Salesforce Flow with Andy Engin
Salesforce announced this year that going forward Salesforce flow is going to become the dominant process tool in Salesforce with Workflow & Process Builder process tools being retired.
I think of Andy Engin as one of the masters of Salesforce Flow. My go-to guy on anything Flow related, so it made sense to pick his brains in this month’s Salesforce Posse to dig into how he started in Salesforce, his experience with teaching Flow to 1000s of people across the globe and the future of the Technology.
- Exclusive cheapest ever discount at $9.99 for Andy’s Salesforce Flow Training
- Andy’s Blog: SalesforceBreak.com
- Flow Support Slack
Listen From:
Watch
Read the Transcript
Francis
So welcome to the Salesforce posse recorded on the 18th of March 2022. And I am very pleased to eventually have on the podcast, Andy Engin. Did I get it right?
Andy
That’s perfect.
Francis
So welcome to the Salesforce posse recorded on the 18th of March 2022. And I am very pleased to eventually have on the podcast, Andy Engin. Did I get it right?
Andy
That’s perfect.
Francis
So thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, I just have been, we’ve been meaning to chat for ages, but kind of circumstances never quite transpired. My kids got ill. And then we had to postpone and it just kind of went round around the circles a little bit. And eventually here, we managed to get on but I’ve been meaning to get you on for quite a while. But just to start off, I’d love to know like, because you’ve only be well, you’ve been in what it looks like in the Salesforce ecosystem relatively recently ish. Not like 10 years or a decade or anything like that. And I just wondered, you know, how did you get into the Salesforce ecosystem?
Andy
Yeah, well, first of all, Francis, thank you very much for having me. I’m super excited. Being here and telling my story to your audience. Now. I’m a very, very different guy. Like my background and history is quite different. Now. I was born in Turkey raised in Turkey. I went to a German Junior High in high school, I learned everything in German language for eight years. My gym teacher was German.
Francis
So did you know German before you went to the school, where were you?
Andy
No no, so I mean, for the last six years, we found also English. And like we’ve, you know, we had all kinds of other classes that we could take. I always wanted to go to the United States, you know, get better in English and also advance my studies, I decided to stay for my undergrad studies in Turkey in Istanbul, I finished industrial engineering. And in 1994, I went to University of Florida from Istanbul, Turkey, and University of Florida is in Gainesville. And I finished engineering management there.
And I met my wife, also in Gainesville. And you know, my wife was also studying, doing the same program with me. And then I ended up working for American Express in Fort Lauderdale for about three and a half years, four years. And I always wanted to move back to Turkey. And I proposed to my wife, Amy, and I said, you know, I want to move to Turkey with you.
And we stayed in Turkey for 18 years, we have wonderful two kids. Our daughter is now at University of Florida in one full circle. And our son just qualified to go there. But you know, he qualified for a couple of schools so he hasn’t made his decision yet. Right. So we never planned on moving to the United States, we were going to stay in Istanbul, Turkey, but you know, especially the education system and the way things were going with universities and the state of universities got us a little bit concerned. And we always wanted to have the kids have the same education we’ve had in the United States. So as they approached college age, we said let’s make this change. And my background as it relates to Salesforce and anything technical is I mean, I’m the type of a kid who always played with computers, right from the very first,my first computer was a spectrum. In fact, you know, you’ll know spectrum, right? Yeah. So I was, I mean, I grew up like typing in basic games from books in.
Francis
finding about and realizing you’ve got the state somewhere having …
Andy
exactly. After hours, you find out it doesn’t work. Yeah. And then all those games on tape and things like that, you know, I’m not gonna go back to that I sound super old when I do that. But
Francis
hitting play on the tape recorder to load the game go down to the Sweet Shop coming back and realizing it’s crashed halfway through playing.
Andy
Yeah, but when I started my professional career, I started doing like, process analysis and quality stuff, some simulations and you know, I quickly got promoted to a project manager position. And then after that, I got involved with service in call centers. And I was a call center guy for almost all my life. After that. And the last position I fell in Istanbul, Turkey. I was running the Turkish arm of Teleperformance, an international giant for BPO and call center operations and I had close to 3000 staff to about I think it At time 36 to $38 million in revenue every year. And, you know, when we decided to move to the United States, it didn’t really work out with the employer at the time because they exist actually in the United States that I take a position over on the side. So I said, I want to go more technical. And my introduction to Salesforce. I mean, first of all, I’ve been involved with CRM systems almost all my life, you know, I worked on Siebel, I had staff working on Siebel, I had, I used to write access databases, like when you know, that was a thing, even for, you know, to just keep a record of all my personnel in the call center. Yeah. So and even I even taught like an elective class at the University about social CRM at some point. And I, I always kept track of different technologies that was that that was coming along. And more than
10 years ago, I think it’s been like maybe 12 years, I had a small Sales Team at this call center company that is owned by the biggest telco in Turkey. And when I was managing them, I implemented Salesforce, right? At that time, the telco was implementing Siebel, and was having a tremendously difficult time like everybody else. And you know, they didn’t have the time to spend on us to implement any kind of CRM for our players. So I just plugged in my credit card from all the way in Turkey.I was probably one of the first clients of Salesforce in Turkey. Yeah, I started using Salesforce, we had a couple of very little partners, who helped us configure a couple of things. And we were on our way. And
Francis
it’s amazing how Salesforce just got into companies just that way by somebody just handing over their credit card, because their internal IT or whatever, you know,didn’t work. It’s like, yeah, yeah, here we go.
Andy
So when I decided to move to the United States, that happened in around 2017, in summer of 2017, my wife and kids moved, I was still working in Turkey. So I was traveling back and forth. I started studying for my admin certification, kind of like maybe October, November of 2017. I moved to the United States. In March, I got admin certified in April. And then I established in a limited liability company, then I made that limited liability company a Salesforce partner.So then I started getting more and more certifications.I mean, every I think everybody has a superpower, right? Everybody has a superpower. We are good in some things. And we are not good in some other things. And it used to be in the past and you know, you focused on your weaknesses and tried to get stronger and that’s not the way people are. You know, I think my superpower is I can learn things by myself. You know, like so I’m a self taught 12 times certified now. I actually got slack admin certified.
Francis
Yeah, really. So
Andy
I wanted to change things up. So yeah. So 13 times certified. Like application architect. All self taught. And I was doing this business by myself. And I, you know, what, well, how did we get to flows? Right. You know, that was another question. Like I said, you know, I always had programming in my background, I’ve done some, I think MATLAB when I was doing my masters at University of Florida, I was doing some kind of nonlinear optimization on MATLAB, imagine. And, you know, I always had some kind of coding background, but you know, I didn’t really spend a lot of time like, typing code.
Francis
So when so, so yeah, so when you were using the Salesforce platform, was it still more declarative? You didn’t kind of get into the code side of Salesforce?
Andy
Well, yeah,I mean, I got platform developer one certified, right. And, you know, I did write some code and you know, I read some code, but you know, I cannot really imagine myself spending all my day in front of a computer typing stuff. I don’t know. I have I have … Anyways, I have attention issues anyway. Right. So. So I’m the type of guy who cannot stay focused very long time. I cannot, for example, read very long, boring books. You know, I’ve never been able to you know, I’m not that I’m not that guy. So when I found flow and I started playing with it, I’m like, this is really cool. This is what I want to do. And you know, I started playing with it and you know, it just felt natural. It was fit.It was a great fit for me. And I started focusing on it more and more. And I love helping in teaching people I said, let me just see whether people are gonna like my style, whether they can understand my Turkish, German, whatever. Whether the person.
Francis
So what was your motivation for because you’ve created an hour course on flow ,Salesforce flow? What was your motivation to create it?
Andy
Well, I mean, I believe in lucky coincidences, and I always believe in listening to people. I mean, I have actually another side, I’m in, I’m also an angel investor, I invested already, like into four startups, you know, one of them had to start, I have three. But I understand the startup mentality quite a bit. So. And I like that. So what I do is, I see what I like, and you know, I create, like a minimum viable product or whatever, you know, like for that project that I have, and I put it out there. And then I listen to feedback. And I evolve, right? Absolutely. into things I like, obviously, if I don’t like something, yeah, I’ll stop doing it. When I moved to the United States, I put a couple of things on Amazon sold a couple of things. I’m like, you know, this is not for me. I don’t like anything about this business, right? So when I started doing, I said, Okay, well, I’m going to create a class, like free training on.
And I was using, at that time, a platform called like a new startup called Super peer, where you could do live webcasts, and also record what you’re doing. So I decided to teach Salesforce flows in Turkish, and in English, I started both programs at the same time. And that was, I think,
was it January 2021, the recording is still on my YouTube channel,it’s actually quite popular. I mean, I have actually two YouTube channels. People don’t realize I release content. Yes. And I have also English content.
Francis
My students. Yeah, and like with yours as well, too. You know, you get students from all over the world, because you nearly have 3000 2000 students? Is it? I can’t remember now. Yeah, so nearly 3000 students. And so how, how is it different teaching… You literally carbon copy teaching? Do you get different questions like how is it different teaching it in Turkish than it is in English? Or the reactions of the students? And the question?
Andy
I mean, there are fundamental cultural differences. First of all, I mean, toward education toward the content, you know, the level of criticism and appreciation, they are quite different from one culture to another. So that’s, that’s the fundamental difference. First of all, the Turkish probably including me, is quite like perfectionist and quite critical.
But first time, I tweeted, I have also like a Turkish Twitter, you know, like, another handle when I tweet Turkish ones. When I first tweeted my Udemy class, the flow Udemy class in English to that audience, and there are a bunch of talented people who speak English. They watch the free introduction. And in the free introduction, there was like, subtitles, and you know, because they want to understand very well, when you’re a turkey speaker, you usually like to turn on subtitles so that you don’t miss anything. And the subtitles were automatically generated, and there was some odd words in it. And that was the first thing they responded to me , they said, like, well, great class, but you know, what the hell is this word? You know, you won’t get that from Americans. You know, that. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful that you don’t get that right. So it’s just different. I mean, I’m not saying it’s really bad. But the take is quite different. Obviously, the economic pressures and you know, what’s happening in that country is dominating everything, like people from Turkey, they really want to understand whether this is a viable career for them that they can adopt, and, you know, that will help them to get to a better income level, possibly even move out of the country for like a, like a different future. Right. So that’s, that’s what they are thinking, rather than possibly the skills first, first they want to understand what is the vision? Well, you know, where can I get to,right? And that’s very natural. But I mean, it’s been, well, how did I get to Udemy? That’s also quite important. So I taught this, these sessions and you know, I surveyed people, I got some feedback. And the feedback was phenomenal. You know, I mean, my first session, I think 80 plus people registered and 50 plus showed up. I couldn’t believe it. Because you know, I did it out of the blue. And then I put the videos out there.
People are watching it. I had this guy, I think he was from the UK, by the way, writing to me on LinkedIn, and I have his name somewhere, but I don’t have it memorized. He told me, Do you know, I’ve watched a lot of content about flow and whatever. And you know, I, I actually have a lot of Udemy classes as well. And nobody does this thing like you do. What you do is you get on there, and then you start doing a step by step. And as you do it, you tell us why you’re doing it. I mean, this is super valuable. And you just got to get this on Udemy.
Francis
I think I find that yeah, I find that with a slight difference with why don’t you just learn it on Trailhead? Why don’t you just, you know, and I think a lot of people it’s like, well, yeah, functionally, knowing how it
works, great. But actually, why do we use it? And what are the best practices for using this feature? Or this function? Or, you know, all these little gotchas, I think you get value out of, you know, a proper course, you know, so
Andy
yeah. And, you know, ask people, I’m like, do you understand me? Is the pace good? They said, it’s good. So I said, Okay, let me get this out there. And for a perfectionist like myself, it’s actually super hard to produce something like this.I produced it, it took me quite a bit of time. And when I put it out there, I didn’t even watch it. I’m like, you know, I can’t watch this, you know. And I watched myself, I watched this and I said the wrong word in it. I said, like, I have to correct this one, now. I have to get away from this. So for me, putting something out there on Udemy is much, much different. Because it’s free, I can leave some stuff on YouTube, that’s a little bit out of date, because I know people can find still value in that. But when I put something on Udemy, if it’s still for sale, and everybody has lifetime access. I feel obligated to
Francis
keep it fresh. Yeah, it is a constant job,
Andy
same person’s job to keep anything updated on Salesforce, especially related to flow, because our flow product team is like
Francis
really evolving.
Andy
Really evolving, I had to immediately change screens because they constantly keep changing screens, you know, they look different. Now.
Francis
I remember when I did my admin course, and they had the lightning had the sidebar to access all the objects and stuff. And then they flicked it to the top. But it was like, everything has changed.
Andy
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the feedback is phenomenal. It’s very, it’s awesome to watch that dashboard on Udemy. To the roadmap. Yeah, people signing up from Mauritius and New Zealand, I don’t know, it’s just
Francis
It is really fascinating. What I love doing is like reaching out, I do kind of success calls with students to find out more about them. And like just like week or two ago, just did one with a student in South Africa and another one in exact Mozambique or somewhere like that. And it is quite, it’s quite fascinating. Just finding out how Salesforce is evolving in their country, and their challenges and things with using or not using Salesforce. And it was quite interesting, just kind of I one of my students, they feel like they’re the utter cutting edge of Salesforce because they know everybody in the country that uses Salesforce, literally there’s like 10 of them. And they’ve got this kind of little community going on. Which I kind of felt like 12 years ago, when I started in Salesforce in the UK, it was all very brand new. Nobody knew what Salesforce was, whereas now you know, I can’t well, I was at my kids. A birthday party, one of my kids friends and one of the moms came up and said, Hey, you’re that sell Salesforce guy. And I was like, oh my
god, this is the world … You know, I never used to get that at all, you know, go to Dreamforce Yeah, but nowhere else. It’s just a little bit weird.
Andy
Yeah, before that at parties, you said you were involved with Salesforce. And they were like, what?
Francis
Yeah, exactly. What is cloud computing? What’s that?
Andy
Yeah, my story is vastly different. I’m the guy who just happened to be there and got interested in this and loved it, liked it. And I was on the surfboard when the tide went up, you know? Seriously. That’s how I that’s how I defined the whole thing. Because, you know, you you were actually there early on, and you were doing all the work and you’ve been through so many different interfaces and iterations but no, like, for example, I learned the details of process builder and workflow rules, I just knew very little because now I know there’s aneed for people to actually transfer their stuff like migrate their stuff from workflow rules and process builders to flow I, when I got involved with flow flow was pretty much like this, you know, like, not as capable, but still the same platform. I didn’t even work on the flow platform with the previous flash interface or whatever, you know, that they had before
Francis
I see, I was in when Salesforce first purchase because it was purchased from another company, I can’t even remember who it was. And actually, I remember being in the first one of the kind of partner training courses for this new product that was called flow at the time, it wasn’t called flow, or even know what it’s called, maybe it was flow. But yeah, it was very different. It was a separate application on your desktop that you had to build in and then save it up to Salesforce
Andy
I knew exactly what that tool was supposed to do. I didn’t know the tool, because I come from the call center environment, there was a wave of products that were created for you to script what the engines supposed to say, when you do
Francis
and Yeah, and actually, ironically,so before I got into Salesforce, I actually worked in a different CRM, which is all process driven, that very much focused on call center where it’s really scripted, and the screen pops to, you know, outbound call centers where the screen is popping constantly. It’s all timed and ranked, and all this kind of stuff. And it’s quite, it’s quite interesting now that Salesforce is moving from this record driven CRM, which was my kind of excitement when they first bought the flow product is how at last we’re moving away from this record driven CRM to this more process driven kind of CRM, where you could define really to kind of define those processes for call centers and things like that really well. But yeah, as you said, like workflow process builder, you know, they’re going the way of the dodo. You know, everybody’s going to need to upskill into flow. Is it the end of this year? Is it that workflows, you’re no longer be able to create new workflows? I think?
I’m not sure. possibly, maybe 23?
All right. Okay. Well, I usually announce it and freak everybody else out and everybody out and then push the data a little bit. So yeah, you’re probably right
Andy
I don’t know. But I mean, like, what the state that the migrate to flow tool is in? It doesn’t seem like they’re very close. I mean, they need to give them give people a tool first.
Francis
Yeah. So I was quite interested actually. Interested to get your feedback on it, because I was quite interested when, like the last the last week’s release before they put the… be able to order the flows.
Andy
Yeah, it was this, this release this, this release? Yeah,
Francis
yes. I was quite interested on why they release that now. Because, obviously, if you’re migrating workflows, and process builder processes over to flow, you need to keep the order the same. If you use the migration tool, right. Otherwise, they could reorder, and your execution could change, and fields that it would expect him to be filled out on and kind of your process breaks, right? But they released the feature already to order the flows. So if I set the order to be, I don’t know how it quite works, but say zero is, and I always want to fire this first, when you go to migrate the rest of your workflow and process builder processes. Surely, it’s then going to screw up the order? Because then you got yours in between? I don’t know how I don’t know quite how it’s gonna work.
Andy
So first of all, there is no guarantee the, you know, let me say this again. So first of all, the order of execution is not guaranteed on any of the automation tools. So if you have multiple workflow rules, multiple process builders in their multiple flows, like you know, you don’t really know what you’re
Francis
not guaranteed. Yeah.
Andy
if you convert a couple of workflow rules, a couple of process builders, or you rebuild them on the flow side, but you decide not to put them into one single flow, then you don’t really know what order they are gonna run it. And you don’t really need to, you don’t really have to use the execution order. Sequence number, whatever.
Francis
They’re connected within the flow, I suppose. Yeah, it’s not I mean, when you’re rebuilding into a single flow, or if you’re connecting,
Andy
no no,if you have multiple flows, right, you have multiple triggers on the same object. Let’s say you have five before save and five after save triggers. If you do not use the order of execution number, it’s going to actually do whatever it’s been doing. So
yeah, so it’s the same as having a process builder or workflow
you can keep doing what you what you’ve been doing, that’s fine. But if you really wanted to influence the order, then you can give it a number from one through 2000. And then that will define the order of execution. Now they advise you like, in any other area of Salesforce, if you if you get sequence numbers, we have that in CPQ. And a couple of other places, they advise you to use numbers 10 apart so that you can get the other bridge in between if you need to. So even in that case, divided by 10, you get about 200. Before save, and you get about 200. After save. And this is the interesting part, like the numbers from one through 1000.
Execute first. And then the … as far as I can remember, the triggers that don’t have any number assigned execute. And then the numbers from 1000 to 2000. Execute.Yeah, there is also something a detail in there. Now, obviously, it’s very hard to test all this thing and you know, see what it does.
Francis
this is where I think so when you migrate the workflows and the process builders, does it, assign it a number? I’m assuming it does?
Andy
No, I don’t think so.
Francis
So how do they know? Because this is the problem I’ve got. It’s like, say if we’ve got these workflows and process builder process, they haven’t been assigned of a number. But generally they execute in the same order. Yeah, as they always have been,although it’s not guaranteed, but generally does. You migrate them to flow, it’s now shifted, and that’s not now guaranteed if they’re not going to put this order reference in it. So now potentially, your workflows and your process builders are all jumbled up now as a flow. If I haven’t set this order.
Andy
Please take an example. Right, especially on the workflow builder side, I don’t think there is any potential issues because the things that you can do are quite limited. We’re talking about field updates. We’re talking about create a task, email and outbound messages, like there are four things you can do on the workflow rules site. And these are actually executing right now. After save. There is no before save on workflow rules.
Francis
Yeah. But then if your criteria is relying on the previous workflow criteria to be. So yeah, again, then you’re reevaluating the workflows again.
Andy
Yeah, well, that’s actually more of a problem than a feature. That’s why they don’t want you in the workflow rules now. Yeah, the workflow rules are prone to recursive action that there is actually taken run again, right? So but when you go to the flow side, you can decide whether you want to run that before save, after save now even play with the sequence. But I mean, in general, when you’re doing things on the workflow rule side, you shouldn’t be really having multiple workflow rules relying on the output of the previous one or something like that. That’s not really hard, right.
Francis
But I’ve seen it many times. Oh, yeah.
Andy
Okay, so what well, actually, by the way, let me just announce it here. I have, I think the video turned out great. I have a video on my YouTube channel called I broke the flow trigger explorer. Something like that.
Francis
I think I’ve seen it, Yeah.
Andy
And you know what I did over there, which is quite interesting. I think I used three before safe flows. And I used three after save flows. And I design them in a way. It’s kind of like domino stones, you know, like one does one thing. And the next one relies on the previous output exactly like this. And I put them in sequence. They were perfect. And immediately when I change the order then obviously they break. So we know this thing works. Right? You know,
Francis
yeah.
Andy
But I mean, let me tell you what that is, in my own perception. I think Salesforce wanted to put this thing out there, because we’ve had many MVPs many influencers started, they started publishing content, saying, you know, you should be only doing one flow per object.
And Salesforce didn’t really want that. They said they they don’t really impose a rule like that. But you know, they didn’t really give you a way of managing it either. And I think they wanted to get ahead of the curve. And you know, they wanted to give a message saying, Okay, well,. you can manage multiple triggers Now, using this interface, although at this point, it’s not perfect. For example, it doesn’t show you the export doesn’t show you the flows in the in the execution order. The view actually shows you all the flows in alphabetical order, so You know, like, there are things that you need to do still. But in the end, it was more of a message, I think, a general message than the functionality itself. Because, you know, what I found really interesting is, you know, the thing didn’t come out in beta. They just, you know, we didn’t hear anything, nobody expected this.I didn’t hear anything about it. And and all of a sudden, it’s like we are dealing with this. I’m like whoa.
Francis
Yeah, this is why it’s like come out from nowhere. I was a little bit. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, I kind of thought maybe it’s something to do with that workflow and process builder migration that they needed to do it, to allow them to do use the migration tool to make sure everything kind of stayed in the right order.
Andy
I think that there is there is one aspect that’s very much related to what you’re saying, which is, people have multiple workflow rules, like, obviously, in their legacy, Salesforce orgs, or like,the orgs, that they’ve been working on forever, right? I mean, I’ve seen clients who maxed out on number of workflow rules they can build on the object, I’m like, you know, oh, my God. You shouldn’t be doing this. But yeah, they have it. So and you cannot really automate the refactoring of the workflow rules and creation of one single or like, two, three good, flows out of 50 workflow rules. So when they give a tool to migrate workflow rules, one to one to flow, they need to also give away to people to organize all that stuff. So it is related. I agree with you.
Francis
I think also, even if you just take like process builder and workflow, you know, workflow executes before process builder. And therefore, even just that, the fact that all process builders, you’re expecting them always to fire after the workflow is completed. Potentially even with recursion, if I get my Yeah, sure, yeah, afterwards. Yeah. So even that, when they migrate over to flow, should still have that order, even if it’s just all your workflows and all your post build, I’m assuming.
Andy
I mean, I honestly think and you know, I’ve said that many times, and other people have said that too. Especially if you are working on an org that has multiple automations running, the migrate to flow tool to migrate one single automation directly to flow is not going to help, you need to go into what automations you have, and I promise you, you probably don’t know, right? You probably don’t have the the wholesome picture, the accurate picture of everything that’s running. So you need to start documenting, and you need to put that together and see how that would work best on the flow side, because by the way, flow is much, much more powerful than you know, anything on the other side, people just don’t realize this is the first thing I tell them on it, once I start talking about flow, I say, record triggered flow is one type of flow, right? You know, like, out of like, I don’t know, six, seven. Now we have more like with the orchestrator and all these templates, we have the field service, mobile falls in this in that. So let’s say 10, one out of 10. And, and under record triggered flow we have before saving and after save. So after save record triggered flow does everything that workflow rules and process builders do and more. But we have a huge space out there, you know, like that, you know, you can play with, you can do many more things. So once you’re looking at what you’ve been doing all these years, and then you know, you look at the whole picture, most probably you’re going to want to do things differently when you come over to fall.
Francis
and you’ve got the toolkit of flow to make those changes.
Andy
Yeah. And that’s where actually training and education comes in. Because I want everybody to understand all the different flow types and what the flow can do. Basically, that’s the first thing. I mean, I get this question quite a bit. People will contact me and they’ll say like, tell me one resource that’ll teach me everything about flow that doesn’t exist. I don’t have it. Nobody has it.
Francis
Yeah, and it changes every three, three times a year anyway.
Andy
that’s right. So what I’m trying to give you right now is a quick and easy way or, you know, understanding, getting the fundamentals right about what flow can do, you know, what are variables? How can I look? What’s the trigger, you know, what’s a scheduled triggered flow versus a scheduled path, because you know, these are tricky, they get confusing. So once you understand everything that’s out there, that’ll give you the base, that will help you evaluate, you know, what you can do on the flow side, and then then you’ll start drilling into details and learning more and more, and that will have to be always there. Because in the end, whether we all agree or not, this low code is very similar to coding in the sense, you know, there are unlimited possibilities almost and there are so many different ways of doing things. Yeah.
Francis
And really, and it’s really funny, like, whenever people go, Oh, I want to learn apex or triggers, I’m like, do you know flow? And they’re like, No, and like, we’ll start there. If you’re an admin, if you don’t, you know, definitely do flow first. Because it’s almost, you’re learning, all those little coding concepts that you don’t really know you’re learning, but you are using Flow, recursion collections kinds of stuff, variables. So that when you want to then move on to code if you want to, after that it’s way more accessible. And it’s as easy a learning path, in my opinion. But yeah, I definitely think flow is… everybody should be learning really.
Andy
That’s also the reason why I always, I mean, I shy away from making very bold statements about what to do and what not to do. But that’s very understandable. The people who are stepping into the flow world, they actually like the comfort of knowing, okay, do this, but don’t do this, right. They want a clear picture. They want you to tell them, you know, do it this way, this is the right way. The other one is wrong way. But that doesn’t exist in most of the areas in and under the flow, right. And I also shy away from saying things like that, because now that I’m an influencer, according to Salesforce, and whatever, people know my name. I don’t know, I don’t even know what that means.
Francis
Neither do I.
Andy
Yeah, there is something out there. So what I say kind of carries certain weight, right? So if I tell people, okay, never do this, and then they’ve been doing that for a while, they are gonna feel bad, again, gonna be like,
Francis
I think it’s the same. I think I’ve seen it on while you’ve probably seen it as well, there’s kind of been some kind of messages and things like that of people posting things, and other people go, Oh, I would never done that. And I think it’s like, it’s a learning journey, you know, you are different, there’s always a million different ways to do the same thing. And your business and your org has different constraints to somebody else. That means that you have to do it in a different way. And so yeah, it’s just kind of, over time learning what works and what is best for you in that kind of scenario based business architecture, you know, your architecture of your org, and the limitations of data or, you know, there’s huge data volumes or not, and it is you do things in different ways, but it’s coming together and learning from each other and is what I find, you know, is really fascinating, which is why I love these, you know, their community groups that we do and stuff like that, and everybody’s webinars and stuff like that, because you kind of constantly learning different ways of doing things different best practice. Oh, I did that. But actually, yeah, this could have been better if I did it this way. In this other scenario, but yeah, it’s all kind of valuable stuff.
Andy
Yeah, I shared this before. I mean, obviously, jokingly, but you know, about a year ago, like, a little over a year ago, I I taught my son how to drive ,right? Teenage driving. So what I usually tell him is like, move slow, be careful, and stop when you hear a sound ,right? So and check. You don’t want to be moving fast, because you’re going to crash big right? It’s the same thing with flow, right? You know, do it in the sandbox and try everything by the way, that’s how I learned you know, I try everything. Do not go into your org and you know, in production, try things. Try this like scheduled triggered flow that can change like the world. Don’t do that. But but try it in your sandbox and see what it can do. And if you mess up, just correct it, learn from it, right. So that’s the idea.
Francis
Yeah, and that’s what we will doing anyway. You know, every time there’s new features come out is you know, having a play, see what works? What doesn’t, moving on? Yeah.
Andy
And I like to share when I mess up too, because I want people to see the humanity of it. I mean, the other day, I think it was David who shared like on LinkedIn, well, don’t forget to activate your flow. That’s the most important part in the… I teach that too. But I wrote right underneath it. I said, Who opened the ticket with Salesforce before?
Because their unactivated flow never ran? And you know, raise my hand? Yeah.
Francis
I did it. You know, like, I did that with workflow back in the day as well.
Andy
You will do these things. I mean, that’s fine.
Francis
And I think, you know, I always like, failing is the best learning experience, I always think, because, you know, if you’re always successful, you don’t know what you don’t know, almost. But by failing, you’re kind of learning from that in, like, the failures I’ve had over the past. I’ve learned a lot more from I suppose than my successes, even if it’s certifications, or whatever it may be. But yeah, definitely.
Andy
Another thing that I do is I, I’m quite connected. I checked the Ohana Slack, I checked the discord, and this and that. And I take a lot of questions on my Udemy class on the YouTube channel. And now I’ve started a Salesforce break Slack workspace. And for 400 people it’s just free flow support. Like if you get stuck, you just go there, you ask your question, and we help you out, right? And I’m just trying to create a community now there’s a Salesforce brake.com website where everything is connected. So the for me, the Udemy course is not something that I do want to offer and you know, like, then you learn flows, or you don’t learn flows, I don’t really care about ,No, I mean, I, I want you
Francis
creating the ecosystem.
Andy
Yeah, I want you to actually keep at it, learn from it, and then develop and improve, because that’s how flows really should work. And that gives me also the experience and the superpower to understand what is very hard for people to understand under the flow ecosystem. Because there are some things that come easy, and there are some things that are super difficult for people to understand. Like, for example, one hurdle is variables, collections, you know that that part is difficult loops are difficult.
Francis
As they kind of hitting that code end of the flow, architecture, aren’t you? Yeah, but it is really valuable to learn.
Andy
Yeah. And I see that there are super motivated people, and they actually would like to tackle the very difficult flows too early in the learning process. That’s one of the dangers, you know, you’ll see that they don’t have the fundamentals down, but they’ll be like, Okay, well, I want to loop through all the account contact relationships, and then you know, then take the contacts and loop through the contacts. And yeah, well, hold on a second, you know, have you done any loops yet? You know.
Francis
hitting Governor limits left, right.
Andy
Yeah, and those are the important ones in another thing that is very important. Let me say this out loud here, because it relates to the content that you do. If you do not have the fundamentals already. As an
admin, you’re gonna have a super hard time doing flows, because when I’m designing your flow, the first place I go to is my schema builder. I have to know and remember, you know, how these objects are related? What are the relationship types? What are the required fields, right? So I have to have a good understanding. I don’t really have to know everything, you know, and memorize everything, I can look them up, obviously. But if you do not have the basic understanding of all the standard objects in their fields, and how they relate to the chair complaint of Salesforce works, then you can’t really do this relational stuff. You can do simple stuff. But you know,
Francis
I remember that because I did. It’s the same in the code world as well. Exactly the same. And I remember actually, years ago, I did a session at Dreamforce, which was the apex 10 commandments. And just hundreds and hundreds of people signed up to it. There’s probably like 800 people sitting in the room. And one of the slides was basically a chunk of code. And I very nervously asked the audience what’s wrong with this code? And nobody knew what the wrong was wrong with it. Some people shouted out some questions like No comments. Some stuff and I was like, Well, yeah, couldn’t fit it on the page. But no, that’s not it. And eventually, I said, Well, actually, it’s replicating functionality that’s in the declarative world of Salesforce. Yeah, that is what’s wrong with it. It’s wrong, because you shouldn’t have written it in the first place. And I think that’s also one of the things of kind of, yeah, in flow as well.
You know, why are you creating your own approvals in flow when there’s approval processes or whatever it may be? Which now you got in flow anyway. Now, but yeah, that kind of thing. So understanding Yeah, that core platform objects, relationships, features within it. Yeah, it’s super important.
Andy
Yeah. I mean, this just happened the other day on Salesforce breaks, like somebody asked me, how would I achieve this? Right, you know, this is the use case. And I said, What’s wrong with the formula field? Yeah, you’re right.
Francis
Yeah, exactly that I it’s happened to me as well, like talking about failing. I remember that whole slide came from me actually writing the code. And going halfway through going, what the hell am I doing? Checking it out, obviously, using the declarative functionality. But yeah. But yeah, it’s been super fun. Yeah, if you got anything other things to say, I think we’ve gone through loads of stuff. Oh, yeah, I’ve got I’ll put your course website and also the Slack channel, if it’s okay, in the show notes, so everybody can kind of sign up.
Andy
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes.
Francis
But yeah, thanks. It’s been a…
Andy
It’s been a blast. Thank you very much . It’s great to finally meet you virtually. I mean, that’s the other thing that was unique about my experience, because I started ramping up my, like Twitter and everything else, like during the pandemic. So it seems like I know people now very well, like virtually.And you know, I connected so well. But you know, I kind of use this to my advantage, because I’m a natural guy on social
media. And yeah, it worked out really well for me. So if I ever get to meet it will be like, you know, I already know you. Right. You know, I’ve known you for years, which is fantastic.
Francis
Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And also, I think it’s really great because you’ve kind of found your niche in the Salesforce ecosystem. And you’re now, really building on it, creating a community around you, around flow, helping the community and really kind of bringing your profile even raising your profile as well, which is I think everybody should find the bit of Salesforce they love and really kind of help and support the community in that area. And also by being known that it kind of raises your profile and you know, you kind of have a lot of fun doing it,now I do.Cool. Well, thanks a lot.
Andy
Thank you very much.
So thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, I just have been, we’ve been meaning to chat for ages, but kind of circumstances never quite transpired. My kids got ill. And then we had to postpone and it just kind of went round around the circles a little bit. And eventually here, we managed to get on but I’ve been meaning to get you on for quite a while. But just to start off, I’d love to know like, because you’ve only be well, you’ve been in what it looks like in the Salesforce ecosystem relatively recently ish. Not like 10 years or a decade or anything like that. And I just wondered, you know, how did you get into the Salesforce ecosystem?
Andy
Yeah, well, first of all, Francis, thank you very much for having me. I’m super excited. Being here and telling my story to your audience. Now. I’m a very, very different guy. Like my background and history is quite different. Now. I was born in Turkey raised in Turkey. I went to a German Junior High in high school, I learned everything in German language for eight years. My gym teacher was German.
Francis
So did you know German before you went to the school, where were you?
Andy
No no, so I mean, for the last six years, we found also English. And like we’ve, you know, we had all kinds of other classes that we could take. I always wanted to go to the United States, you know, get better in English and also advance my studies, I decided to stay for my undergrad studies in Turkey in Istanbul, I finished industrial engineering. And in 1994, I went to University of Florida from Istanbul, Turkey, and University of Florida is in Gainesville. And I finished engineering management there.
And I met my wife, also in Gainesville. And you know, my wife was also studying, doing the same program with me. And then I ended up working for American Express in Fort Lauderdale for about three and a half years, four years. And I always wanted to move back to Turkey. And I proposed to my wife, Amy, and I said, you know, I want to move to Turkey with you.
And we stayed in Turkey for 18 years, we have wonderful two kids. Our daughter is now at University of Florida in one full circle. And our son just qualified to go there. But you know, he qualified for a couple of schools so he hasn’t made his decision yet. Right. So we never planned on moving to the United States, we were going to stay in Istanbul, Turkey, but you know, especially the education system and the way things were going with universities and the state of universities got us a little bit concerned. And we always wanted to have the kids have the same education we’ve had in the United States. So as they approached college age, we said let’s make this change. And my background as it relates to Salesforce and anything technical is I mean, I’m the type of a kid who always played with computers, right from the very first,my first computer was a spectrum. In fact, you know, you’ll know spectrum, right? Yeah. So I was, I mean, I grew up like typing in basic games from books in.
Francis
finding about and realizing you’ve got the state somewhere having …
Andy
exactly. After hours, you find out it doesn’t work. Yeah. And then all those games on tape and things like that, you know, I’m not gonna go back to that I sound super old when I do that. But
Francis
hitting play on the tape recorder to load the game go down to the Sweet Shop coming back and realizing it’s crashed halfway through playing.
Andy
Yeah, but when I started my professional career, I started doing like, process analysis and quality stuff, some simulations and you know, I quickly got promoted to a project manager position. And then after that, I got involved with service in call centers. And I was a call center guy for almost all my life. After that. And the last position I fell in Istanbul, Turkey. I was running the Turkish arm of Teleperformance, an international giant for BPO and call center operations and I had close to 3000 staff to about I think it At time 36 to $38 million in revenue every year. And, you know, when we decided to move to the United States, it didn’t really work out with the employer at the time because they exist actually in the United States that I take a position over on the side. So I said, I want to go more technical. And my introduction to Salesforce. I mean, first of all, I’ve been involved with CRM systems almost all my life, you know, I worked on Siebel, I had staff working on Siebel, I had, I used to write access databases, like when you know, that was a thing, even for, you know, to just keep a record of all my personnel in the call center. Yeah. So and even I even taught like an elective class at the University about social CRM at some point. And I, I always kept track of different technologies that was that that was coming along. And more than
10 years ago, I think it’s been like maybe 12 years, I had a small Sales Team at this call center company that is owned by the biggest telco in Turkey. And when I was managing them, I implemented Salesforce, right? At that time, the telco was implementing Siebel, and was having a tremendously difficult time like everybody else. And you know, they didn’t have the time to spend on us to implement any kind of CRM for our players. So I just plugged in my credit card from all the way in Turkey.I was probably one of the first clients of Salesforce in Turkey. Yeah, I started using Salesforce, we had a couple of very little partners, who helped us configure a couple of things. And we were on our way. And
Francis
it’s amazing how Salesforce just got into companies just that way by somebody just handing over their credit card, because their internal IT or whatever, you know,didn’t work. It’s like, yeah, yeah, here we go.
Andy
So when I decided to move to the United States, that happened in around 2017, in the summer of 2017, my wife and kids moved, I was still working in Turkey. So I was travelling back and forth. I started studying for my admin certification, kind of like maybe October, November of 2017. I moved to the United States. In March, I got admin certified in April. And then I established in a limited liability company, then I made that limited liability company a Salesforce partner. So then I started getting more and more certifications. I mean, I think everybody has a superpower, right? Everybody has a superpower. We are good in some things. And we are not good in some other things. And it used to be in the past and you know, you focused on your weaknesses and tried to get stronger and that’s not the way people are. You know, I think my
superpower is I can learn things by myself. You know, like so I’m a self taught 12 times certified now. I actually got slack admin certified.
Francis
Yeah, really. So
Andy
I wanted to change things up. So yeah. So 13 times certified. Like application architect. All self taught. And I was doing this business by myself. And I, you know, what, well, how did we get to flows? Right. You know, that was another question. Like I said, you know, I always had programming in my background, I’ve done some, I think MATLAB when I was doing my masters at University of Florida, I was doing some kind of nonlinear optimization on MATLAB, imagine. And, you know, I always had some kind of coding background, but you know, I didn’t really spend a lot of time like, typing code.
Francis
So when so, so yeah, so when you were using the Salesforce platform, was it still more declarative? You didn’t kind of get into the code side of Salesforce?
Andy
Well, yeah,I mean, I got platform developer one certified, right. And, you know, I did write some code and you know, I read some code, but you know, I cannot really imagine myself spending all my day in front of a computer typing stuff. I don’t know. I have I have … Anyways, I have attention issues anyway. Right. So. So I’m the type of guy who cannot stay focused very long time. I cannot, for example, read very long, boring books. You know, I’ve never been able to you know, I’m not that I’m not that guy. So when I found flow and I started playing with it, I’m like, this is really cool. This is what I want to do. And you know, I started playing with it and you know, it just felt natural. It was fit.It was a great fit for me. And I started focusing on it more and more. And I love helping in teaching people I said, let me just see whether people are gonna like my style, whether they can understand my Turkish, German, whatever. Whether the person.
Francis
So what was your motivation for because you’ve created an hour course on flow ,Salesforce flow? What was your motivation to create it?
Andy
Well, I mean, I believe in lucky coincidences, and I always believe in listening to people. I mean, I have actually another side, I’m in, I’m also an angel investor, I invested already, like into four startups, you know, one of them had to start, I have three. But I understand the startup mentality quite a bit. So. And I like that. So what I do is, I see what I like, and you know, I create, like a minimum viable product or whatever, you know, like for that project that I have, and I put it out there. And then I listen to feedback. And I evolve, right? Absolutely. into things I like, obviously, if I don’t like something, yeah, I’ll stop doing it. When I moved to the United States, I put a couple of things on Amazon sold a couple of things. I’m like, you know, this is not for me. I don’t like anything about this business, right? So when I started doing, I said, Okay, well, I’m going to create a class, like free training on.
And I was using, at that time, a platform called like a new startup called Super peer, where you could do live webcasts, and also record what you’re doing. So I decided to teach Salesforce flows in Turkish, and in English, I started both programs at the same time. And that was, I think,
was it January 2021, the recording is still on my YouTube channel,it’s actually quite popular. I mean, I have actually two YouTube channels. People don’t realize I release content. Yes. And I have also English content.
Francis
My students. Yeah, and like with yours as well, too. You know, you get students from all over the world, because you nearly have 3000 2000 students? Is it? I can’t remember now. Yeah, so nearly 3000 students. And so how, how is it different teaching… You literally carbon copy teaching? Do you get different questions like how is it different teaching it in Turkish than it is in English? Or the reactions of the students? And the question?
Andy
I mean, there are fundamental cultural differences. First of all, I mean, toward education toward the content, you know, the level of criticism and appreciation, they are quite different from one culture to another. So that’s, that’s the fundamental difference. First of all, the Turkish probably including me, is quite like a perfectionist and quite critical.
But the first time, I tweeted, I have also like a Turkish Twitter, you know, like, another handle when I tweet Turkish ones. When I first tweeted my Udemy class, the flow Udemy class in English to that audience, and there are a bunch of talented people who speak English. They watch the free introduction. And in the free introduction, there was like, subtitles, and you know, because they want to understand very well, when you’re a turkey speaker, you usually like to turn on subtitles so that you don’t miss anything. And the subtitles were automatically generated, and there were some odd words in it. And that was the first thing they responded to me, they said, like, well, great class, but you know, what the hell is this word? You know, you won’t get that from Americans. You know, that. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful that you don’t get that right. So it’s just different. I mean, I’m not saying it’s really bad. But the take is quite different. Obviously, the economic pressures and you know, what’s happening in that country is dominating everything, like people from Turkey, they really want to understand whether this is a viable career for them that they can adopt, and, you know, that will help them to get to a better income level, possibly even move out of the country for like a, like a different future. Right. So that’s, that’s what they are thinking, rather than possibly the skills first, first they want to understand what is the vision? Well, you know, where can I get to,right? And that’s very natural. But I mean, it’s been, well, how did I get to Udemy? That’s also quite important. So I taught this, these sessions and you know, I surveyed people, I got some feedback. And the feedback was phenomenal. You know, I mean, in my first session, I think 80 plus people registered and 50 plus showed up. I couldn’t believe it. Because you know, I did it out of the blue. And then I put the videos out there.
People are watching it. I had this guy, I think he was from the UK, by the way, writing to me on LinkedIn, and I have his name somewhere, but I don’t have it memorized. He told me, Do you know, I’ve watched a lot of content about flow and whatever. And you know, I, I actually have a lot of Udemy classes as well. And nobody does this thing like you do. What you do is you get on there, and then you start doing a step by step. And as you do it, you tell us why you’re doing it. I mean, this is super valuable. And you just got to get this on Udemy.
Francis
I think I find that yeah, I find that with a slight difference with why don’t you just learn it on Trailhead? Why don’t you just, you know, and I think a lot of people it’s like, well, yeah, functionally, knowing how it
works, great. But actually, why do we use it? And what are the best practices for using this feature? Or this function? Or, you know, all these little gotchas, I think you get value out of, you know, a proper course, you know, so
Andy
yeah. And, you know, ask people, I’m like, do you understand me? Is the pace good? They said, it’s good. So I said, Okay, let me get this out there. And for a perfectionist like myself, it’s actually super hard to produce something like this.I produced it, it took me quite a bit of time. And when I put it out there, I didn’t even watch it. I’m like, you know, I can’t watch this, you know. And I watched myself, I watched this and I said the wrong word in it. I said, like, I have to correct this one, now. I have to get away from this. So for me, putting something out there on Udemy is much, much different. Because it’s free, I can leave some stuff on YouTube, that’s a little bit out of date, because I know people can find still value in that. But when I put something on Udemy, if it’s still for sale, and everybody has lifetime access. I feel obligated to
Francis
keep it fresh. Yeah, it is a constant job,
Andy
same person’s job to keep anything updated on Salesforce, especially related to flow, because our flow product team is like
Francis
really evolving.
Andy
Really evolving, I had to immediately change screens because they constantly keep changing screens, you know, they look different. Now.
Francis
I remember when I did my admin course, and they had the lightning had the sidebar to access all the objects and stuff. And then they flicked it to the top. But it was like, everything has changed.
Andy
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the feedback is phenomenal. It’s very, it’s awesome to watch that dashboard on Udemy. To the roadmap. Yeah, people signing up from Mauritius and New Zealand, I don’t know, it’s just
Francis
It is really fascinating. What I love doing is like reaching out, I do kind of success calls with students to find out more about them. And like just like week or two ago, just did one with a student in South Africa and another one in exact Mozambique or somewhere like that. And it is quite, it’s quite fascinating. Just finding out how Salesforce is evolving in their country, and their challenges and things with using or not using Salesforce. And it was quite interesting, just kind of I one of my students, they feel like they’re the utter cutting edge of Salesforce because they know everybody in the country that uses Salesforce, literally there’s like 10 of them. And they’ve got this kind of little community going on. Which I kind of felt like 12 years ago, when I started in Salesforce in the UK, it was all very brand new. Nobody knew what Salesforce was, whereas now you know, I can’t well, I was at my kids. A birthday party, one of my kids friends and one of the moms came up and said, Hey, you’re that sell Salesforce guy. And I was like, oh my
god, this is the world … You know, I never used to get that at all, you know, go to Dreamforce Yeah, but nowhere else. It’s just a little bit weird.
Andy
Yeah, before that at parties, you said you were involved with Salesforce. And they were like, what?
Francis
Yeah, exactly. What is cloud computing? What’s that?
Andy
Yeah, my story is vastly different. I’m the guy who just happened to be there and got interested in this and loved it, liked it. And I was on the surfboard when the tide went up, you know? Seriously. That’s how I that’s how I defined the whole thing. Because, you know, you you were actually there early on, and you were doing all the work and you’ve been through so many different interfaces and iterations but no, like, for example, I learned the details of process builder and workflow rules, I just knew very little because now I know there’s aneed for people to actually transfer their stuff like migrate their stuff from workflow rules and process builders to flow I, when I got involved with flow flow was pretty much like this, you know, like, not as capable, but still the same platform. I didn’t even work on the flow platform with the previous flash interface or whatever, you know, that they had before
Francis
I see, I was in when Salesforce first purchase because it was purchased from another company, I can’t even remember who it was. And actually, I remember being in the first one of the kind of partner training courses for this new product that was called flow at the time, it wasn’t called flow, or even know what it’s called, maybe it was flow. But yeah, it was very different. It was a separate application on your desktop that you had to build in and then save it up to Salesforce
Andy
I knew exactly what that tool was supposed to do. I didn’t know the tool, because I come from the call center environment, there was a wave of products that were created for you to script what the engines supposed to say, when you do
Francis
and Yeah, and actually, ironically,so before I got into Salesforce, I actually worked in a different CRM, which is all process driven, that very much focused on call center where it’s really scripted, and the screen pops to, you know, outbound call centers where the screen is popping constantly. It’s all timed and ranked, and all this kind of stuff. And it’s quite, it’s quite interesting now that Salesforce is moving from this record driven CRM, which was my kind of excitement when they first bought the flow product is how at last we’re moving away from this record driven CRM to this more process driven kind of CRM, where you could define really to kind of define those processes for call centers and things like that really well. But yeah, as you said, like workflow process builder, you know, they’re going the way of the dodo. You know, everybody’s going to need to upskill into flow. Is it the end of this year? Is it that workflows, you’re no longer be able to create new workflows? I think?
I’m not sure. possibly, maybe 23?
All right. Okay. Well, I usually announce it and freak everybody else out and everybody out and then push the data a little bit. So yeah, you’re probably right
Andy
I don’t know. But I mean, like, what the state that the migrate to flow tool is in? It doesn’t seem like they’re very close. I mean, they need to give them give people a tool first.
Francis
Yeah. So I was quite interested actually. Interested to get your feedback on it, because I was quite interested when, like the last the last week’s release before they put the… be able to order the flows.
Andy
Yeah, it was this, this release this, this release? Yeah,
Francis
yes. I was quite interested on why they release that now. Because, obviously, if you’re migrating workflows, and process builder processes over to flow, you need to keep the order the same. If you use the migration tool, right. Otherwise, they could reorder, and your execution could change, and fields that it would expect him to be filled out on and kind of your process breaks, right? But they released the feature already to order the flows. So if I set the order to be, I don’t know how it quite works, but say zero is, and I always want to fire this first, when you go to migrate the rest of your workflow and process builder processes. Surely, it’s then going to screw up the order? Because then you got yours in between? I don’t know how I don’t know quite how it’s gonna work.
