💃 Salesforce Professionals Need to Master This Framework 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Have you heard of MECE 🤷‍♀️? Do you know what a platform application is 🤔?

If you said yes to both, you might know where this is headed. If you said no to both, no worries, this is tough concept. But we will do our best to break this down into simple terms, and give you actionable content that will make you a powerful (Sales)force.

Agenda for today includes

• Salesforce Professionals Need to Master This Framework

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Salesforce Professionals Need to Master This Framework

Platform Application

Let's start with the simpler concept. And let's use a visual.

Side note - This image was taken from the film The Platform. It's a pretty messed up movie, if you're into that sorta thing 🙈.

Anyway, see those people on that thing? That thing is a platform. Everything those people do is on that platform. Eat 🍔, sleep 😴, drink 🍺. There are things they cannot do on that platform. The guardrails for what they can, and cannot do, start and end with the platform they're on.

They can sing on that platform - they open their mouth and let it rip 🎼. They cannot snowboard on that platform - there is no snow, no hill to slide down, and no snowboard 🏂🏻.

Sales Cloud is a platform. Salesforce has guardrails. In Salesforce, you CAN build a report ✅. You CANNOT use C# ❌. You CAN create a custom object ✅. You CANNOT create a custom object that does not have __c appended to it ❌.

Make sense? Salesforce is the best and most powerful CRM on the planet. It can do amazing things. And it has guardrails 🙂.

MECE

MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

Now, before we break this down, a disclaimer 👀 that frameworks are tools. Tools have many uses. Said another way, tools are flexible. A hammer 🔨 can be used to drive a nail. A hammer can also be used to break down rock or concrete💥.

Mutually Exclusive

MECE

Think of this as a segment, or a bucket. For example, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. All 10 could be a lot to keep track of and manage. What if we put these into 2 segments, 1-5 and 6-10. Or 2 buckets, odd and even. Simpler, right? ✅

Now, because Salesforce is such a well integrated platform, there is not much that is truly Mutually Exclusive. This is where our disclaimer 👀 comes in - let's be flexible. Objects, List Views, Reports, Flows, Apex Classes, Roles, Profiles, etc. may all have tight relationships. Even their functionality is not necessarily exclusive. List Views and Reports. Apex and Flows.

Don't fret. Let's use buckets 🪣 .

• 🪣 Automations - Flows, Process Builders, WF Rules and Apex

• 🪣 Reports - List Views, Reports and Dashboards

• 🪣 Activities - Tasks, Events, and Calendars

• 🪣 Fields - Standard Fields and Custom fields

Collectively Exhaustive

MECE

Hang in there, we're almost done. Collectively exhaustive is simply EVERYTHING. We can get crazy and list out all components of the Salesforce platform, but that is contrary to the point of frameworks, which exist to simplify complex things.

Continuing off our last example, here is one option to get to collectively exhaustive-

• Automations

• Reports

• Activities

• Fields

• EVERYTHING ELSE (aka "other")

Hmmm 🤔 , that "other" bucket is gonna be kinda big. How about this -

• Licensing

• Data Utilization

• Security (Roles, Profiles, Permission Sets)

• Reports

• Automations

• Objects

• Record Types

• Fields

• Page Layouts

• Managed Packages

• Other

^That gets us pretty close to defining the entire platform in under a dozen bullets 💪 .

MECE Framework + Platform Application

So, why do we care?

Salesforce can feel like an endless monster🐉 (in a good way 🙂). By understanding the nature of a platform and applying the MECE framework, we can make it feel simpler. Smaller. More manageable.

How do we use it?

Practice 😅. Find ways to apply it 🧐. We provided a few examples already. Here are 3 more -

1. Project Management, and the 5 phases.

2. Statuses - Not Started. Work in Progress. Completed. All of your tasks will roll up under one of these statuses. If not, add some more, or just add "other" to get to Collectively Exhaustive.

3. Integration Options All integrations in your company's tech stack will roll up under one of the types listed. If not, add some more, or just add "other" to get to Collectively Exhaustive.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes