Clint Lee

The good news about working on the Salesforce platform is that three times a year, while you're lying asleep at night, the little Salesforce elves are hard at work rolling out the newest release. The bad news is that sometimes on a Monday morning you start seeing Apex errors in your inbox. This past release of the Summer '11 upgrade was one of those times for me. I thought I'd share the details to prevent anyone else from banging their noggin' against the wall. Spoiler Alert! The story ends happily with a working solution. The Background We had a portion of Apex code that, when executed, created a custom object that was the detail side of a master-detail relationship. Nothing special going on here, just straightforwardness. The Problem On the Monday morning after the org was upgraded to Summer '11, errors started to kick off whenever this particular piece of code w... (more)

A Business Use Case for Batch Apex

I want to share a recent real-world use case where Batch Apex was used to achieve our goal.  If you’re not familiar with Batch Apex you can find more here in the Salesforce Development Docs. Business Use Case An organization’s sales team is using Salesforce CRM primarily to manage their Leads, Contacts, and opportunities. This is akin to a retail setting whereby there are multiple physical locations and each location has its own sales team and sales manager (think car dealership).  In this setting, Leads (and/or Contacts) enter through multiple channels such as internet marketing,... (more)

Trigga What?

I do some consulting work for non-profit organizations that use Salesforce.com.  There are so many non-profits that use Salesforce but many often lack the internal resources necessary to truly realize the benefits of adopting it.  It is highly rewarding work and I would encourage you to check out the Salesforce Foundation as one way of getting involved with non-profits who use Salesforce. The Salesforce Foundation has a very successful program that gives non-profits the ability to get 10 donated (free) Enterprise Edition user licenses. This is a great program that offers a huge ... (more)

Designing a Process for Awarding Franchises – Part 2: Management

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” -Albert Einstein   In my previous post, titled “Designing a Process for Awarding Franchises – Part 1: Leadership”, I looked at the notion of how designing a process of awarding franchises has to start with prioritizing around the characteristics that your franchisees should have.  Without fist hashing out this issue, it will be largely unproductive to tactically begin putting together a process that can be managed.  For example, creating a system for “selling” franc... (more)

How-To: Create Leads from Twitter Conversations

Many franchisors utilize Twitter to communicate their products and services to would-be customers.  But how do you know if your social media efforts are paying off?  Can you pull up a real-time report to see just how many new leads you’ve created over the past week?  If you find an interesting conversation taking place about your franchise opportunity, are you able to effectively get a business development rep involved and respond in real-time? We’ve posted this video to demonstrate the powerful functionality that’s created by integrating Salesforce and Twitter together in your fr... (more)