Menttium, the leader in professional mentoring experiences, faced operational challenges within their Salesforce systems. Partnering with Demand Chain’s Managed Services for small incremental updates, they recognized it was time for a larger transformation that simplified their data architecture and end user experience. Shifting from an ongoing Managed Services to an Agile Sprint process, we identified the three key systems ready for change and created detailed project plans to create solutions in two six-week phases.

Challenges

• Custom Coded Match Tool: Menttium’s proprietary match tool, was built before the Salesforce Lightning conversion and relied on Visualforce pages and was hard-coded in Apex. Updates required costly developer intervention with case-by-case customization.
• Conga: In addition to matching mentees and mentors together in mentoring partnerships, Menttium also offers a robust Pre-Mentoring Assessment. Conga was used as the foundation to calculate and graphically represent the data in complex Excel reports for each end user. Minor changes to the templates caused formatting issues resulting in headaches each time a report was modified. Each report modification was a labor-intensive process.
• Operational Email System: Built on a reputation of being a high touch customer service focused company, Menttium requires 100% receipt rate for transactional emails to their customers. Working predominantly with large Fortune 500 clients adds additional challenges with increased firewalls and protection around email receipt. A shared IP address as used by the Pardot product became untenable as delivery was near 100%, but email receipt was much lower. The Menttium team spent more time than reasonable managing email receipt failures.

Our Salesforce Solutions

In collaboration with Menttium, Demand Chain’s team scoped out a two-phase project built on the “Demand Chain Way” Agile Sprint Methodology.

Custom Code Transformation:

We began by modifying the data structure to align to new features and functionality gained through the Salesforce Lightning conversion. The robust App Builder and record pages allowed Demand Chain to leverage the power of Salesforce Flows along with flow components to replace the Visualforce pages and remove the majority of legacy Apex code. This process of focusing on native Salesforce functionality and simplifying the data model created an intuitive, flexible system where Menttium’s team can easily adjust search parameters and flow automation. Menttium also leveraged Quick Actions on Record Page Layouts to extend visibility to additional objects for increased transparency and data access. End users required minimal training and very quickly recognized the benefits and time savings.

Tools: Salesforce Flow, Lightning Record pages, third-party flow components, and optimized queries with Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL)

Conga:

Demand Chain conducted several discovery sessions with Menttium to understand their existing roadblocks. One roadblock identified was the current use of Conga to generate reports. Instead of relying on a single template, the decision was made to leverage three separate templates and “stitch” them together to create the full report. This process allows for additional flexibility. Full automation of the process was achieved by leveraging a flow to trigger Conga.

Streamlining Email Communication:

Next the team streamlined Menttium’s operational email system, shifting from Pardot to Salesforce. Flow work consolidated various tools and we introduced templates with parameters. Adding the reusable, customizable template option eliminated the need of uniquely making multiple emails per event. Automation for status changes and other steps was also added utilizing Salesforce Flow, improving efficiency, and eliminating manual interventions.

Realized Benefits

Custom Code to Flows:

• Time Reduction: The automation improved staff efficiencies, removed redundancies in data maintenance and decreased opportunity for human error thus reducing the need for existing human intervention and quality control measures. It is estimated that 2 days of time savings per cohort was accomplished.
• Intuitive Design: Menttium has always been a relationship first organization. Providing an intuitive tool allows Menttium to continue to hire focused on relationship expertise vs. technical database management proficiency.
• Training Improvements: The intuitive design, with prompts guiding users, reducing the need to remember complex input requirements. An improved interface allows easy access to mentee and mentor information, eliminating complex system navigation and extensive ongoing training.

Conga:

• End User Experience: The automation will allow end users immediate access to their reports avoiding any delay in support and will increase client engagement through convenient access to information.
• Time Reduction: The automation and reporting capability will reduce staff time by approximately 10 hours per cohort.
• Reduced Tracking Requirements: Through automation, staff will be able to periodically monitor the work versus being hands on with the work.

Operational Emails:

• Maintainability: Parameterized templates provide Menttium the ability to set parameters and adjust as needed instead of building new templates for every situation.
• Immediate Time-Savings: Complex email setups are replaced by a single campaign setup and one-click execution – saving an estimated 6-8 hours per month.
• Efficiency Gains: Automation set-up drove efficiency including time automation for messages. Day-of session reminders were automated, eliminating the manual attention that was needed to trigger the emails to arrive prior to the session. The ability to schedule emails in advance streamlined operations further.

“With Demand Chain’s team, Menttium optimized our Salesforce system and integrated tools. This project resulted in substantial time savings, enhanced scalability, improved automation, streamlined processes, and positions Menttium for continued flexibility to adapt to ever changing market conditions.”
-Lynn Sontag | Owner

 

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