Andy
So first of all, there is no guarantee the, you know, let me say this again. So first of all, the order of execution is not guaranteed on any of the automation tools. So if you have multiple workflow rules, multiple process builders in their multiple flows, like you know, you don’t really know what you’re
Francis
not guaranteed. Yeah.
Andy
if you convert a couple of workflow rules, a couple of process builders, or you rebuild them on the flow side, but you decide not to put them into one single flow, then you don’t really know what order they are gonna run it. And you don’t really need to, you don’t really have to use the execution order. Sequence number, whatever.
Francis
They’re connected within the flow, I suppose. Yeah, it’s not I mean, when you’re rebuilding into a single flow, or if you’re connecting,
Andy
no no,if you have multiple flows, right, you have multiple triggers on the same object. Let’s say you have five before save and five after save triggers. If you do not use the order of execution number, it’s going to actually do whatever it’s been doing. So
yeah, so it’s the same as having a process builder or workflow
you can keep doing what you what you’ve been doing, that’s fine. But if you really wanted to influence the order, then you can give it a number from one through 2000. And then that will define the order of execution. Now they advise you like, in any other area of Salesforce, if you if you get sequence numbers, we have that in CPQ. And a couple of other places, they advise you to use numbers 10 apart so that you can get the other bridge in between if you need to. So even in that case, divided by 10, you get about 200. Before save, and you get about 200. After save. And this is the interesting part, like the numbers from one through 1000.
Execute first. And then the … as far as I can remember, the triggers that don’t have any number assigned execute. And then the numbers from 1000 to 2000. Execute.Yeah, there is also something a detail in there. Now, obviously, it’s very hard to test all this thing and you know, see what it does.
Francis
this is where I think so when you migrate the workflows and the process builders, does it, assign it a number? I’m assuming it does?
Andy
No, I don’t think so.
Francis
So how do they know? Because this is the problem I’ve got. It’s like, say if we’ve got these workflows and process builder process, they haven’t been assigned of a number. But generally they execute in the same order. Yeah, as they always have been,although it’s not guaranteed, but generally does. You migrate them to flow, it’s now shifted, and that’s not now guaranteed if they’re not going to put this order reference in it. So now potentially, your workflows and your process builders are all jumbled up now as a flow. If I haven’t set this order.
Andy
Please take an example. Right, especially on the workflow builder side, I don’t think there is any potential issues because the things that you can do are quite limited. We’re talking about field updates. We’re talking about create a task, email and outbound messages, like there are four things you can do on the workflow rules site. And these are actually executing right now. After save. There is no before save on workflow rules.
Francis
Yeah. But then if your criteria is relying on the previous workflow criteria to be. So yeah, again, then you’re reevaluating the workflows again.
Andy
Yeah, well, that’s actually more of a problem than a feature. That’s why they don’t want you in the workflow rules now. Yeah, the workflow rules are prone to recursive action that there is actually taken run again, right? So but when you go to the flow side, you can decide whether you want to run that before save, after save now even play with the sequence. But I mean, in general, when you’re doing things on the workflow rule side, you shouldn’t be really having multiple workflow rules relying on the output of the previous one or something like that. That’s not really hard, right.
Francis
But I’ve seen it many times. Oh, yeah.
Andy
Okay, so what well, actually, by the way, let me just announce it here. I have, I think the video turned out great. I have a video on my YouTube channel called I broke the flow trigger explorer. Something like that.
Francis
I think I’ve seen it, Yeah.
Andy
And you know what I did over there, which is quite interesting. I think I used three before safe flows. And I used three after save flows. And I design them in a way. It’s kind of like domino stones, you know, like one does one thing. And the next one relies on the previous output exactly like this. And I put them in sequence. They were perfect. And immediately when I change the order then obviously they break. So we know this thing works. Right? You know,
Francis
yeah.
Andy
But I mean, let me tell you what that is, in my own perception. I think Salesforce wanted to put this thing out there, because we’ve had many MVPs many influencers started, they started publishing content, saying, you know, you should be only doing one flow per object.
And Salesforce didn’t really want that. They said they they don’t really impose a rule like that. But you know, they didn’t really give you a way of managing it either. And I think they wanted to get ahead of the curve. And you know, they wanted to give a message saying, Okay, well,. you can manage multiple triggers Now, using this interface, although at this point, it’s not perfect. For example, it doesn’t show you the export doesn’t show you the flows in the in the execution order. The view actually shows you all the flows in alphabetical order, so You know, like, there are things that you need to do still. But in the end, it was more of a message, I think, a general message than the functionality itself. Because, you know, what I found really interesting is, you know, the thing didn’t come out in beta. They just, you know, we didn’t hear anything, nobody expected this.I didn’t hear anything about it. And and all of a sudden, it’s like we are dealing with this. I’m like whoa.
Francis
Yeah, this is why it’s like come out from nowhere. I was a little bit. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, I kind of thought maybe it’s something to do with that workflow and process builder migration that they needed to do it, to allow them to do use the migration tool to make sure everything kind of stayed in the right order.
Andy
I think that there is there is one aspect that’s very much related to what you’re saying, which is, people have multiple workflow rules, like, obviously, in their legacy, Salesforce orgs, or like,the orgs, that they’ve been working on forever, right? I mean, I’ve seen clients who maxed out on number of workflow rules they can build on the object, I’m like, you know, oh, my God. You shouldn’t be doing this. But yeah, they have it. So and you cannot really automate the refactoring of the workflow rules and creation of one single or like, two, three good, flows out of 50 workflow rules. So when they give a tool to migrate workflow rules, one to one to flow, they need to also give away to people to organize all that stuff. So it is related. I agree with you.
Francis
I think also, even if you just take like process builder and workflow, you know, workflow executes before process builder. And therefore, even just that, the fact that all process builders, you’re expecting them always to fire after the workflow is completed. Potentially even with recursion, if I get my Yeah, sure, yeah, afterwards. Yeah. So even that, when they migrate over to flow, should still have that order, even if it’s just all your workflows and all your post build, I’m assuming.
Andy
I mean, I honestly think and you know, I’ve said that many times, and other people have said that too. Especially if you are working on an org that has multiple automations running, the migrate to flow tool to migrate one single automation directly to flow is not going to help, you need to go into what automations you have, and I promise you, you probably don’t know, right? You probably don’t have the the wholesome picture, the accurate picture of everything that’s running. So you need to start documenting, and you need to put that together and see how that would work best on the flow side, because by the way, flow is much, much more powerful than you know, anything on the other side, people just don’t realize this is the first thing I tell them on it, once I start talking about flow, I say, record triggered flow is one type of flow, right? You know, like, out of like, I don’t know, six, seven. Now we have more like with the orchestrator and all these templates, we have the field service, mobile falls in this in that. So let’s say 10, one out of 10. And, and under record triggered flow we have before saving and after save. So after save record triggered flow does everything that workflow rules and process builders do and more. But we have a huge space out there, you know, like that, you know, you can play with, you can do many more things. So once you’re looking at what you’ve been doing all these years, and then you know, you look at the whole picture, most probably you’re going to want to do things differently when you come over to fall.
Francis
and you’ve got the toolkit of flow to make those changes.
Andy
Yeah. And that’s where actually training and education comes in. Because I want everybody to understand all the different flow types and what the flow can do. Basically, that’s the first thing. I mean, I get this question quite a bit. People will contact me and they’ll say like, tell me one resource that’ll teach me everything about flow that doesn’t exist. I don’t have it. Nobody has it.
Francis
Yeah, and it changes every three, three times a year anyway.
Andy
that’s right. So what I’m trying to give you right now is a quick and easy way or, you know, understanding, getting the fundamentals right about what flow can do, you know, what are variables? How can I look? What’s the trigger, you know, what’s a scheduled triggered flow versus a scheduled path, because you know, these are tricky, they get confusing. So once you understand everything that’s out there, that’ll give you the base, that will help you evaluate, you know, what you can do on the flow side, and then then you’ll start drilling into details and learning more and more, and that will have to be always there. Because in the end, whether we all agree or not, this low code is very similar to coding in the sense, you know, there are unlimited possibilities almost and there are so many different ways of doing things. Yeah.
Francis
And really, and it’s really funny, like, whenever people go, Oh, I want to learn apex or triggers, I’m like, do you know flow? And they’re like, No, and like, we’ll start there. If you’re an admin, if you don’t, you know, definitely do flow first. Because it’s almost, you’re learning, all those little coding concepts that you don’t really know you’re learning, but you are using Flow, recursion collections kinds of stuff, variables. So that when you want to then move on to code if you want to, after that it’s way more accessible. And it’s as easy a learning path, in my opinion. But yeah, I definitely think flow is… everybody should be learning really.
