Does your organization host events, need to take on-line sign-ups, or want to publish your events on your website? Have a look at the akaCRM Event Management Solutions for Salesforce vendor comparison. This review includes pricing, ecommerce features, and other key features of 3rd party Event Management tool add-ons for Salesforce.

The Conga Contracts discovery call is a critical component in the Conga Contracts implementation process. On this call you will have the opportunity to discuss in detail where your organization is, the current pain points you are experiencing, and the benefits you wish to achieve.

Salesforce implementation for nonprofits now more affordable than ever

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO, JULY 9, 2020 – Today, akaCRM, a Salesforce.org IMPACT partner, announced its partnership with Supermums which harnesses the power of the Salesforce ecosystem to provide flexible well-paid career opportunities to those who are under or unemployed.

The akaCRM team has worked remotely for more than a decade. Over that period of time, we have learned some things about creating culture, tools for remote workplaces, and collaboration that we thought we would share.

Unless you have all the customers you need, some level of marketing is necessary and important. Despite the proliferation of spam, email marketing continues to be a key weapon in the marketer's arsenal. For our clients which use Salesforce CRM as their enterprise CRM system, we often have the conversation about the extent of the native capabilities of Salesforce CRM as it relates to email marketing, mass email, email tracking, etc. The goal of this article is to provide a high-level look at the difference between using the native capabilities of Salesforce CRM vs using a specialized email marketing or marketing automation application. We also highlight a number of third-party Email Marketing and Marketing Automation applications that are pre-integrated with salesforce.com.

One of the great pleasures we have at akaCRM is working with nonprofit organizations. Salesforce has become an excellent solution for nonprofits because Salesforce.org provides a donation of ten (10) free Lightning Enterprise Edition licenses to qualified nonprofits. Did you catch that? FREE – Enterprise Edition licenses. Keep in mind, this is not a “scaled-down free version” of Salesforce. This is the full-scale, Enterprise edition with all the bells and whistles that large corporations get, plus several bonus features that are exclusive to nonprofits when you include the Nonprofit Success Pack!

Top 20 Questions For Thoughtful Integration Documentation

More and more, our clients want to integrate Salesforce CRM or their Conga Contracts applications (their "Solution") to a database or business application. The question they almost always want to know is "how much will it cost?". To answer this question, first be prepared to present a high-level description of your integration. This could be a paragraph or a number of bullet points that summarize what the integration needs to do. However, to reasonably answer the cost question, we typically need documented requirements. The following article reviews basic questions you should be prepared to answer and document.

In the Winter ‘19 Release, Salesforce enhanced an already useful tool by adding additional flexibility. First, users can now search a List View instead of using the “rolodex” style tool or filters, and second, users can share a particular list view with other specified groups of users. While these might seem like small changes, they definitely make working with List Views more efficient and streamlined. 

Conga Contracts Flow automates your Contract Lifecycle Management process without having to add a flow to a specific contact, company or project. By creating a Conga Contracts flow template you can choose different stages and steps in the flow that will appear on the profile underneath the chevron bar which lets everyone know what step the flow is on, making it very organized. Conga Contracts Flow cuts out steps you don’t need to reduce errors, cut risk, and speed up contract cycles.

Having the right information in front of the right person at the right time is critical in providing customer support. Customers expect to have most of their questions answered instantly and increasingly get frustrated if an answer is not available within minutes. Being able to provide this information to your customers in real time used to be a hallmark of superior customer service, but now is expected as standard customer service.

While there are numerous paid training courses available, we believe that most people can pass this exam with the proper preparation. We have many consultants at akaCRM that passed the exam on their first attempt and did it all via self study so here are some tips that we hope can help get you ready for the test.

How Much will it cost? How long will it take? For turn-key implementation or integration projects, we get asked these questions every day. Because your needs are unique to your organization, the functionality, effort and cost of your project will be unique as well. To help you answer the cost and time questions, we will offer to hold a phone call we call the "Scope Call" at no cost to you, so we can better understand the project and get enough information to provide you good answers.

We often speak of the critical success factors in a Salesforce or Conga deployment. These include: (i) Senior Sponsorship, (ii) Communication Planning, (iii) Design & Understanding of the Purpose of the Project, (iv) Qualified Configuration, (v) Training for end-users, managers and administrators, and (vi) Post-Implementation Support. The last item, Post-Implementation Support, is often overlooked or considered ancillary in nature. If you did every step perfectly but fail to provide an adequate support plan for your organization, you are at risk of limited adoption or worse, failure. We will cover options for support as part of another blog posting. In this post, we are focusing on selecting the right System Administrators, who play a key role in the ongoing support and success of your investment.

Over the past two decades, we have seen Salesforce deployments with associated integrations go from less than 5% of deployments to more than 60% of deployments. Consequently, one of the most common questions that clients ask is, "Have you integrated to [fill in your system] before?" It's a great question and who wouldn't want to hire a firm that had proven experience integrating a specific system to your CRM?

For large national and international clients, we often find companies with multiple instances of Salesforce CRM. In Salesforce "speak" each instance is referred to as an "org" which is short for "organization". These independent orgs arise most often as a result of mergers and acquisitions where one company using Salesforce purchases another using Salesforce. In other cases, large organizations will deploy separate orgs overtime for various country, divisions, departments or business functions. This article addresses briefly some of the considerations for clients with multiple instances on whether to combine orgs or leave them as independent. If you are considering creating an incremental instance of Salesforce, this article is also for you.

If you are considering integrating your Salesforce deployment with Quickbooks, here is some food for thought. We often get asked about doing this and here are some of the questions we will ask and that you should know the answers to.

Salesforce is sunsetting the Desk.com tool, meaning many companies are faced with migrating the information from Desk.com to Salesforce. We recently completed a Desk.com migration, but did not use the Desk.com migration tool that has been supplied by the Desk.com support team. We found that the migration tool has some great features, however, it did not allow us to write back to Salesforce audit fields so that we could maintain analytic integrity. Salesforce audit fields are used to track when a record is created or last modified by utilizing timestamp fields, which can be edited only on record creation with additional Salesforce permissions.

Currently, if you have enable this feature in the Activity Timeline, there are out-of-the-box insights including "Pricing Discussed", "Executive Involved", and "Scheduling Requested". Salesforce now gives you up to ten custom Email Insights.

Since the Salesforce application was first released in 2000, users have been helpless to make use of white space on the various Salesforce screens. When the Lightning Experience was released, the Home Page became far more useful and configurable; however, detail screens still showed labels above text. As Salesforce customers added more fields and pages started to growth in length, the amount of whitespace on the screen and vertical scrolling because more of an issue. The following example of the Contact record for William Whitespace shows the large amounts of whitespace to the right of each column.

akaCRM is pleased to bring you In the Cloud, a Salesforce-themed crossword authored by Matthew Stock.