Creating a Demo Org with Salesforce, Jira and Artificial Intelligence.
If you’re looking to transition into a career within Salesforce you might find yourself in the no-mans-land of maybe having a certificate-or-two, some points on Trailhead and maybe some super-badges under your belt but you still don’t have experience. There are some recommendations out there to volunteer your services for free but this raises a difficult ethical concern - namely, the companies that need free Salesforce consultation or administration are those that are most vulnerable to errors that newfound Admins may unknowingly introduce. Enter - a Demo Org.
A Demo Org can be anything from a simple proof of concept to resolve a specific business use case, to a full fledged example Sales Cloud instance. The benefits of creating a Demo Org over volunteering is that you will never impact any real customers or business - if something breaks, and you aren’t sure how to resolve it there are no real world ramifications of this providing you room to experiment as you desire but also supporting you with a safety net.
Let’s create one together over the first two stages of the implementation lifecycle.
PREP WORK:
Because we aren’t building an organization for a real business we need to do a bit more prep work - namely creating a Business, and creating mock data. Don’t panic - we can use some tools to make this step easy and spend more time focusing on Salesforce.
Step One is creating the Business - Enter Artificial Intelligence - specifically ChatGPT. This AI is completely free and for our purposes will provide us some inspiration for our hypothetical client.
I asked the AI to pitch me three different start up companies in a growth phase in different industries. I then iterated on those concepts and landed on one I was happy to proceed with - a manufacturer of technology accessories (think Phone cases) made from sustainably farmed Alpaca wool.
I also asked ChatGPT to make a blurb for the company, let me know their top three values and then got its assistance for branding and identity.
The AI and I settled on a logo featuring an Alpaca and Clouds, with a colour palette featuring greens, oranges, and dark blues. It also provided the companies ad slogan, #SimplySmarter
Now this next step is optional but I decided to have some fun with it - I went to coolors.co and found a colour palette that I thought fit the brief, and then created a fake logo in Photoshop using some stock images and colour screening. The final result?
Back to the task at hand - we also need some mock data to fill the organization. There are multiple ways of generating fake data and multiple data you might want. For this Demo Org I created some leads, opportunities, accounts, and Alpacas. If you just want to import a long list of names into an organization you can find a GitHub repo with a long list of baby names here.
If you want something more complex there are a few options on the table - Excel can generate random letters and numbers through Formula fields which I used to assign Alpacas to a random farm, and create an expected yield of Wool. For something with more formatting options Mockaroo is an excellent service that allows you to generate fake emails, company names, phone numbers, strings of text and more.
Who knew making a full business worth of data would be so easy.
Thanks to AI, Excel and Mockaroo we now have a business with a long list of data - my only recommendation at this stage is to be mindful of how many records you’re planning on creating within Salesforce. Roughly, ~500 records are 1mb of data, and demo orgs have 5mb available. I ran into an issue earlier on here where I hit the Org storage limit because I imported too many records. Thankfully the bulk of my records at that time were related to a custom object that I could then fully delete through Salesforce Classic and free up some space in my org again.
Removing Custom Objects in Salesforce Classic
ANALYZE:
Next step is to identify (or in our case create) some business needs that we want to address and resolve. At this stage I’d recommend creating a Jira project to manage your tasks, and create a page in Confluence. If not Jira then consider the use of some project management, and documentation software.
For my Demo Org I created project in Jira from a Kanban template. I made two Epics (think parent folders) - one for gathering Business Requirements, and one for User Stories. As it was just myself working on this project a set a limit of two issues in progress, and two in UAT.
Jira Project underway
I then created a Project Requirements document:
and set of Personas (two of which written by ChatGPT) for me to then act as a base for User Stories.
Once you’ve identified some business needs for your fake company, it’s time to create some user stories and define UAT criteria.
Typically this would be a top down approach of identifying the need, creating the story, and defining the UAT criteria but if you want to develop a specific solution you can start there and work backwards.
If you’re struggling with creating some concepts, or aren’t sure of what you want to build use resources like Superbadges or Trailhead modules as inspiration, as well as previous year FlowFest challenges or even asking ChatGPT for help again. ChatGPT can also be told specific instructions like providing UAT criteria in a ‘given-when-then’ format - lots to experiment with.
BUILD:
We’ve identified our business needs, created User Stories, and generated UAT criteria so it’s finally time to start building within Salesforce.
Thankfully Salesforce gives you a free fully fledged version of their software called a Developer Edition org which will be perfect for our project. Sign up here.
First thing first is to import your data - you’ll need to use a combination of the Data Import Wizard and dataloader.io to import your full set of Leads/Contacts/Accounts/Opportunity/Custom Objects. The order you import your data in is important! (Eg, Accounts before Opportunities). Once your data is imported I’d recommend creating some users (annoyingly you’ll need to deactivate them one at a time given the licenses you have in the Dev Edition org).
Your data is in, you have some users - the rest is now up to you! Create some Flows, Reports, Dashboards, and anything else that you want to experiment with. Make sure you document along the way.
If you need some inspiration here is a list of the things that I did for my Demo Org:
Org Setup:
Custom domain
Default Timezone
Scheduled monthly backups
Admin can login as other users
User Creation:
Salesforce License
Minimum Access
Open up with PSET
Custom Roles as required
Data import:
Import leads from data import
Import account names from opportunities first via data import
Once accounts imported import opps via dataloader.io
Org Changes:
Changing page layout to minimise unnecessary fields
Uniformity across UI for lead/contact/account/opportunity through custom lightning pages
State/Country pick lists
Org Customisation:
Custom WCF app
Activity tab with Apex
Opportunity discount approval process
Custom Opportunity List
Flows:
Inbound Lead Call Script flow
Auto-create Task on new Lead flow
Lead Priority Status
Account Rating based on Annual Revenue
Standardised Opportunity Name
Copy Account Billing and Shipping Address on change
Lead Email Follow up on day 1,3,5,7
Reports and Dashboards:
VP Dashboard
Lead Status Reports
Opportunity Win Rate
Pipeline for Current/Prior FQ
User Adoption
Alpaca Distribution and Yield by farm
NEXT STEPS:
Once your solution is built out - it’s time to share it!
Check out this blog post for some ideas here.
Authors note:
As originally written the article referred to a Demo Org as a “Simple Demo Org” or SDO.
/u/NiftyThreeFifty on Reddit has since made me aware that ‘Simple Demo Org’ describes a specific type of org in Salesforce nomenclature - namely one that is a fully equipped org and typically used by Salesforce SEs to demo Salesforce products. This project would therefore be a demo org, or anything else you want to call it.
You can find the comment thread that discusses this in more detail here.