Ramtin

About Ramtin

I am a Salesforce Certified Cloud Specialist with over 10 years of technology industry and consulting experience. I’ve led enterprise Salesforce implementations for some of the most respected companies in Australia. I have proven expertise and a track record of success helping customers successfully implement, integrate and receive business value from salesforce.com’s solutions, specifically Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Social Studio.

Posts by Ramtin Sohrabian:

Getting ready for Salesforce World Tour Sydney

12 February, 2018

A day of innovation and inspiration in Sydney

Attend the Salesforce World Tour 2018 for a day of innovation, inspiration, learning, and fun. Meet and hear from Salesforce’s community of Trailblazers, pioneers, and innovators, and discover how they’re blazing trails across their organisations.

Venue: International Convention Centre (ICC), Sydney, Australia.
Date and Time: Tuesday, March 6th, 8:00 a.m – 6:00 p.m.
Maps and Directions: https://goo.gl/maps/jenx6MwwYTn

Salesforce Events App

Find out how to use the Salesforce Events App to plan your day at the Salesforce World Tour Sydney on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 at the International Convention Centre (ICC).

Noble CX partners with Conga

20 August, 2017

It is with great pleasure we announce that Noble CX has partnered with Conga, to collaboratively offer their suite of solutions to our new and existing Salesforce customers.

Conga’s most popular solution, Conga Composer, allows you to create sophisticated documents, presentations and reports from Salesforce with data directly from your standard or custom objects. The Conga Suite will allow your team to simplify the challenging document generation maze and help you to streamline your processes and end user experience.

Use cases for Conga include:

Quickly generate complicated Quotes to help your sales team be more efficient
Create professional Proposals that automatically pull data from your Salesforce instance
Sharply decrease your payment cycle by streamlining your Invoice and Receipts process
Standardise your Contract process so you can close deals faster
Harness the power of your data with Internal Reports

Contact Noble CX today to learn how we can help you identify process bottlenecks and discover efficiency opportunities that you’ve felt but may have difficulty putting a finger on.

Take Salesforce to the next level with Conga

7 July, 2017

We work with companies from all industries that need some help optimising their Salesforce solutions. At Noble CX we help them tailor Salesforce to their systems, business processes and overall priorities.

At Noble CX we do just the same. Just look at Conga, a good friend we rely on to take our Salesforce instance to the next level by making it more responsive, effective and flexible.

Conga Composer Conga enhances the Salesforce experience by giving you better control over your data, documents, reports and contracts.

The product suite – ActionGrid, Composer, Novatus and Courier – draws information from Salesforce records and transforms the data into actionable items such as reports, contracts or other documents.

More so, let’s look at what Conga offers.

ActionGrid – Accelerating your CRM starts with good data management. ActionGrid allows you to turn the Salesforce data lists into a spreadsheet-like format so you can edit, preview and filter the data on an easy-to-use interface.

Composer – Conga Composer makes document creation smoother. Many large organisations are data-driven and draw from hundreds of data fields to create documents such as:

Invoices
Proposals
Purchase orders
Work orders
Other forms

Using Excel to create these forms takes significant time and energy.

With Conga Composer, you can create customised templates, and skip over the manual data input by using real-time data retrieval to automatically insert the data fields, and data can be merged from the Salesforce Classic or Lightning interfaces.

Novatus – Conga Novatus is a comprehensive contract management solution – better known as CLM (contract lifecycle management) this tool allows you to administer all aspects of the contract lifecycle – the generation, distribution and storage. The platform facilitates all types of contracts, including:

Sales contracts
Business contracts
Employment contracts
Letters of Acceptance
NDAs and MSAs

Composer also allows you to make deals faster as it integrates with leading eSignature providers.

Courier – Conga Courier has the ability to dive deeper into the Salesforce dataset and create robust reports. Dynamic output with tables, images, charts, custom fonts, graphs, watermarks, global languages and currencies, Courier allows you to email Salesforce reports to people inside and outside your organisation, customising the content, format and schedule.

We’ve helped empower many of our clients with Conga which allows them to take Salesforce to a new level.

To learn more about the ways in which we can help you, contact Noble CX today.

How you can get $25,200 AUD worth of CRM licences for free

9 June, 2017

Yes, you read that right… $25,200 AUD per year worth of CRM licenses for free!

