There's a task-sized hole in Salesforce
There's a task-sized hole in Salesforce
Request for product: a series of tasks that correspond to multi-person workflow in Salesforce. We need a first-class task app. Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #218
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: if you listen to pop songs and wonder when the words in the title will show up, you’re not alone. Title song words show up much later than they used to in pop songs, increasing the chance that you will sound silly during the song when you don’t know any words but the title ones. Edition 218 of this newsletter is here - it’s September 30, 2024.
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The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ There’s a task-sized hole in Salesforce
I’ve got an ask for Marc Benioff and the Salesforce team. It’s probably something that many people have asked for over the years, and it points to one of the key problems of building a “platform” instead of building purpose-built software for CRM (customer relationship management).
Salesforce does a pretty good job managing opportunities and accounts out of the box. You could quibble with how they handle leads versus contacts, but the basic flow of converting prospects to accounts and marking deals as closed won is relatively seamless.
Not so when it comes to tasks and events. If you’ve got a rep handling multiple accounts, deals, and people, that person will have many tasks in many stages and precious few ways to avoid overload.
Designing tasks to meet the needs of operators
As a rep (or an SDR, or a CSM), there are multiple overlapping workflows that need to be managed daily across many accounts. Salespeople solve this problem by moving from account to account using deal stages, handling first their early stage prospects and progressing to later stage deal closing motions at the end of the month or quarter.
But there’s a need here for handling the cadence of tasks that happen during the deal cycle or immediately after it that make it hard to know what you should be doing on any one day or week. The beginning and end of a deal cycle are usually pretty straightforward, but the middle is muddy.
Salesforce makes this possible through the task object, a weird hybrid of activity and due date where you can stack all of your to-dos in one place and view it as an ordered list, a Kanban (as above), or a report. If you happen to have a hired a productivity expert skilled in managing this blob of similar looking tasks, good for you! If not, you need to order tasks by priority and by the order in which your workflows need to run.
Most people using Salesforce will not succeed at their tasks in this way unless they “drain the queue” by doing all the available things every day. This *might* be an effective way of managing their time, but they might be missing a task due in two or three days that needs to jump up in priority based on other factors or events.
Mapping tasks to workflow
It turns out that creating this workflow is hard.
You need to think about:
Trigger events → things that increase or decrease priority
Deadlines → absolute times when tasks need to be completed to stay in a service level agreement
Tie breakers → when you have two tasks, which one is more important than the other
Prerequisites → because some tasks are dependent upon each other, they may not be done out of order
What we need is a visual builder to help the Salesforce admin arrange the creation and completion of tasks in a way that supports the overall workflow.
Imagine if you could combine a series of flow-based steps that checked for entry and exit criteria to create the ranked view of tasks a rep or SDR needed to do today? It would be a lot easier to keep folks on track while also alerting them to other items they need to keep in mind.
Flow-based Task Management
The good news? Salesforce has a lot of this infrastructure in place. You can create a ranked list of tasks filtered for an individual or a team and organize that list like a Kanban or list view to help the rep know what to do next.
The bad news? Salesforce doesn’t make building an application process like this very easy. You need some pretty advanced Flows knowledge to be able to set up tasks in order and dynamically change them based on information held in other objects. You also need some decent application chops to be able to create Lightning component (think of it as Kanban++) to manage those tasks as they happen.
Yes, I know there are external task apps like Dooly and Scratchpad. They don’t keep you in the Salesforce experience with the goal to avoid syncing your data.
Who’s going to build this flow-based task management?
What’s the takeaway? Salesforce falls short of being an effective task manager because it’s hard for normal people (or even skilled admins) to create a sequenced task experience for their users. Flows that create and manage tasks might make this significantly better.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ AI needs a new paradigm - One of the reasons we haven’t found a wide-ranging application for AI is that we’re trying to solve the same problem as previous software. The breakthrough app might be much different than we expect.
2/ When do Americans stop working? - This might not surprise you, but the age at which Americans in the US stop working is increasing over time. This data doesn’t tell you whether those workers want to keep working or if stopping work was a default because there were no more opportunities.
3/ Kiosks and job loss - Kiosks in fast food restaurants were thought to kill jobs by removing the need for cashiers. It turns out they move work around instead of removing it, which seems like a paradox common to technology improvement. Not asked: what’s better for the customer?
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
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The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon