Last fall, Salesforce announced at Dreamforce that they’re planning to retire Workflow Rules and Process Builder. For those of you not familiar with these two powerhouse tools, they make it easy for Salesforce admins to create behind-the-scenes automation rules and workflows — without knowing how to code.
Never fear: Salesforce is consolidating both of these tools’ functionality into Flow so that it can focus all of its resources into a single tool moving forward. Salesforce admins can begin migrating Workflow Rules this spring and Process Builders this summer, and have until this end of the year before they can no longer create new ones and will have to create them in Flow.
So, why does this matter to marketers, exactly?
I strongly recommend that marketers take advantage of this opportunity by asking your Salesforce admin to review all existing business logic, rules, and automations, especially if they were created more than a year or two ago. There’s a good chance they may no longer be working properly or may no longer be valid — and what you don’t know could be hurting you (and your marketing campaigns and processes).
I’ll provide some real-life examples below, but the short answer is that these tools provide the business logic and automation that make things happen “automatically” in Salesforce, your marketing automation platform, and any other applications you’ve integrated with Salesforce.
Like, say, when you:
- Upload a list, run an email campaign, or want that MQL to be routed to the right sales rep and followed up with within 24-48 hours.
- Update a contact field and expect it to update other fields — or even related records — automatically.
- Expect your reporting to be accurate to demonstrate lead attribution and revenue contribution.
In fact, I come across these issues most often when marketers approach us for help with something that’s gone awry in their MA platform — and it’s almost always because something is no longer functioning correctly in Salesforce. You read that correctly. It’s usually the Marketo, Eloqua, or HubSpot admin who ends up identifying an issue in Salesforce.
Below are just a few examples of what may already be happening in Salesforce and impacting your marketing efforts:
1. Large list uploads may not sync (or upload at all).
Processing a high volume of data, like a large list upload, can really slow down your system. Sometimes even a small list, depending on the complexity of automations running in the background and number of Salesforce integrations. Anything that slows down your system can cause an issue. Depending on how long a single process takes to complete, you may get timeout errors or pages may freeze or reload—disrupting the process running in the background and possibly canceling it out altogether.
One of our clients, a mid-size software company, was experiencing some challenges with their current Process Builders — which in turn was causing systemwide syncing issues between Salesforce and Marketo. They realized something was wrong, but they couldn’t pinpoint the root cause so they reached out to BDO Digital for assistance.
Whenever they uploaded a prospect list, previously created business logic automatically triggered changes to multiple fields. When they uploaded a really big list, which requires more processing power in Salesforce, user occupancy limits were causing individual Salesforce users to hit their timeout limits and get exceptions. In many cases, users didn’t understand what the errors meant, so they just closed them out. As a result, their lists didn’t finish uploading in Salesforce — or get updated in Marketo for their campaigns — and they didn’t even realize it.
Example of a common (yet mysterious) timeout error in Salesforce.
Your marketing automation platform isn’t the only tool that can be affected. Any integrations you have with Salesforce can also be impacted by these kinds of issues. Over the past couple months, I’ve had four clients experience sync errors between Salesforce and Bizible because Process Builder just isn’t able to handle the workload.
2. New accounts and opportunities may not get created or updated.
Another one of our clients wants Salesforce to automatically create a new renewal opportunity 90 days before a contract renewal date. They had previously setup business logic in Process Builder so that 90, 60, and 30 days before a customer’s contract expires, Salesforce creates a new renewal Object and notifies the sales rep to reach out and work the opportunity.
Errors in Process Builder were causing issues, and you can do some things in Flow that you can’t do in Process Builder, such as perform calculations and score values based on related accounts and records. So, we recreated the business logic in Flow for our client based on contract renewal date, opt-out date, and contract effective date. A built-in formula autopopulates the contract renewal date, eliminating some previously labor-intensive work.
Along those same lines, you may want Salesforce to automatically create a new account (or make updates to an existing account) on the back end when you close an Opportunity. If the workflow doesn’t run or the process stalls, your updates won’t be made.
An example of a record-triggered flow that updates each record in Salesforce based on Lead status.
3. A back-end process may no longer be running correctly.
It’s quite common to setup business logic and automations in the background that update related fields or records when someone selects a particular picklist value, such as under Industry, Line of Business, or Company Revenue. If those automatic, behind-the-scenes updates stop happening, new Opportunities may not get updated correctly or routed to the right sales rep. Your carefully planned segmentation efforts may not even be able to pull them into the right marketing campaigns, leaving them in a black hole of sorts in your MA platform.
Say you have three picklist values under Industry that autopopulate potential pipeline revenue. If someone later decides to change that picklist value to a text field, but doesn’t update the logic on the back end, you’re going to run into issues. Even changing the field name from Industry to Industries can have an impact. On top of that, you won’t have accurate pipeline or reporting numbers moving forward.
It’s time to dust off your Salesforce business logic and automations
I know this isn’t something that’s usually in a marketer’s job description, but any errors happening without your knowledge are negatively impacting your data, campaigns, reporting, and success. And I see these kinds of issues happening a lot, especially if you’re still relying on Process Builders or Workflow Rules that were built out years ago.
So, take this opportunity to work with your Salesforce admin to review and verify the processes in your system to make sure they’re still working correctly. If you’re interested, Salesforce provides a sneak peek of the new Flow features that will be available this spring, as well as a useful collection of articles to help you learn how to build Flows (remember: it’s designed for non-developers!).
If you don’t currently have a Salesforce admin or would like some outside support, our skilled CRM and marketing automation consultants can help you with CRM system administration and management, marketing automation integration, and custom development. One of my colleagues shared a great article on how interconnected and interdependent Salesforce is with your other MarTech tools, and how we can help you realize its full potential. And if you’re short on resources, we can help you with one-off projects or day-to-day administration and maintenance so you can focus on other things.
Zahid Abid is a Salesforce Solution Architect with BDO Digital’s Demand Gen Group. As a Salesforce-certified Advanced Administrator, Certified Platform Developer, and Certified Platform App Builder, Zahid helps clients unlock the potential of their Salesforce instance and integrated MarTech solutions.
The post It’s Time to Go with the Flow: Salesforce Is Retiring Workflow Rules and Process Builder (and Yes, This Matters to Marketers) appeared first on DemandGen.
