💃 Functional Salesforce Professionals Integration Guide🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Is there a more intimidating topic than integrations?

Except for you technical brains 🧠, for whom integrations is literally in your job description 🫡.

For you functional folks, integrations are an abstract layer and the reason why the devs get to come in late, get Windows machines when everyone else has Macs, and are paid more than you 😜!

But no longer! Welcome to your newest series-

Integrations for People Who Aren't Responsible For Integrations 😉!

When you have completed this journey, you will be “just dangerous enough” and have the ability to annoy your technical teammates with surface-level knowledge 😂.

But in all seriousness, understanding enterprise integrations adds an important feather 🪶 to your hat 🎩. It levels you up and outside of the Salesforce platform, ultimately giving you a better understanding of Salesforce 💪!

And for you technical readers - at any point in this series, please reply with any anything you want your functional brethren to be aware of (to contact us, just hit reply in your email browser!) 🧑‍🏫.

Integration Guide For Functional Resources

Today we will discuss-

💃 SalesforceChaCha Assumptions🕺

💃 How to Use This Guide🕺

💃 Enterprise Integrations Intro🕺

💃 Why Should You Care? 🕺

💃 What’s Included 🕺

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SalesforceChaCha Integration Assumptions-

✅ Big dog 🐶 integrations only! Salesforce integrations with ERPs, Master Databases, Mulesoft and other robust applications, ESBs, and Middleware.

Why? Because integrations with enterprise applications require the highest degrees of consideration. Other integrations - like SFTP, Zapier, or standard connector solutions - will seem simple after experiencing enterprise integrations.

✅ You are in a supporting role and the technical team will be managing all the things.

Why? Because technical resources are responsible for enterprise integration success. It takes years of experience, in addition to the prerequisite technical knowledge and skill, to become a highly paid 🤑 integration expert.

NOTE: Their pay is great because the learning curve is steep and the business stakes are high!

✅ You have, or you have not contributed to an enterprise integration project, from initiation to close. There is no in-between. If you have, you know that there is much that you don’t know. If you have not, buckle up!

Why? Enterprise integrations are some of the highest effort technology solutions in the business world. They require an incredible amount of considerations. Lots of friction….

❌ This series is not enough to make you an enterprise integration expert 😢.

Why? The purpose of this guide is for Functional Salesforce Professionals to have a practical resource to reference in their projects.

❌ This series will cover a good amount (see below for examples) but not everything 😢.

Why? The goal is to cover common scenarios that you will certainly be exposed to in an enterprise integration project. The total landscape is too sprawling and vast, even for the ChaCha 😅.

❌ There will be minimal technical references.

Why? The technical audience is served every tuesday- check this out if you’re thirsty for our technical newsletters! This guide is for functional folks to have a base knowledge that allows you to meaningfully contribute to, and understand the risks of, an enterprise integration.

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

Who is this guide for?

Everyone! But definitely functional Salesforce roles.

What is the objective?

The purpose of this guide is to provide functional Salesforce roles with (entertaining) insights for enterprise integrations.

Enough insights to be dangerous 🤠.

Not enough to lead this type of project if you haven’t done it before 🙅.

How do you use this guide?

The “Guide” will be a series of posts, that will be aggregated into this post. So, this post is the best place to start, and to reference in the future.

This will be a living 💗, breathing 😮‍💨 document.

As we release articles aligned with this topic, we’ll aggregate them here, and with context 🙂.

That means-

• Evergreen content. Yay!

• Check back here weekly to see the newest updates.

• For easy access, we’ll pin this as a Featured post on the website.

Enterprise Integrations Introduction

WHAT IS IT?

Here’s a scenario that has initiated many an enterprise integration project-

VP of Sales: We’re selling our butts off. And we’re sick of double-entering accounts into the CRM and the ERP. Why can’t we just enter them into one system? We’re making the company tons of money!

VP of IT: I understand your frustration. It’s like entering your credit card twice to spend your own money! There is certainly value in reducing clicks and data-entry by your revenue generating people. Let’s get an integration between Salesforce and the ERP on the roadmap.

VP of Sales: Great. Where do we start?

VP of IT: Let’s go to lunch and we can discuss. We have a 3 major considerations before we agree on presenting a case to the CEO-

1. Cost - this could exceed $1MM.

2. Timeline - this could exceed 1 year.

3. Resources - this will exceed our current capacity and bandwidth.

At its core, an integration is a way to connect Salesforce with other applications, systems, or data sources to automate data exchange.

Think of it as a bridge that allows different software applications to talk to each other.

These integrations enable Salesforce to do even more, like bring in product data from a Master Database for CPQ, or send account data to an ERP to write a contract, like the above example.

Sounds amazing, right?

Here’s the thing-

• It’s expensive. A million dollars. Millions of dollars.

• It takes a long time. A year. Years. Depends on scope but plan for at least a year.

• It’s resource intensive. You will need a lot of time from a lot of expert people ($$$) that you trust.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Salesforce is the the #1 CRM in the world 🌎.

But CRMs, on their own, do not fulfill all of the needs of a business.

And, just like the above example, the business will get to the point where connecting applications makes a ton of sense 💯.

It’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN you will be a key contributor to a Salesforce integration, even as a functional professional.

AND NOW….let’s add the other layer-

Enterprise integrations are complex. Exponentially more complex than an isolated application.

Here’s why-

It’s not a 1:1 formula. It’s not Saleforce:Netsuite.

It begins at the business process level. Then fields. And objects/tables. Data transformation. Data sync patterns. Salesforce team. ERP team. Client team. Security of each application. Ownership of each application. Effective communication loops amongst all the stakeholders. Integrated test environments. Integration testing. And so on and so forth….😳 

You can see how the high count of considerations drives exponential complexity 😵‍💫.

Technical resources will do the technical lifting, and some of the project administration.

Functional resources need to fill in the gaps, mainly on the administration side, but the lucky ones will get pulled into technical depths they’ve never considered 🙃 . Many Business Analysts will be promoted as a result of their contributions.

Put these together and you get a scenario where you inevitably are a meaningful contributor to an enterprise integration project.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a resource to reference for that 😉?

WHAT’S INCLUDED?

Your favorite and most common integration scenarios will be covered-

💡 Data/Field Mapping | When the weeds are in the weeds are in the weeds…

💡 Swivel-Chair-enomics | Need an integration? Or nice to have?

💡 System of Record | Easy choice, but sometimes the business likes to mess with you 😉.

💡 …And More!

Daily Principle