I thought I must put a dollar value on this program as we may all miss the point that what a valuable offer this is.

If you are a nonprofit organisation and looking for a CRM to start managing your donors or looking to replace your current CRM, keep reading this post because we have some exciting news for you.

As an eligible nonprofit organisations you receive 10 subscriptions of Enterprise Edition (costed at $210 AUD/month per user) at no cost through the Power of Us program. You will also get deep discounts on additional subscriptions if you need additional licenses.

Overview of the Program

Through the Power of Us program, nonprofit organisations and education institutions can get access to Salesforce products and resources.

The Power of Us Program includes:

10 donated Enterprise Edition Sales or Service Cloud subscriptions
Discounts on additional subscriptions, products and/or services from Salesforce.org
Discounts on Salesforce training
Discounts on Salesforce events
Access to nonprofit and education specific user groups, events and webinars
Discounts on participating Apps and consulting partners from the AppExchange

Eligibility

Salesforce.org serves organisations that are legally recognised as charitable, nonprofit, nongovernmental or social change organisation in the country that they are located. This also includes nonprofit education organisations and institutes. In Australia applicants need to have ACNC Registration or DGR status.

To be eligible your organisation must provide legal documentation that states you are recognised as a charitable, nonprofit, nongovernmental or social change organisation. This also includes nonprofit education organisations.

You can read more about eligibility criteria here.

Steps to Apply for the Grant

Here are the steps:

You first need to sign up for the appropriate trial org by going to this page.
After you sign up for the trial version you want you will need to log into the Power of Us Hub to fill out the form to apply for the Power of Us Program.
After you fill out the form you will need to wait to hear back. You will receive a reply within 5-7 business days. Please make sure you have all nonprofit documentation ready and scanned.

We can help

If you have any questions or need help with any of the steps involved in the process, we are here to help.

Click here to contact us with any questions.

Free Google Advertising for Nonprofits

12 March, 2017

I don’t think there is a nonprofit that hasn’t had to worry about budgeting for advertising. In this post you’ll find everything you need to know about the Google Grant Program for nonprofit organisations.

The Google Ad Grants Program gives nonprofits the chance to advertise on Google AdWords at no cost to the nonprofit. This program gives qualified organisations USD$10,000 per month in AdWords spend to be used to promote their missions and initiatives on Google.com.

Google Ad Grants are a great way to gain some advertising funds to get your nonprofit’s name and the great things you do out into the community.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is Google paid advertising product. Ads typically include four lines of text, including a headline that links to your website.

You’ll use keywords to target your ads, selecting a set of words related to the services you’d like to advertise. Then, when people search on Google using the words or phrases you picked, your text ads can appear alongside or above the search results.

Google Sponsor a Child AdWords

Google Ad Grants

Google Ad Grant is an AdWords account with a USD$10,000 cap. AdWords lets you create text-based ads and associate them with different keywords. You can create other types of campaigns and set the target based on other things like audience or device, but Ad Grants are set to target keywords only.

When someone searches for a keyword you’ve chosen on Google, your ad could appear above or below the organic search results for that phrase. As you may know AdWords operates on a bidding system. The maximum bid you can place on any given keyword will be USD$2. So if the minimum bid is higher than that (usually due to its popularity), your ad won’t be shown for that particular keyword. But when the minimum bid is less than USD$2, your ads will appear below the paying ads that are included for any particular keyword phrase.

Google Grants run as long as your organisation remains actively engage with its Grants AdWords account, however there are some restrictions with Google Grants:

The maximum bid you can place is USD$2 (AUD$2.65)
Daily budget is USD$330 (AUD$437.50), equivalent to around USD$10,000 (AUD$13,257) per month
Only keyword based ads campaigns (no images or videos)
Only text ads can be used

Who is eligible for Google Grants

The Nonprofit organisation must exist in one of the countries listed here. The Nonprofit ogranisation must also hold a current, valid charity status and acknowledge.

Google Grants notes that organisations must be funds or institutions that have either been endorsed as such in Australia by the Commissioner of Taxation or “prescribed charitable institutions” in the Income Tax Assessment Regulations of 1997 that have Deductible Gift Recipient status to be chosen for the programme.

How to apply for Ad Grants

You can apply for Google Grants by filling in the form here. Make sure you have all the required documents (DGR Status) ready before you start the process as you will need to attach the documents to the application.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about the Google Grant program or need help to setup your account.

