Welcome to another How I Solved It. In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one Awesome Admin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Brandon Walton helped Family Bred Puppies use Salesforce to create a Puppy Adoption Platform using out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality, without using any lines of code!
Family Bred Puppies (FBP) is made up of a team that LOVES dogs! Based in Goshen, Indiana, the FBP team has built their business around working with properly vetted breeders to provide families (and puppies) the highest quality of care and support throughout the adoption process. As animal lovers, it’s important to the team that the puppies are cared for from birth and that they find good homes for each puppy.
In order to successfully match families with puppies for adoption, the FBP team needed to implement a structured process for interviewing and qualifying potential adopters and breeders.
The solution needed to allow the team to track and manage applicants through the qualifying interview and adoption process, as well as track litters of puppies by breeders, birthdates, vaccinations, health checks, and transportation to their new homes.
After analyzing multiple systems, the FBP team decided Salesforce had the best service available for security, uptime, integrations, customization, and community support to provide a solution for their business.
It was most important to FBP to use as much of the standard Salesforce architecture in their process as possible. As a small business, they needed to implement Salesforce in order to grow with the platform without relying on heavy customization or development.
We decided to take a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach and start by implementing Sales Cloud first, with plans to roll out Service Cloud and Experience Cloud in future phases.
The first step was to take in new applications from the company website. Since the team was already using Squarespace, we leveraged Web-to-Lead forms with their puppy application.
The application-specific questions are mapped to standard and custom fields within the Lead object in Salesforce, and mapped to the application directly through the Web-to-Lead form setup.
By using Web-to-Lead and the Lead object in Salesforce, the FBP team is able to leverage out-of-the-box functionality to manage new applications. As a result, the team can use standard reporting to run analysis on how many new applications are being generated monthly, use list views to manage incoming applicants, and track new applicants through the interview process.
To assist FBP users with getting through the applicant qualification process, we leveraged Path! We used the lead Status field to drive the path, which provides an easy-to-use interface for the team to manage the applicant qualification process, tracks important details, and provides qualification tips for each step.
Once the applicant has been interviewed and qualified, the FBP team uses the Salesforce lead conversion process to create a contact, account, and opportunity.
We customized opportunity stages to map Salesforce to the FBP adoption process and leveraged Path to provide user guidance through each opportunity stage.
In addition to the Standard Lead Qualification and Opportunity objects, we created some custom objects and relationships to track puppies, litters, and breeders.
The Puppy__c custom object represents an individual puppy and is related to the Opportunity. This object stores key information about each puppy, including their availability, age, breeder, parents, and health notes. Because this information is stored on the puppy object, puppies can be tracked independently from an opportunity and assigned or re-assigned appropriately. It’s critical that only available puppies can be added to a new opportunity for adoption.
Once the objects and architecture were in place, we created flows to automate processes. We started simple by sending out notifications to the different vendors alerting them when a family is ready to adopt a puppy.
We created two critical record-triggered flows to accomplish the automation of these alerts, starting with automating the puppy status based on changes to the opportunity.
The first flow is a record-triggered flow, for each time an opportunity is created or updated.
This flow automates the updating of the Puppy record when the opportunity is updated. This prevents a Puppy from being associated with multiple opportunities and helps the team track the status of each puppy.
Here are the steps for this flow.
The second record-triggered flow is based on Status field updates to a Puppy__c record and sends an email alert to vendors when the status of a puppy is updated. This email alert includes information about the puppy, like breeder and health information, so that parties are notified when a puppy is scheduled for adoption.
As puppies are adopted, their status will be updated on the Puppy object. The correct parties are notified to report the adoption and initiate the appropriate next steps for supporting families and their newly adopted puppies!
Family Bred Puppies is centered around providing great experiences for puppies, family breeders and adopters. It’s also important that their business systems are easy to use, save the team time and make smart business decisions. In order to support this vision, we are exploring power of Einstein AI to improve processes!
We are excited to explore future opportunities to streamline FBP business processes with Einstein AI features!
The FBP team has been able to instantly recognize several benefits of making the digital transformation to manage their CRM with Salesforce, including:
Most importantly, FBP is able to provide an organized experience for their customers, vendors, and partners by using core Salesforce functionality. The best part—this was all done without writing any code!
It’s time to get comfortable with Path! One of the biggest enablers for digital transformation is making Salesforce easy to navigate for sales users.
Paths allow admins to bring the most relevant fields to the top of a page layout, and provide users with help as they maneuver through business processes with Salesforce.
When paths are implemented correctly, this also saves admins time by making users more self-sufficient in managing processes in Salesforce.
Here are a few tips for implementing paths.
Welcome to another post in the “How I Solved This” series. In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one #AwesomeAdmin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Selina Choy was […]
Welcome to another post in the “How I Solved It” series. In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one #AwesomeAdmin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Cece Adams built […]
Welcome to another “How I Solved It.” In this series, we do a deep dive into a specific business problem and share how one Awesome Admin chose to solve it. Once you learn how they solved their specific problem, you’ll be inspired to try their solution yourself! Watch how Kim Strauss built an automation for […]
