x button may be sold at 10, which is the standard amount a button would normally be sold for.

Sales Price

This is the price per unit that you are actually selling at. It gives managers visibility into pricing and buying behaviour. e.g. for a specific customer, you might sell 1x button for 9, which is slightly lower than the amount it would normally be sold for.

The Sales Price generally defaults to List Price. Unless your Salesforce administrators have built rules preventing it, you can usually override a list price and add your own sales price when you add Products to an Opportunity (creating Opportunity Products).

Discount

Discounts in Salesforce are a percentage applied at the Product line level. E.g. 1x button sold at a sales price of 9, less a discount of 10%. You would enter 10 into a field labelled “Discount” on the Opportunity Product to apply this.

Total Price

Total Price appears at the Opportunity Product level and is a calculated field that gives you the total price per Opportunity Product, like so:

Qty1
List Price10
Sales Price9
Discount10&

Total Price = Qty x Sales Price x % Discount

Total Price = (1 x 9) – ((1×9)*0.1) = 8.10

Salesforce takes care of the maths for you, so you don’t have to. This means that when reporting on Products, the figure you need to rely on is the Total Price.

Reports

Yay, reports!

  • You can’t report products and prices from an Opportunity report, so have a look at the other report type options that are available
  • When grouping by dates, make sure you’ve understood the requirement well enough to decide which date you should group by, and what metrics the report seeks to show. e.g. the value or volume of opportunities
  • When reporting on Opportunities, extra filters exist that are unique to Opportunity reporting. If the report is looking at the pipeline, this tends to mean any opportunities that have not closed yet.
  • There are a. couple of ways to group Opportunities by month: a field called Close Month, and by grouping the Close Date. With superbadges, the checking system looks for a match to how the designer has created the solution on the Trailhead side; in real life, either approach works.

Quiz

I’ll leave you lot to figure this one out by yourselves! Thanks for reading, and I wish you the best of luck with the superbadge!

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