Oct 31, 2020
Salesforce Flow: Why Now is the Perfect Time to Learn
If you’ve had the chance to read any of my past works on Salesforce either here on Medium, on my Linkedin, or general posts in various Salesforce Community forums you should know that most of my writings intend to push the reader to continue their learning journey. This article is no exception to that pattern, and if you are a professional in the Salesforce ecosystem who currently does not know how to build Salesforce flows, or if you do know how but it’s been a while, I implore you to dive in head first. Frankly, Salesforce flow is taking off like a rocket ship, and now is the perfect time to grab a seat. In this article i’ll explain why I believe whether you build with clicks or code, Salesforce flow is quickly becoming the gold standard or automation in the Salesforce world.
Now before I dive into my potentially long-winded rant on why I think Salesforce flow is the greatest things since sliced bread, I should first pause to explain what Salesforce flow is.
Salesforce flow is one of the several process automation tools that comes with your Salesforce environment. Compared to it’s companion workflow rules and process builder, it’s far more powerful, complex, and significantly increases what you can do within a process due to it’s far-reaching abilities within the Salesforce platform. Simply put, Salesforce flow can significantly help you increase productivity, provide users with guided process, run large scale database updates, and much much more.
Now, back to why you should learn more:
When looking at Salesforce flow, you can immediately become overwhelmed with where, or how to start (and that’s completely OK!). Just like other processes and tools within Salesforce you have to start small and work your way up, and there are tons of resources out there to help you get started or even provide you with templates to work from! And starting now is the perfect time to really dive in and learn, here’s why:
- Recent releases of Salesforce flow have been jam packed with tons of incredible features. For example, take a look at these two blogs to cover some of the new features coming that just launched in Flow in Winter 21' .
Tim Combridge from Salesforce Ben — 10 New Salesforce Flow Features to Shout about in Winter 21
Jen Lee’s — Winter 21' Flow Enhancements
These features are incredible exciting, useful, and expansive on the already fantastic capabilities of Salesforce Flow. It’s apparent that Salesforce is investing significant development into this already powerful tool, and seemingly continues to do so release after release.
2. Salesforce flow has friendly debugging features allowing you to throughly and visually test each of your new processes before you roll them out to users for testing or deployment. This feature alone makes Flow a dynamite tool by providing the “Flow Builder” with the ability to get direct system feedback with direct admin-panel-side testing features. This is extremely unique to flow and allows you to produce better automation!
3. Salesforce flow has incredible resources, jump-starts, and other great features to get you started on a new flow reducing the amount of time you need to spend to get a process automation up and running!
One of the best parts about building in Salesforce has always been the Salesforce AppExchange. It even has some great features specific to Salesforce flow:
When you enter the Salesforce AppExchange you can sort your search results by “Flow Solutions” to get direct access into all of the AppExchange products and solutions that focus directly on flow. These include templates, pre-built processes fit to standard object use cases, flow dashboards, flow plugins, and many other great and mostly free solutions.
4. Finally, any Salesforce article would be completely remiss if it didn’t include a huge mention about Trailhead. For those of you who don’t know, Salesforce Trailhead is a free online learning platform that leverages point systems that allow you to follow learning trails and get hands on experience with the Salesforce platform in the topic area of your choice. Salesforce Trailhead has tons of great content on Salesforce Flow that you can check out. Below are some of my recommended trails to learn Salesforce Flow!
- Flow Basics
- Build Flows with Flow Builder
- Automate your Business Processes with Flow Builder
- Build a Simple Flow
In closing, Salesforce flow is a game changer that will continue to be a major asset to Salesforce customers and Salesforce professionals alike who need to streamline business process in our modern business world. Learning Salesforce flow now will set you up for major success and allow you to continue to grow in your career. Learning Salesforce Flow was the second best thing i’ve done for my career outside of learning Salesforce itself.
Thank you for taking the time to read my article — please stay tuned for more content around Salesforce flow as I work on video tutorials for how to make flows and popular flow use cases!