Andy
That’s also the reason why I always, I mean, I shy away from making very bold statements about what to do and what not to do. But that’s very understandable. The people who are stepping into the flow world, they actually like the comfort of knowing, okay, do this, but don’t do this, right. They want a clear picture. They want you to tell them, you know, do it this way, this is the right way. The other one is wrong way. But that doesn’t exist in most of the areas in and under the flow, right. And I also shy away from saying things like that, because now that I’m an
influencer, according to Salesforce, and whatever, people know my name. I don’t know, I don’t even know what that means.
Francis
Neither do I.
Andy
Yeah, there is something out there. So what I say kind of carries certain weight, right? So if I tell people, okay, never do this, and then they’ve been doing that for a while, they are gonna feel bad, again, gonna be like,
Francis
I think it’s the same. I think I’ve seen it on while you’ve probably seen it as well, there’s kind of been some kind of messages and things like that of people posting things, and other people go, Oh, I would never done that. And I think it’s like, it’s a learning journey, you know, you are different, there’s always a million different ways to do the same thing. And your business and your org has different constraints to somebody else. That means that you have to do it in a different way. And so yeah, it’s just kind of, over time learning what works and what is best for you in that kind of scenario based business architecture, you know, your architecture of your org, and the limitations of data or, you know, there’s huge data volumes or not, and it is you do things in different ways, but it’s coming together and learning from each other and is what I find, you know, is really fascinating, which is why I love these, you know, their community groups that we do and stuff like that, and everybody’s webinars and stuff like that, because you kind of constantly learning different ways of doing things different best practice. Oh, I did that. But actually, yeah, this could have been better if I did it this way. In this other scenario, but yeah, it’s all kind of valuable stuff.
Andy
Yeah, I shared this before. I mean, obviously, jokingly, but you know, about a year ago, like, a little over a year ago, I taught my son how to drive, right? Teenage driving. So what I usually tell him is like, move slow, be careful, and stop when you hear a sound ,right? So and check. You don’t want to be moving fast, because you’re going to crash big right? It’s the same thing with flow, right? You know, do it in the sandbox and try everything by the way, that’s how I learned you know, I try everything. Do not go into your org and you know, in production, try things. Try this like scheduled triggered flow that can change like the world. Don’t do that. But but try it in your sandbox and see what it can do. And if you mess up, just correct it, learn from it, right. So that’s the idea.
Francis
Yeah, and that’s what we will doing anyway. You know, every time there’s new features come out is you know, having a play, see what works? What doesn’t, moving on? Yeah.
Andy
And I like to share when I mess up too, because I want people to see the humanity of it. I mean, the other day, I think it was David who shared like on LinkedIn, well, don’t forget to activate your flow. That’s the most important part in the… I teach that too. But I wrote right underneath it. I said, Who opened the ticket with Salesforce before?
Because their unactivated flow never ran? And you know, raise my hand? Yeah.
Francis
I did it. You know, like, I did that with workflow back in the day as well.
Andy
You will do these things. I mean, that’s fine.
Francis
And I think, you know, I always like, failing is the best learning experience, I always think, because, you know, if you’re always successful, you don’t know what you don’t know, almost. But by failing, you’re kind of learning from that in, like, the failures I’ve had over the past. I’ve learned a lot more from I suppose than my successes, even if it’s certifications, or whatever it may be. But yeah, definitely.
Andy
Another thing that I do is I, I’m quite connected. I checked the Ohana Slack, I checked the discord, and this and that. And I take a lot of questions on my Udemy class on the YouTube channel. And now I’ve started a Salesforce break Slack workspace. And for 400 people it’s just free flow support. Like if you get stuck, you just go there, you ask your question, and we help you out, right? And I’m just trying to create a community now there’s a Salesforce brake.com website where everything is connected. So the for me, the Udemy course is not something that I do want to offer and you know, like, then you learn flows, or you don’t learn flows, I don’t really care about ,No, I mean, I, I want you
Francis
Creating the ecosystem.
Andy
Yeah, I want you to actually keep at it, learn from it, and then develop and improve, because that’s how flows really should work. And that gives me also the experience and the superpower to understand what is very hard for people to understand under the flow ecosystem. Because there are some things that come easy, and there are some things that are super difficult for people to understand. Like, for example, one hurdle is variables, collections, you know that that part is difficult loops are difficult.
Francis
As they kind of hitting that code end of the flow, architecture, aren’t you? Yeah, but it is really valuable to learn.
Andy
Yeah. And I see that there are super motivated people, and they actually would like to tackle the very difficult flows too early in the learning process. That’s one of the dangers, you know, you’ll see that they don’t have the fundamentals down, but they’ll be like, Okay, well, I want to loop through all the account contact relationships, and then you know, then take the contacts and loop through the contacts. And yeah, well, hold on a second, you know, have you done any loops yet? You know.
Francis
hitting Governor limits left, right.
Andy
Yeah, and those are the important ones in another thing that is very important. Let me say this out loud here, because it relates to the content that you do. If you do not have the fundamentals already. As an
admin, you’re gonna have a super hard time doing flows, because when I’m designing your flow, the first place I go to is my schema builder. I have to know and remember, you know, how these objects are related? What are the relationship types? What are the required fields, right? So I have to have a good understanding. I don’t really have to know everything, you know, and memorize everything, I can look them up, obviously. But if you do not have the basic understanding of all the standard objects in their fields, and how they relate to the chair complaint of Salesforce works, then you can’t really do this relational stuff. You can do simple stuff. But you know,
Francis
I remember that because I did. It’s the same in the code world as well. Exactly the same. And I remember actually, years ago, I did a session at Dreamforce, which was the apex 10 commandments. And just hundreds and hundreds of people signed up to it. There’s probably like 800 people sitting in the room. And one of the slides was basically a chunk of code. And I very nervously asked the audience what’s wrong with this code? And nobody knew what the wrong was wrong with it. Some people shouted out some questions like No comments. Some stuff and I was like, Well, yeah, couldn’t fit it on the page. But no, that’s not it. And eventually, I said, Well, actually, it’s replicating functionality that’s in the declarative world of Salesforce. Yeah, that is what’s wrong with it. It’s wrong, because you shouldn’t have written it in the first place. And I think that’s also one of the things of kind of, yeah, in flow as well.
You know, why are you creating your own approvals in flow when there’s approval processes or whatever it may be? Which now you got in flow anyway. Now, but yeah, that kind of thing. So understanding Yeah, that core platform objects, relationships, features within it. Yeah, it’s super important.
Andy
Yeah. I mean, this just happened the other day on Salesforce breaks, like somebody asked me, how would I achieve this? Right, you know, this is the use case. And I said, What’s wrong with the formula field? Yeah, you’re right.
Francis
Yeah, exactly that I it’s happened to me as well, like talking about failing. I remember that whole slide came from me actually writing the code. And going halfway through going, what the hell am I doing? Checking it out, obviously, using the declarative functionality. But yeah. But yeah, it’s been super fun. Yeah, if you got anything other things to say, I think we’ve gone through loads of stuff. Oh, yeah, I’ve got I’ll put your course website and also the Slack channel, if it’s okay, in the show notes, so everybody can kind of sign up.
Andy
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes.
Francis
But yeah, thanks. It’s been a…
Andy
It’s been a blast. Thank you very much . It’s great to finally meet you virtually. I mean, that’s the other thing that was unique about my experience, because I started ramping up my, like Twitter and everything else, like during the pandemic. So it seems like I know people now very well, like virtually.And you know, I connected so well. But you know, I kind of use this to my advantage, because I’m a natural guy on social
media. And yeah, it worked out really well for me. So if I ever get to meet it will be like, you know, I already know you. Right. You know, I’ve known you for years, which is fantastic.
Francis
Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And also, I think it’s really great because you’ve kind of found your niche in the Salesforce ecosystem. And you’re now, really building on it, creating a community around you, around flow, helping the community and really kind of bringing your profile even raising your profile as well, which is I think everybody should find the bit of Salesforce they love and really kind of help and support the community in that area. And also by being known that it kind of raises your profile and you know, you kind of have a lot of fun doing it,now I do.Cool. Well, thanks a lot.
Andy
Thank you very much.
Responses