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) Reports Workbook

The New, The Awesome, The Great NPSP Reporting Workbook is Out!

9 March, 2017

On Monday this week we published a blog post and highlighted the importance of reports and to be very specific annual reports for nonprofits.

As promised this post focuses on the new reports that are available in NPSP, actually 67 of them – right out of the box at no additional cost.

Nonprofit Salesforce Admins and Development personnel are being asked to provide more and more data about their organisations, but seem to have less and less time to prepare reports. Nonprofit Success Pack harnesses the power of Salesforce reports and dashboards to deliver data to you—right out of the box.

What’s in it for you

In the extensive list of NPSP reports, you’ll find reports that track Donors and giving, Grants, Memberships, Campaign ROI, and more.

Salesforce NPSP Lightning Reports You can use these reports just as they are, or customise them to meet your specific needs. Of course if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can always create new reports using the Report Builder, but we recommend customising the out-of-box reports before you go that route…

If you’ve been using NPSP for a while, you’ve probably used the older reports in the NPSP 3.0 report folders. We strongly recommend that you take advantage of the new reports available in NPSP version 3.90 (February 2017).

All in all, NPSP offers 67 new reports and 4 new dashboards.

Available Reports & Dashboards

The sections below provide a complete list of the reports and dashboards available with NPSP.

NPSP Constituent Reports

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NPSP Fundraising Reports

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NPSP Dashboards

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How Can We Help

Feel free to get in touch with us if you would like to learn more about these reports or find out about your current version of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).

We are here to help you to upgrade to the latest version of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).

Download the Complete Workbook

The Importance of Annual Reports for NFP

The Importance of Annual Reports for Nonprofits

6 March, 2017

Even though nonprofit organisations aren’t required by law to publish annual reports, most nonprofit leaders recognise the value annual reports can provide. A well-written annual report will help you demonstrate your accomplishments to current and future donors, cultivate new partnerships, and recognise important people.
Annual reports can be used to highlight a nonprofit’s mission and impact, thank volunteers and supporters, and make a case for donating to the organisation.

New research shows that 90% of donors say it is important to know how their donations are impacting the causes they support.

On the 14th of December 2016, Salesforce.org, the philanthropic arm of Salesforce, released its “2016 Connected Nonprofit Report,” surveying more than 1,500 U.S. adults who have donated and/or volunteered at nonprofits in the past 12 months, to understand the current state of giving and how people engage with nonprofit organisations.

There is a cultural shift happening in the nonprofit sector where the measure of nonprofit success is no longer based on the amount of dollars raised, but on the impact they’re making on the communities they serve. Consequently, donors and volunteers expect more transparency, and want to know how their time and money is impacting the causes they support. Salesforce.org’s “2016 Connected Nonprofit Report” found that 90% of donors think it’s important to understand how their money is impacting the nonprofits they support, but more than half (52%) don’t know how their donations are being used. The study was conducted online by Harris Poll, please visit: http://salesforce.org/connected-nonprofit-report-16

Key Report Findings:

Nonprofits could be losing volunteer time and money by not engaging with their constituents in more personalised and modern ways

65% of donors would donate more money annually if they felt their nonprofits really knew them—and 75% of volunteers would give more time annually
80% of donors and/or volunteers believe that their nonprofit only somewhat knows or does not at all know them or their personal preferences
Millennial supporters (aged 18-34) agree that they would engage more with nonprofits (46%)—and would be more likely to donate (41%)—if they had a mobile app

What’s Next

If you are using Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), we have some good news for you. We are publishing another blog later this week to highlight the new reports available in the latest release and how you can take advantage of those 67 new reports… Stay tuned!

The Power of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) Data Import Tool

8 February, 2017

NPSP Data Import Overview

If you have thousands of data rows in existing spreadsheets or other databases, importing your data into the
right Salesforce takes a lot of work. The good news is with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) tools described in this guide, you don’t have to tackle this complex, time-consuming project without some help.

The NPSP provides tools to streamline the process and automate the translation of your data into Salesforce objects.

If you’re used to working in Excel, think of Salesforce as many, many spreadsheets, all related to each other in specific ways, and all stored on the Internet. Salesforce is like a gigantic database in the cloud, and we commonly refer to the various “parts” of Salesforce as objects (contacts, household accounts, donation opportunities, and so on). You can see these as the tabs across the top of your Salesforce organisation.

