How to make the marketing department like you vol. 1

The standard functionality of Sales Clouds Campaigns isn't necessarily everything your marketing department wants it to be. Still it is something that many companies continue to use to coordinate their email mailing lists and events they organise. I've customized our campaign object in several ways to make the user experience better and add some functionality to it and I'll be going through them in the following few posts.

One of the first things that came up was the crazy inability to define standard campaign member status values depending on the type of the campaign. Instead you need to go every time to the campaign and click on the Advanced Setup button to do so. That's not very intuitive and definitely not user friendly. And the values the marketing people add might not be standardized and therefore harder to report on. Actually it seems like such an obvious feature that it should be a standard.

Now as any developer or consultant will tell you it is possible to go on and write some apex to change that but luckily in the world of Salesforce and AppExchange there is also an easier - and free - way to do it.

The solution is called AAkonsult Campaign Status. It is a very straightforward app that solves the whole issue of having to manually enter campaign statuses every single time. It is a great help even if you do just one type of campaigns but it really shines with multiple campaign types that require different member statuses. The setup is also a breeze and doesn't require any code. I recommend it for everyone who uses the Campaigns object. The app is available for Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions.

Few examples from our organisation:
email campaign has values will be sent, sent and email read.
Customer event has values will be invited, invited, attending, attending + avec and not attending.
VIP Ice Hockey has values table of 4, table of 6 and Extra seat (additional cost)

We are also setting limits on how many people can attend a single event and Salesforce will instantly tell us if we are trying to overbook the event. I'll explain that in more detail in a future post.