Admin Journal: Quick Help with a Force.com Labs App by @ReidCarlberg, Another Reason Why the Salesforce Community Rocks

Last week, I discovered an app on the Salesforce AppExchange that I was extremely interested in: Campaign Membership Manager.

Why?

It filled a gap that we had noticed for some time. When it came to campaigns, such as mass emails, we were struggling to get input from our sales team with the regard to who they wanted to exclude/include. As we began to use filters based on custom fields to manage campaign inclusion for Contacts/Leads, we discovered that our sales team still wanted the ability to fine tune which of their Contacts were included.

In the past, I would export a list of each person’s Contacts into Excel using the Excel Connector, then add a column for ‘Include’ and send it to each sales person. <groan>

Then, when the sales person finally got around to reviewing the spreadsheet, adding ‘x’s to all the Contacts that they wanted to include and emailing it back to me, I had to combine all the x’d Contact IDs and use that to add members to the campaign via the Excel Connector.

Are you still following along? If not, I don’t blame you. Just typing that was rather painful. Doing it was… bad. I became increasingly apathetic about campaigns with each one that we launched.

At Last

Finally, I found an option for simplifying our workflow on the AppExchange. And the best part? It’s made by Force.com Labs, so it is free. Awesome functionality. Free. Two phrases that make my heart go pitter-pat.

But, when I installed the app, I discovered that it wasn’t using the current api (blah blah blah technical details) and it was throwing an error.

I posted to the developer community and explained the issue.

Enter Reid Carlberg

I contacted Reid, whom I follow on Twitter and who is a Force.com Lab app developer. I shared some screencaptures of exactly what I was seeing.

Within a few days, Reid fixed the issue and send me a link to reinstall the app.

Awesome.

Improved Workflow

Now, I can just email our sales people before we launch an email campaign with the message ‘Click here to review all of your contacts that are currently enrolled in ________ campaign. Click to exclude any that you do not wish to receive the email.’ No more painful export/combine/import process. <contented sigh>

Just another example of why I love the Salesforce Community. It’s a pretty tight-knit and responsive group with serious skillz.

Note: Force.com Labs graphic from AppExchange listing. Credit goes to Salesforce.

Additional Resources

• Campaign Membership Manager app on the AppExchange
• All Force.com Lab Apps on the AppExchange 
• Follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter

Jenna Baze is a rather geeky girl with average social skills and an affinity for: all things Google, Remember the Milk, Salesforce.com, Inbox Zero, Etsy, natural light photography and finding creative ways to avoid doing dishes (which includes updating a handful of blogs).
Email: rathergeeky@gmail.com
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