Even with the help of these tools, you need to budget enough time to go through the data import process properly. Data import is not something that can normally be done in an hour or two— it could take up to a month or more to go through all of the required steps, depending on the quality and quantity of your data.

How does the process work

To get the data into Salesforce, follow these steps.

1- Clean up your existing data.

Do this in your existing spreadsheet, database, or wherever you currently maintain your donor data. Getting your data in great shape for import is the most important step. It’s also the most labor-intensive.

Maintaining data quality is hard. Your data may have been entered in different ways by different people, and may be incomplete or out-of-date. Additionally, you may not have been able to enforce data validation rules or consistent formatting with your previous tools.

As you make the transition, your data must absolutely be highly structured and in the required format . Otherwise, Salesforce will reject it. Your data can’t have inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and duplicates. Invest the time now to clean up your data and your organisation will reap the benefits for years to come.

2- Transfer your existing data into a template that’s specially designed to structure your donor data for import.

Use the spreadsheet file called NPSP Data Import Template.csv provided by Salesforce.org.

You can download the template from here. Keep in mind that the fields in this template mirrors the fields in the NPSP Data Import custom object. If you have additional custom fields on Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities etc, they must be added to the template.

3- Upload data from the template into the NPSP Data Import custom object.

Use the Salesforce Data Import Wizard (in Salesforce Setup), or an external data import application (such as Salesforce Data Loader, DemandTools, Apsona, Jitterbit, Informatica, etc.) to upload your data to Salesforce. (This is the first part of the two-part import process.)

4- Verify the uploaded data in Salesforce.

Check the fields in the NPSP Data Import custom object to make sure that your data uploaded correctly under NPSP Data Imports tab.

5- Run the NPSP Data Importer tool to complete the import.

Start the NPSP Data Importer tool, which takes the organised data from the custom object and imports it into the NPSP as multiple objects, including contacts, accounts, and opportunities.

By the time you’re done, your data will reside in the following multiple Salesforce objects created from the import process.

Contacts (which normally translate to donors in the NPSP)
Accounts (Households or Organisations in the NPSP)
Opportunities (Donations, grants, and the like in the NPSP)

This illustration shows you what the data import process ultimately looks like:

If you need to know more about Salesforce NPSP Data Import or get help for your data import contact us today.

Top 5 New Features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud January 2017 Release

19 January, 2017

It’s almost time for the next Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release. The upcoming release will go live on 27 January 2017.

You can sign up here for the webinar which will be held on 9/2/2017, 06:00:00 AEDT.

Here are the top 5 new features that we love:

Email Studio

1- Impression Region Tracking Name Now Visible and Editable during Email Creation

When you build emails with dynamic content, the Impression Region Tracking Name appears under each rule. This setting lets you track the performance of dynamic content blocks, rules, and content either in the current email or throughout different emails by leveraging Impression Region Tracking Reports, found in the Reports application.

Impression region tracking name

2- Impression Region Tracking Name Now Visible and Editable during Email Creation

Customise the rule name in dynamic content blocks in the email creation flow. Edit the rule name to instantly update the name in the Impression Region Tracking Name and gain a clear understanding of your rules.

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Edit your rule name when you create your rule

Edit your rule name when viewing your dynamic content

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Automation Studio

3- Lightning Overview Enhancement

BOOM! Lightning experience will be rolled out to Automation Studio in this release. A new modern design brings alignment with the other Salesforce Clouds and Marketing Cloud applications. Users will notice improved performance and overall usability.

Lightning Experience in Automation Studio

4- Automation Skip Notification

You will now receive email notifications to alert you when a scheduled run of an automation is skipped, usually because a prior run is still processing. The email provides the name of the automation as well as the scheduled start time of the skipped run.

Lightning Experience in Automation Studio

Journey Builder

4- Journey Builder History Tab

This release replaces the Journey Builder Contacts tab in the main Journey Builder navigation bar with a Journey Builder History tab. The new History tab gives you a running status of all of your journeys. Confirm that your journey is functioning as expected or review information about issues that may occur.

Journey Builder History Tab

To view the full product release notes go here.

It’s almost time for the next Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release. The upcoming release will go live on 27 January 2017.

You can sign up here for the webinar which will be held on 9/2/2017, 06:00:00 AEDT.

