Dear Salesforce Santa

It’s December and we are slowly but surely getting closer to Christmas, whether you celebrate Christmas the 24th, 25th or maybe not at all. Now I am sure we can all agree that Christmas is a time for family, friends, love and kindness. It’s also the time a year where million of kids sit down write a list of wishes and sent of to the North Pole or Greenland as I was brought up to believe was the home of Santa Claus or “Julemanden” as I knew him.

I might not believe in Santa Claus and his elfs anymore but I like the idea of sitting down and reflecting on what you really want whether it being items that can be bought or personal goals. When it comes to actual items I am personally really bad at following lists; for instance when I buy Christmas presents for my niece and nephew I find it hard to follow long list of desirable items, mostly becuase I don’t know what half of it is. If only Barbie dolls and Lego took up the whole list, I know that from my own childhood, anyway I do try buy at least one thing from their list. With that in mind, I will make a cup of coffee and reflect on my list of features for Salesforce Santa. And hopefully Salesforce Santa is out there reading my blog and willing to grant me just one wish. So here we go…

Dear Salesforce Santa

I have been very good this year trying to help the community in the ways I can. Please if you and your little helpers could work on the following for Christmas (I don’t expect it to be delivered this Christmas but before the next would be great!). I know you are busy so I will keep my list to the top 3 for Pardot and Einstein Analytics.

Pardot

1. Make the WYSIWYG for email and landing pages more flexible. A lot of work has been put into Engagement Studio, and don’t get me wrong I love that builder it is what every B2B marketer didn’t know they needed. But get the ease of that building experience into the other studios. I would love to be able to build content blocks I could reuse, drag new blocks onto an email or landing page to instantly extend the layout – of course while being responsive.
2. Have multi split or randome split in a Engagement Program. Today we have rules and they are great to do segmentation of your prospect within your program. However, it always boils down to a yes or no answer. Sometimes I would like to define a random split to see which of my further paths are most effective. Or maybe I want to split based on four different grades, I can still look at this by creating multiple rules, but the complexity quickly goes up.
3. Let me use prospect related data in segmentation and “mail-merge”. So we have a lot of data in Salesforce spread on several objects and Pardot can help influence a prospect in all the stages of the prospect lifecycle. Now let’s say I want to let a prospect know that their renewal for a product is up, if I have all the information on the contact level I can put it in an email, but if it’s on the asset or opportunity object I cannot leverage that information. But wow it would be great if I could.

Einstein Analytics

1. More powerful formulas in the platform. I have my roots in the core Salesforce platform, learning Salesforce I use to hate creating formula fields as a non-developer, but now I love them! Let me have the same powerful capabilities in compare tables, recipes and dataflows.
2. Filter logic options as we know from Salesforce operational reporting. This was actually a question I got this year at Dreamforce and I realized there is no easy fix for non SAQL savy people. It would be great if I could easily define my filter logic, my “AND” and “OR” combinations.
3. Make XMD available in the UI. To be honest this has been done more in the latest releases, but I still very much depend on Wave Labs (if I am still allowed to call it Wave). It’s a quick way for me to modify all aspects of my XMD, both those available and not available in the UI without the app. And it would be even greater if I could have a XMD for the dataset as well as for the dashboard.

One last wish…

For the elfs that make Pardot and Einstein Analytics talk together I wish you could make it possible for me to customize the dataflow, so I can add custom and default fields that are important to me, which would open up for endless opportunities.

Love

Rikke Hovgaard

P.S. I promise to give milk and cookies should you come by, but I am afraid you’ll have to knock on the door as I am not lucky enough to have a chimney.

Written by

Rikke Hovgaard

I have worked with CRM Analytics since 2015 (back then Wave). I started this blog to help make the journey to master CRM Analytics easy by documenting tips, tricks & cool solutions.

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