Salesforce Automation Guide. I cannot lie. There was a time when I thought the greatest thing about Salesforce was that it prevented leads from falling through the cracks. I was a marketing opps person. There was a time I thought readily available information at your fingertips and integration with an email platform was the greatest thing. I was in sales management. Today, as a Solutions Architect, I think Salesforce Automation Guide is the best.

Automation provides the tools necessary to automate repetitive processes and daily tasks for your business, such as creating follow-up tasks, sending reminder emails, or updating records. Automations help users save critical time and reduce errors by creating automated processes to complete repetitive tasks.

Below, you’ll find resources to help you decide which automations to use depending on your needs.

An Intro to Salesforce Automation

Before determining which automation best suits your business’s needs, you must first understand what automation means. These resources will help paint a clear picture of what the automation of processes, approvals, and tasks can look like for your organization. They aren’t just time savers. They can be game changers.

Why Should You Love Automation?
Check out this article highlighting the positive global impact of automation across different industries and countries. Review the customer story on how automation helped digitize an approval process during a time of especially high-volume requests. After reading this, you will understand why automation is so beneficial!

Intro to Automation
Explore this documentation to get a high-level overview of the different automation methods.

Automation Tools

Salesforce provides multiple automation tools depending on the level of complexity needed to achieve your goals. These resources will help you understand which automation tool will best help you reach your business objectives.

Automation Tool: Features
Scroll down within this article to check out the matrix for a breakdown of all the features and actions supported within each automation tool: Approvals, Flow Builder, Einstein Next Best Action, and Apex.

Automation Tool: Which One to Use
View this video from one of the leading cloud experts that walks you through each automation tool and when and why to use each one.

Architect Decision Guide
The Architect Decision Guide will help you evaluate the pros and cons of the different automation tools. Get recommendations from Salesforce product teams on which tools best address different use cases.

Automation Implementation

A hands-on approach is the best way to learn how to implement automation tools. Dig right in by exploring guided Trailhead modules that will help you understand the steps to enable these tools.

Flow Basics
Get to know Flow Builder, the primary tool for creating flows. Learn when to use flows to automate business processes.

Automate Approvals
Learn how you can automate simple approval processes using Flow Builder.

Automation Deep Dive

As you begin to think about your automation journey, it is useful to study use cases to help guide your automation strategy and energy. Check out these resources to learn how to take your automations even further than you imagined to streamline your business processes.

Building a Simple Flow
Explore this video to learn how to build a simple visual flow using Flow Builder for a donation request example via an input screen, fields, and choices to collect required customer information.

Five Pro Tips for Salesforce Flow
Follow these quick tips to get up and running with Salesforce Flow.

Troubleshooting Resources

Before rolling out your automations to users, make sure you validate and test them just like any other customization. Should you encounter a bug while validating, don’t worry! These resources will guide you through troubleshooting tips if you run into any blockers during the validation process.

Troubleshooting Flow Errors Using the Debug Button
Check out this helpful Salesforce video on how to fix errors using the Debug button in Flow Builder.

Flow Troubleshooting
Further your education with this Trailhead module to learn how to diagnose and fix common flow issues.

Go Further with Automation

Manage Productivity
Determine how much time you’re saving your team with the Process Automation Tracker in Salesforce AppExchange.

Flow Orchestration
Streamline complex workflows with Flow Orchestration. Our experts will guide you on rolling out multi-step processes that interact with multiple users.

Join the Customer Success Community
Connect with Salesforce experts and other Trailblazers like you. The community is a great place to ask questions, get answers, and share your experiences.

Become a Trailblazer
Consider blazing your own trail by completing this Trailhead superbadge on process automation.

Automation Use Case

StridePride makes comfortable sneakers, designed and customized for its customers. The company’s online retail business has grown rapidly in the past year domestically; as a result, they have decided to use Salesforce to help launch their sneakers in international markets.

Linda Rosenson, StridePride’s admin, needed to quickly set up Salesforce to create sales processes for all of the additional international markets. As Linda was creating these processes, the Sales Leaders asked her to include a discount on the sneakers if certain criteria were met to help promote sales for the new markets. The tricky part was, each market had its unique set of criteria and rules before the discount could be applied.

After mapping out each region’s unique criteria for the discounts, Linda determined that tracking this all manually or on a document for sales reps would be a logistical nightmare.

Linda began thinking of automation. She was determined to find a more efficient way to automatically apply the discounts if criteria were met, lessening the chance for human error or missteps. Her goal was to make the process as seamless and efficient as possible.

Because Linda had already reviewed the resources on choosing the right automation tool, she knew that Salesforce Flow made the most sense for her use case. This flow would help automate the discount by evaluating criteria based on customer inputs and then automatically applying the discount if applicable. She could even create or update records, create quotes, and send emails through flow elements.

She teamed up with StridePride’s business analyst to create a Salesforce Flow. Together, they had it up and running in no time.

Linda set up a meeting with the sales teams and their leaders to discuss the new automated method for discounts. She did an end-to-end demo of the complete checkout process and how the automation would automatically apply the discounts. The sales team was thrilled to learn how much time they would save by not having to manually track this!

As a result, StridePride seamlessly and successfully launched their sneakers to an international market. The company’s sales teams achieved efficiencies and were able to focus more on expanding further into other markets. Sales leaders were able to trace every step in the deal process, all made possible by automating the discount process with a simple flow.