Here are the top 5 new features that we love:

Email Studio

1- Impression Region Tracking Name Now Visible and Editable during Email Creation

Impression region tracking name

2- Impression Region Tracking Name Now Visible and Editable during Email Creation

Edit your rule name when you create your rule

Edit your rule name when viewing your dynamic content

Automation Studio

3- Lightning Overview Enhancement

Lightning Experience in Automation Studio

4- Automation Skip Notification

Lightning Experience in Automation Studio

Journey Builder

4- Journey Builder History Tab

Journey Builder History Tab

To view the full product release notes go here.

Tips for Successful Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

15 January, 2017

Shopping cart abandonment is a natural part of the eCommerce buying cycle and abandoned cart emails are a conversion optimisation marketing strategy that online stores use to remind their browsing customers who exit their website with outstanding items in their shopping cart.

Abandoned cart emails offer a gentle reminder of shoppers’ initial intent and ensure that the online store doesn’t get forgotten. Whether you love them or not, abandoned shopping cart emails are an effective staple of any successful email marketing program.

According to SaleCycle, nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to purchases back on site. You have to understand that customers often abandon their carts without meaning to do so lexapro medication. People abandon their shopping carts for varies reasons, such as slow load times, excessive shipping charges or simply not being ready to buy yet.

The best way to combat the SPAM folder is to send highly segmented abandoned cart emails that your customers actually want to open.

There are many approaches you can take to abandoned cart emails. Some commonly utilised approaches include:

Comply with CAN-SPAM Act: Treat abandoned cart email as commercial and provide the receipts with options to unsubscribe easily. Aside from that, follow best practices for CAN-SPAM compliance. Never use misleading subject lines or envelope information and honor opt-out requests as quickly as you can.
Multiple emails: Sending out one email a few hours after the cart is abandoned and at least one more in the days that follow is a standard practice.
Offer similar products: Besides featuring the product abandoned in the cart, use the abandoned cart message as an opportunity to showcase alternative products that may catch the prospect’s eye.
Segment Abandoned Carts for Better Targeting & Filtering: Segmentation can be used for more granular targeting of your ideal customers and also for filtering out customers you may not want to send to. For example, you would want to filter out customers in the geographies that you don’t ship to.
Personalised content: Abandoned cart emails should be tailored to the customer and the products they left in the shopping cart. Try different combinations of referencing these elements in the subject, headline, and body. Pictures of the items in question are generally also effective in improving click rates.
Coupons and discounts: Market research has shown that most frequent reason customers drop out of checkout is because of some anomalies with shipping cost calculation at checkout. Sending out a coupon for 5%-10% off the sale or even waiving the shipping fee can be the small enticement customers need to return and make a purchase.

According to SaleCycle, nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to purchases back on site. You have to understand that customers often abandon their carts without meaning to do so. People abandon their shopping carts for varies reasons, such as slow load times, excessive shipping charges or simply not being ready to buy yet.

The best way to combat the SPAM folder is to send highly segmented abandoned cart emails that your customers actually want to open.

There are many approaches you can take to abandoned cart emails. Some commonly utilised approaches include:

Comply with CAN-SPAM Act: Treat abandoned cart email as commercial and provide the receipts with options to unsubscribe easily. Aside from that, follow best practices for CAN-SPAM compliance. Never use misleading subject lines or envelope information and honor opt-out requests as quickly as you can.
Multiple emails: Sending out one email a few hours after the cart is abandoned and at least one more in the days that follow is a standard practice.
Offer similar products: Besides featuring the product abandoned in the cart, use the abandoned cart message as an opportunity to showcase alternative products that may catch the prospect’s eye.
Segment Abandoned Carts for Better Targeting & Filtering: Segmentation can be used for more granular targeting of your ideal customers and also for filtering out customers you may not want to send to. For example, you would want to filter out customers in the geographies that you don’t ship to.
Personalised content: Abandoned cart emails should be tailored to the customer and the products they left in the shopping cart. Try different combinations of referencing these elements in the subject, headline, and body. Pictures of the items in question are generally also effective in improving click rates.
Coupons and discounts: Market research has shown that most frequent reason customers drop out of checkout is because of some anomalies with shipping cost calculation at checkout. Sending out a coupon for 5%-10% off the sale or even waiving the shipping fee can be the small enticement customers need to return and make a purchase.

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