The ultimate guide to salesforce automation in 2023

Salesforce is a cloud-based software as service provider that offers a wide range of solutions to help organizations run their business smoothly. Salesforce started with customer relationship management and expanded to sales cloud, marketing cloud, analytics, business process automation, etc.

Overview of Salesforce Automation

Salesforce automation is the process of using salesforce to automate any business process or task and reduce manual effort. This can include tasks such as lead management, contact management, forecasting, and territory management. Salesforce automation can help a company improve its sales performance by increasing efficiency and accuracy and reducing manual effort.

Who can use Salesforce Automation?

Salesforce automation can be used by both Admin and Developers to automate various business processes. However, there are multiple ways to build an automated process, so it is important to choose the best method based on the specific needs of the process. Salesforce automation features provide a powerful and versatile way to declaratively develop automated processes; Salesforce has a tool for every need.

Use the Salesforce Platform Flow Builder, Process Builder, and Approval Process to automate processes without writing code. Use Batch Apex, Apex Scheduler, and Triggers to automate processes using code.

Tools for Salesforce Automation

Flow Builder

Flow Builder is an incredibly powerful tool that Salesforce Admins can use to automate complex processes and workflows. Salesforce Admins can use flow builder to automate actions that would traditionally require coding, making their jobs easier and more efficient.

For example, if you need to perform mass updates across multiple unrelated records, or add complex logic to opportunity conversion, Flow Builder is the perfect tool for the job.

If you want to learn more about flow, The Complete Guide to Flow is a great resource.

Process Builder

Process Builder is a powerful Salesforce tool that allows you to automate actions or evaluate criteria for a record. With Process Builder, you can use simple 'If/Then' logic to add automation to your Salesforce environment, making your workflows more efficient and effective.

The repetitive tasks you assign, the emails you send, and other record updates are all vital parts of your standard processes. You can configure flows or processes to do this automatically, which we strongly recommend. Flow Builder is the best option, but Process Builder can also get the job done.

Approval Processes

When a person needs to give approval for something at your business, that is a good time to use a Salesforce Approval Process. This can be used for things like opportunities, quotes, campaigns, leads, and custom objects like new product requests, Salesforce change requests, referral requests, and more.

The approval process in Salesforce automates the approval of records. It specifies the steps involved in the approval process, including requesting approval from the appropriate party and taking the next actions based on the response.

Einstein Next Best Action

With Einstein Next Best Action, you can automate recommendations and actions for your users, displayed at the right time, to meet your unique criteria. Develop a strategy that applies your business logic to refine those recommendations, ensuring that the right people see the right offers.

All organizations receive a free monthly allowance of 5000 requests. If you exceed this limit, Salesforce will contact you to discuss your usage pattern and pricing. There's no need to worry, though - with Einstein NBA automation on your side, you're guaranteed to get the best possible deal!

Flow Orchestration

Flow Orchestration, formerly Orchestrator, enables you to create orchestrations: multi-step processes that interact with multiple users. An orchestration is a sequence of stages, each of which is comprised of a series of steps. A stage can contain interactive and background steps.

You can create advanced approval processes, task lists for groups, or any other processes that require multiple interrelated steps. For example, you can consider employee onboarding, which requires a new employee to go through a multi-level, multi-user approval process to get equipment and access to company resources.

Batch Apex

Batch Apex is a powerful automation tool for processing large amounts of data. Let's say you want to process 1 million records using Batch Apex. The execution logic of the batch class is called once for each batch of records you are processing, making it a highly efficient way to process large amounts of data.

Batch Apex is an asynchronous process that helps you to stay within platform limits when processing large jobs. This is especially useful for data cleansing or archiving tasks that involve a large number of records.

Apex Scheduler

With the Apex Scheduler, you can delay the execution to run Apex classes at a specified time. By taking advantage of the scheduler and writing an Apex class that implements the Schedulable interface, you can schedule it for execution on a specific schedule. This makes it easy to manage your time and ensure that your classes are executed when you need them.

You can also use Apex Scheduler to schedule Batch Apex for long-running tasks.

The Apex Scheduler for Salesforce automation is a great tool that can help you automate your sales process. It allows you to schedule tasks and events, so you can focus on your sales goals. It also provides you with reports and analytics, so you can track your progress and improve your performance.

Apex Triggers

Salesforce is a powerful CRM tool, but it can be even more powerful with the use of Apex triggers. Apex triggers are pieces of code that execute automatically when certain conditions are met. This makes them ideal for automating processes in Salesforce.

For example, let's say you want to automatically send a thank-you email to a customer after they make a purchase. With an Apex trigger, you can do just that. The trigger would fire whenever a new purchase is made, and then it would send a thank-you email.

Apex triggers give you the ability to do custom actions before or after events to records in Salesforce, like insertions, updates, deletions, and more. With Apex triggers, you can keep your data clean and tidy, just like a well-managed database system.

Trailhead that can help Salesforce automation with trigger

Salesforce automation with Apex can help your business run more efficiently. By automating tasks that are typically done manually, you can free up time for your staff to focus on more important tasks. In addition, automating tasks can help to improve accuracy and eliminate errors.

The Apex scheduler can be used to automate a variety of tasks, including salesforce data entry, lead assignment, and follow-up tasks. By using the Apex scheduler, you can customize when and how often these tasks are performed. This can help you to optimize your workflow and ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner.

Here is how you can generate PDF on a button click with Apex and visualforce.

New Updates in Salesforce Winter '23 Release

Workflow Rules Are Blocked

As Salesforce transitions to the more powerful automation of flow, the ability to create new workflow rules will be blocked starting in Winter '23. (Oct 2022)

You can still activate, deactivate, and edit existing workflow rules. To create new automation, use flows.

Flow Builder Updates

Salesforce has made numerous enhancements to Flow Builder in its winter 23 release, some of which are listed below:

• Cut and paste feature for flow elements
• Easily find incoming go-to connected elements in one place now
• Use an enhanced formula builder in Flow Formula-type resources and the Collection Filter element.
• Record-triggered flows for new and updated records now support the ISCLONE formula function.
• New Operators for Flow:  In and Not In
• Generate flow choices options from External Data
• Launch ScreenFlow with LWC and many more.

Conclusion

In summary, Salesforce is a powerful platform that enables organizations to streamline and automate their sales, marketing, and customer service operations. Its wide range of automation tools, such as Flow Builder, Process Builder, Einstein Next Best Action, and Approval Processes, allows businesses to manage customer data, automate workflows, and improve productivity and efficiency.

Salesforce Automation can bring many benefits to an organization such as saving time and money by automating repetitive and manual tasks, providing faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries, and making better decisions by providing real-time data and analytics on customer interactions and sales performance.

In the Salesforce Winter '23 Release, there are new updates such as the blocked workflow rules, updates on the Flow Builder, and other new features that will help the user to improve their processes even more.

As technology continues to evolve, Salesforce Automation will continue to be important for organizations looking to improve their sales, marketing, and customer service operations. As the world becomes more digital, the use of automation tools will become even more critical for businesses looking to remain competitive in today's fast-paced market.