Jerome Russ

Salesforce engineer and consultant since 2017. I write about Development, Flows, metadata, and getting agents to behave in a real org. CTO @c3g_cloud. Iowa.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

Headless CRM is a data quality story wearing a product announcement. Take the UI away and nothing hides the mess anymore. The agent reads exactly what's in the fields, even the ones nobody has used for years, and so does everyone downstream of it.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@sd_chak Agree the record stays. What changes is who reads it. Agents need clean fields and clear ownership. Humans need the three things that changed since yesterday.
Most CRM screens were built for neither.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@scottdclary @jacobwarwick Freelancer describes how you're paid. Consultant describes what you're paid for. Buyers price the second one.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@appnigma The ones that'll bite are old middleware and scheduled scripts nobody remembers owning.
A good first step is pulling Login History for API logins over the last 30 days. That list is your migration backlog.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@NateBridgeman Business process is a big one. AI can build the flow, but it can't sit in the meeting where sales and finance disagree on what Closed means. Or, it can, but wouldn't know what to do with the two disagreeing definitions.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

Agree. For most, the CRM was always where data ended up, not where the work happened. The new risk is that if reps stop opening it, nobody notices when the data underneath goes stale.

All of this puts more weight on the data model, not less. If agents are asking the questions, a bad picklist or a duplicate account gives the wrong answer with total confidence.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@cxtodaynews And it is a shame it needs Data 360. The orgs with the most mess, where this would help most, are usually the ones that don't have it.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@cxtodaynews An index of what is actually being used would be more helpful than a list of what exists. Most orgs I've worked with have three Status fields but only one is being actively used. The others are just defaults or stale.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@SalesforceAdmns @salesforce @trailhead This is a good one to finish before users start asking for it. Fill in field descriptions first too, since that's what the model leans on to understand your custom fields.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@SalesforceDevs @salesforce @msrivastav13 This is a great episode because the model is rarely the problem in a real org, the context the model has is. Field descriptions and help text suddenly matters a whole lot more once an agent is the one reading them.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@ejbantz @ejbantz Are you reusing the session ID to keep context across calls, or starting fresh each time? Curious how that holds up inside batch jobs.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@hg_chaos The scary ones are always the integrations nobody remembers owning. A good exercise to do before anything is match up every connected app to a person/team who will answer for it.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@SalesforceAdmns @jenwlee @SalesforceAdmns This is so cool! Having the logic live in the Flow and being able to reuse it across Slack, Claude or a button? Awesome. Definitely beats the old way of having three copies of the logic that is out of date in no time.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@SalesforceAdmns No custom field description. No deployment. A description is needed in the custom field so a future admin can know a bit more about why the field exists as well as it's purpose.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@tomoakley_e1 I'd pick one task you'll actually need on Monday and find the Trailhead module for that, rather than trying to learn Salesforce broadly. It's a huge platform; you don't need to learn all of it to get comfortable in the new role.
Hope you get/got the rest of your Saturday back!

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@JakeDSBD24 @verge Yep. The demo always starts with reads. The support tickets start the first time it writes.

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

Calling agronomy, extension, and grower groups on X: would you try our free GDU calculator and tell us what’s missing?

No login. Corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, sorghum, and peanuts.

https://t.co/jZPq7uNlv2

#AgTwitter

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@DxSaleMark @jayzhangdev @vercel Deployments have continued but it is intermittent! Some get stuck in initializing now. :(
Should probably just step away until they get it fixed...

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@DxSaleMark @jayzhangdev @vercel And yet their status says "All systems normal." so, not a good sign.
...and, as I went to get a screenshot, they changed it to:
delays and degraded.
So, progress!

[Jerome Russ @jeromedruss]

@clinton_cunning Just adding a comment so I remember to check back and see if I can figure it out. ...for my friend as well.