💃 Introduction to Technology Stack🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Hope your Fantasy Football Drafts have been eventful 🏈!

We previously discussed why-

• The industry you work in impacts your tech strategy

• The business group that is paying your salary impacts your compensation

Today, we discuss the technology stack, and how it impacts your Salesforce role 🫡.

Let’s get to it!

Agenda for today includes

• Introduction to Technology Stack

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Introduction to Technology Stack

Today we will discuss-

💃 What Is It?🕺

💃 Why Should You Care? 🕺

💃 How Do You Get It? 🕺

💃 Takeaways🕺

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WHAT IS IT?

Disclaimer - there is more than one way to define a tech stack. This version is most relevant to Salesforce professional’s specific roles and responsibilities!

Let’s start with visuals 🤩

⬇️

WHAT IS IT? CONT’D

Your tech stack is the suite of applications your company uses to do business-y things 🙂.

➡️ Starting in the front, you have inbound applications that prospects can access - webforms, chatbots, telephony solutions, etc.

➡️ Then, the prospects are pushed (or pulled, like SFTP) to the CRM for routing/queueing, nurturing and then negotiating.

➡️ Finally, to the backend applications where financials are rubber stamped .

For companies that have complexity in their sales cycle, like custom pricing or product bundling (CPQ), the CRM, alone, is not a good solution to manage the many layers of business process and data integrity/synchronization 😵‍💫.

For example-

A CRM is good for managing contacts. Also, a CRM has the ability to manage SKUs and financials, but it is not the optimal solution as a system of record for SKUs and financials.

An ERP can store SKUs with their cost and pricing; it is also ok for storing contacts and other details you would find on a contract. An ERP is NOT the correct application to manage leads, tasks, events, etc ❌.

Why this separation of concerns? You’ve seen overbuilt Sales Cloud solutions. Imagine that x100 🤮 in an ERP.

It would be a nightmare for everyone - managers, users, developers, admins, and consultants ☠️.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Why should a Salesforce professional care about applications that are not Salesforce, or are not directly integrated to Salesforce?

Context and Impact.

Understanding where the CRM fits in the big picture and how inputs and outputs will impact upstream and downstream applications gives you the ability to make better (the best?!) decisions!

Salesforce is the best CRM on Earth 🌍. It is an incredibly powerful platform 💪.

With its ability to automate process, Standard APIs, powerful custom API platform, and the plethora of 3rd party apps that have standard connectors to Salesforce….

…The more context you have, the more you can leverage Salesforce, or de-risk the Salesforce solution.

For example, if a downstream application does not like symbols in the phone field, then you can manage that upstream in the CRM.

HOW DO YOU GET IT?

The concept is simple - a list or graphic of all of the applications in your stack.

An application architecture artifact is great, but scarily uncommon 👻…

If no documentation exists, you can use the above images as a roadmap to create one - start with Salesforce and ask questions to fill out the rest of the applications.

Finding the right people and asking them the right questions will eventually get you to the point that you can create a graphic like the above.

IT managers and developers are good resources. Marketing and Sales professionals…usually have an entertaining response 😉.

And doesn’t every company have that one person who knows where all the bodies are buried?!

TAKEAWAYS

✅ There is only upside to knowing your company’s or client’s tech stack.

✅ A document may already exist, but if not, start creating one!

✅ Make it a habit of considering the full tech stack in important business decisions. You may be surprised at the insights you glean from it!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes