Pro Tips Archives

Pro Tips, Strategy
August 3, 2026

Crawl, Walk, Run: A Step-by-Step Guide to Adopting Agentforce Marketing

Erin Duncan

Too many marketers today are trapped in “survival mode.” Day after day, marketing ops professionals churn out campaign after campaign, wading through rigid data silos, manual list exports, and tedious workarounds that sap their creative and strategic brainpower. Solutions like Agentforce Marketing give marketers a clear way out. But while many marketing leaders have watched the impressive platform demos, most are left asking the critical tactical questions: “How do we actually get started?” “How are other marketers using the platform, and what successes are they seeing thus far?

To answer those exact questions, I sat down for a fireside chat with Brittany Cowan, Director of Marketing at Denver Public Schools (DPS). We talked through how she and her team took a pragmatic crawl, walk, run approach to adopting Agentforce Marketing. Eliminating manual workarounds, deploying multi-channel journeys, and tracking true attribution.

Get the highlights from our conversation below, or check out our full discussion on-demand.

Watch the Agentforce Marketing: Unlock Data and Drive Measurable Growth webinar now.

Laying the Foundation: Starting the Journey

When Denver Public Schools first started thinking about adopting a new marketing automation platform, their goals centered around driving enrollment. Like many urban districts, they faced student population declines from rising competition with private schools, families having fewer children, and more families moving out of the city.

To reach their goal as seamlessly as possible, and to ensure they engage families with personalized messaging, DPS needed a way to centralize family data, streamline communication during major district initiatives like Round 1 and Round 2 school enrollment, and reach families through their preferred channels without drowning them in irrelevant emails.

When Brittany and her leadership team were first considering Agentforce Marketing, those early conversations focused heavily on alignment, technical readiness, and bandwidth. Critical success factors were top-of-mind, but instead of trying to rebuild their entire marketing ecosystem overnight, leadership focused on immediate, high-impact needs.

Ultimately, DPS chose Agentforce Marketing because of its native scalability. Since they were already using the Salesforce platform for their enrollment application, it was a natural evolution. The ability to unify customer data, leverage native multi-channel tools like email and SMS within a single Flow, and lay a foundation for future AI enhancements made it the clear choice for the district.

Setting the Stage: First Use Cases & Multi-Channel Deployment

Once the platform was implemented, the team immediately jumped into their highest-priority initiative: student enrollment campaigns. Rather than overcomplicating their initial setup, they mapped out essential segmentations and structured core messaging flows to ensure families completed their application steps on time.

A major benefit of Agentforce Marketing is the ability to build seamless multi-channel journeys combining email and SMS. They did not use a lot of SMS communications previously, but when they surveyed their families, they found that many of them prefer this channel, and decided to lean in. Before adopting Agentforce Marketing, this would have involved tedious, manual processes such as data uploads. Now, DPS leverages Flow Builder decision paths, such as the example below:

Email First: An initial email goes out to families regarding enrollment deadlines.
Smart Logic: If a family doesn’t open the email within 3 days, the system automatically triggers a targeted SMS reminder.

Flow diagram showing the trigger of a targeted SMS email if the email hasn't been opened in 3 days.

Because families receive endless communications from various sources, this multi-channel strategy ensures urgent reminders land on the device they actually check, fostering better engagement.

When it came to reporting, DPS approached attribution by establishing baseline metrics early on. Unified campaign tracking allowed them to connect outreach activity directly to application completions, proving ROI across both email and SMS.

Looking Back: Lessons Learned & What’s Next

Reflecting on how far the team has come, Cowan shared that she is most proud of their ability to deliver tailored, relevant communications while leveraging smart exit rules. Instead of blasting generic district news, messaging is now personalized based on geographic zones, student life stages, and specific program interests.

Even better, automated exit rules remove families from reminder flows the moment they complete an application. Families appreciate not being bombarded with irrelevant information once they’ve taken action, creating a far better overall experience for district families.

“The ability to cater our messages more specifically—both to specific programs and not bombarding people with comms once they’ve already taken action—has been wonderful.”

– Brittany Cowan, Director, Marketing, Denver Public Schools

Looking ahead to the next phase of their journey, DPS is excited to tap into more advanced capabilities:

Language-Based Routing: Delivering fully automated Spanish-language communications to Spanish-speaking families.
Send Time Optimization: Sending messages at the precise day and time an individual is most likely to engage.
Path Experiments: Testing different channels and messaging sequences to continually optimize conversion rates.

When asked about the biggest lessons learned along the way, the marketing team emphasized the importance of respecting the crawl, walk, run process. Focusing on super-advanced features in year one would have been overwhelming. The real win was establishing clean segments, setting up Flows, and securing baseline reporting.

Your Strategic Roadmap for Adopting Agentforce Marketing

Whether auditing a current tech stack or preparing to launch advanced AI automations, adopting Agentforce Marketing works best when structured in defined phases:

Phase 1: Learn & Plan (Crawl)

Audit existing data structures and align stakeholders on immediate business requirements.
Pick 1–2 initial use cases (like event registration, lead nurture, or enrollment).
Build core competencies across your team.
- Take the Next Step: Join our upcoming Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop on August 13 to build hands-on skills with Flow Builder.

Join our upcoming training: Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop

Phase 2: Explore & Deploy (Walk)

Draft campaign briefs and define cross-channel decision paths (Email + SMS).
Establish baseline performance metrics to track against legacy manual processes.
Deploy core journeys using native target segmentation and dynamic content rules.

Phase 3: Optimize & Evolve (Run)

Einstein Engagement Frequency: Dynamically suppress sends to saturated contacts to avoid burnout.
Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO): Deliver communications when individual recipients are statistically most likely to open.
Path Experiment: Scientifically test journey variations (e.g., SMS vs. Email follow-ups) to evaluate top-performing paths.

Ready to Take Your Next Step?

Successfully adopting Agentforce Marketing isn’t about replacing your strategy with AI, it’s about giving your team the operational foundation needed to eliminate manual workarounds, engage your audience, and drive measurable growth.

Explore hands-on tools, real-world use cases, and customer stories over at the Marketing Hub for Agentforce.
If you’d like to get expert guidance on planning your next steps with Agentforce Marketing, or figure out how it can be used alongside your existing platform, reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team.

Contact the Sercante | Trilliad team to plan your next steps with Agentforce Marketing.

Data Management, Pro Tips
July 24, 2026

Get your Data Model Out of Your Head (and into a Diagram) using Salesforce CLI & Diagramforce

Cate Godley

Get Out of My Dreams Head and Into My Car Diagram

If you’ve ever found yourself singing Billy Ocean songs to yourself as you tried to explain a Data 360 data model using only your hands and a determined facial expression, this post is for you! Data Model Objects (DMOs) and their relationships live in Data 360 in a way that’s technically documented, but not exactly easy to look at. Sure, the Data Model tab gives us some cute bubbles to look at, but it’s not exactly easy to navigate or dive into how individual fields are mapped.

Enter Diagramforce, a free tool for visualizing Salesforce data models as clean, shareable diagrams. The tricky part is getting from the data model from only living in Data 360 (and your head) and into a usable JSON file that Diagramforce can understand. I recently went through this process for a client project and came across several wrong ways to do this before finally landing on a solution. Thankfully it’s one that is easily repeatable and works well as a first CLI project.

Why Use Diagramforce At All?

When I first asked my client if they had any documentation or diagrams showing how each of the DMOs in their system were connected, they pointed me towards the Data Model graph mode, where we quickly discovered that we can’t actually get the type of granular information we’re looking for from that visual. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the high level overview of how each DMO is related to one another, but when I need to get a Data 360 specialist to dive into some field mapping issues with me, it’s not exactly a walk in the park to investigate if you don’t know the data model first hand.

Diagramming existing DMOs and relationships helps with future discovery documentation and knowledge transfers in the event that someone leaves the organization
A visual representation of a data model is a lot easier for most people to understand, especially in comparison to a table of object API & field names
Seeing your existing data model will help with change management in the future by allowing you to avoid breaking something you didn’t know was connected

Required Tools to Get Started

This should come as no surprise, but there are a few tools and access points that you’ll want to make sure you have before you dive into this project.

Salesforce CLI installed and authenticated to the target org (see below for more information on this process)
PowerShell (this walkthrough uses it, but the same logic works in bash if that’s your preference)
API access to the org’s DMOs — more on this below

All the Small Wrong Things

Before we dive into the way I made this work, you should know I didn’t get this right on the first or second try. Initially I wanted to retrieve the DMOs as metadata, the same way you’d retrieve a standard component using the CLI. Unfortunately, DataModelObject isn’t a registered metadata type in the CLI registry, so that failed.

Next, I tried to exchange the CLI’s API session token with a Data 360 tenant token, but that didn’t pan out either. The standard CLI session token doesn’t have the right OAuth scope needed for the exchange, and setting up a dedicated Connected App just for a single diagram felt like a lot of overhead for this task.

What Finally Worked

Although you won’t find the DMOs in your standard Object Manager, they are ordinary sObjects under the hood and answer to standard REST API calls the way any standard Salesforce object would. You’ll recognize them by the __dlm suffix. This means we can get to them and their relationships through the regular REST API describe endpoint, using whatever Salesforce org is specified in the CLI. The complete steps for this process are broken down for ease of reference below.

Authenticate Your Salesforce Org

You can connect Salesforce CLI to multiple Developer Orgs, Sandboxes, or Production, each one taking on their own Org Alias. You’re also able to set up a “Default” org that will be used in any commands that do not specify which connected org to use. The commands below will allow you to set an Org Alias, login, and set an org as the default org if desired.

Authentication in Production or Developer Orgs

sf org login web –alias my-org –set-default

Sandbox Authentication Script:

sf org login web –instance-url https://test.salesforce.com –alias my-sandbox –set-default

Edit the my-sandbox or my-org text to set your org alias. Try and keep this something short and memorable, if you add multiple orgs to the CLI you’ll need to reference this pretty regularly. The –set-default tag is optional, and if you use it this org will be used as the default org when none is specified in a command.

If your org is using Salesforce Enhanced Domains, you’re able to use the –instance-url command and include the login URL for your Enhanced Domain (checkout the Sandbox Authentication script for an example of this).

Create A Dedicated Folder

We’ll need to point PowerShell to a specific folder to find the scripts we’ll be running in future steps. This folder is also where the scripts will output documentation once they have finished running. Once you’ve created the folder, you’ll need to copy the path from the top of the File Explorer window, as shown below.

Download the Scripts for Extracting and Formatting

This method relies on 2 different scripts, one to extract the data from Data 360, and another to format it appropriately for Diagramforce. You’ll need both of these files stored in the folder you just created in the previous step. Once you’ve downloaded the scripts, you’ll need to replace any of the YourOrgAlias text with whatever org alias you entered when you authenticated the org earlier in this process. Without updating this, the script won’t know where it needs to pull the data from.

View the “Get Data 360 DMOs Script” here

View the “Convert to JSON Script” here.

Set Your Directory in PowerShell

Now that we have our folder created and our scripts saved, we need to tell PowerShell where it should look when we’re executing our next sets of commands. Inside of powershell, type the following:

cd [paste the file path we copied earlier here]

The “cd” command tells the system to change the directory to whatever file path comes afterwards, so for my example, I’d enter:

cd C:\Users\categ\DataCloud Diagrams

Enable Script Execution in PowerShell

By default, PowerShell blocks custom .ps1 scripts so we’ll need to run a command to bypass this restriction. This command only works to bypass things temporarily, so next time you go to run these scripts you’ll need to execute the same command.

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy Bypass

Extract DMOs from Data 360

Now that your Salesforce org is authenticated, we’re ready to extract the DMOs from Data 360. Copy and paste the command below, being sure to replace the YourOrgAlias with whatever you set as your org alias in the previous steps.

.\Get-DataCloudDMOs.ps1 -TargetOrg YourOrgAlias

Getting it Ready for Diagramforce

Here’s where I got tripped up the most: you can’t upload the JSON file from the first script into Diagramforce as-is because it’s expecting a specific cell-graph structure. This structure helps to map out shapes with positions and ports, as well as the connections between them, and helps out with layout metadata. Rather than trying to build the structure blind, I was able to reference the JSON spec on Diagramforce’s GitHub and get the right structure for my data. You can run this script in the CLI with the following command:

.\Convert-DMOsToDiagramforce.ps1

This script reads the dmo-model.json stored in the same folder and creates a diagramforce-import.json file that can be imported into Diagramforce successfully. Head over to Diagramforce and use File > Import JSON to import the diagramforce-import file. Once it’s loaded, you’ll be able to see all of the DMOs in your org, along with the relationships between them. You’ll likely need to spend some time organizing them and cleaning up some of the relationship names, but the end result is an excellent representation of the data model.

Instructions for converting data models into Diagramforce format

If you get a version mismatch warning on import, double check the appVersion value in the script against whatever the current Diagramforce release expects. You can find this information by checking out the GitHub repository for Diagramforce and checking what the most recent version of the platform is.

Things to Keep in Mind…

This is absolutely a first pass and not meant to be a finished product, but a step towards more accurate and usable documentation of Data 360. I also fought with 2 different LLMs to figure out the right approach and scripting to get this to work, but the code has been reviewed and this method has been tested in a few different orgs. A few other things worth mentioning:

Diagramforce is a great tool, but the layout is still a simple drag and drop grid. You’ll likely need to spend some time rearranging after your import to make sure it’s legible.
The scripts here all use “YourOrgAlias” as a placeholder. Make sure to update that text to match whatever your actual Org Alias is prior to running.
If your org has multiple data spaces, you will need to filter the DMO list accordingly before converting – otherwise you’ll get a diagram of ~~hot dog fingers~~ everything, everywhere, all at once, defeating the purpose.
Relationship names may not be end user friendly as they’re coming directly from the describe call in the script. You may want to relabel a few of them after import for clean documentation.

Another Data 360 Org? Time to Diagram!

If you’re working in Data 360 orgs regularly, it’s worth keeping both scripts (the extractor and the converter) in your toolkit rather than rebuilding them from scratch every time. Run the extractor whenever you land in a new org, run the converter, import into Diagramforce, and you’ve got a shareable diagram in less time than it used to take to attempt explaining the model verbally. Just be sure to update the “YourOrgAlias” name wherever it appears in the script so that it’s pointing to the right Salesforce org at runtime and you’ll be good to go.

Got a cleaner way to handle the layout step, or run into a different Data 360 quirk along the way? Drop it in the comments — I’d love to see how others are tackling this.

Pro Tips, Strategy
July 23, 2026

The 6-Step CRM Optimization Framework to Turn Friction Into Revenue

Heather Rinke

A broken CRM seller experience acts like a tax on your pipeline, dragging down deal velocity and rendering new AI investments practically useless. Identifying the friction is easy, but executing the cure is where most teams get stuck. So, how do you transition from diagnostic firefighting to actual, scalable optimization? The answer isn’t a full rebuild, it’s a Seller Experience Audit. It pinpoints exactly where your system is broken, and then applies a practical CRM optimization framework that targets high-friction areas first, proves fast ROI, and builds momentum.

To help you map this out, we’ve broken down the core architecture from our full 2026 CRM Optimization Playbook. Here is the exact 6-step roadmap to transform your CRM from a roadblock into a high-velocity revenue engine.

Download the 2026 CRM Optimization playbook.

Groundwork: Uncovering Where the Friction Lives

Before you change a single validation rule or field setting, you have to gather your boots-on-the-ground intelligence. A successful CRM optimization framework relies on two distinct discovery exercises:

Walk your funnel like a customer: Take a handful of recent closed-won accounts and map every single technical and human touchpoint. Did the buyer experience a massive lag between marketing handoff and sales outreach? Did they have to repeat their pain points? Funnel walkthroughs surface your biggest gaps faster than any dashboard.
Shadow your sellers: Sit down with your sellers and watch them navigate a typical day. Ask the direct questions: Where are you clicking too much? What fields feel completely pointless? What context are you keeping in a shadow spreadsheet because the CRM is too slow? When you design the process for the front line, you have to hear it from the front line.

The 6-Step CRM Optimization Framework

Once you know where the drag lives, work through these six execution steps in order.

1. Define Stages and Strict Ownership

Alignment is the bedrock of any CRM optimization framework. Get your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders in one room to establish absolute clarity around buyer journey milestones.

Define exactly what qualifies a lead at each stage, and more importantly, who owns the record at every handoff. Clear operational boundaries stop lead leakage before it starts.

Another key team to align with is IT. For alignment to actually be actioned, data must be able to flow seamlessly from one department to the next to provide the right context. That data can sometimes be owned in systems where IT needs to collaborate for access. Therefore, ensuring that all teams are aligned ahead of time will help to make the execution easier.

“Bringing IT into the conversation and creating a collaborative relationship across departments when defining stages and strict ownership is critical. Friction when unlocking your data can often be due to department silos rather than just technology silos.”

– Austin Frink, Director, Data Technologies, Sercante l Trilliad

2. Cleanse and Trim the Fields

Audit your current fields and page layouts with one brutal question: Does this field help a rep move a deal forward right now? If a seller is in early discovery, they shouldn’t be forced to look at 40 blank legal or billing fields. Use conditional visibility to show the right fields at the right deal stage. The answer to “can we track that?” is always yes, but the smarter question is “should we?”

3. Automate the Administrative Burden

Identify the repetitive, manual tasks that drain your team’s energy. Logging basic activity, routing leads, progressing stages, and triggering standard follow-ups. Let your system handle these based on real-time buyer engagement. This is what the technology was built to do. Don’t pay premium seller salaries for manual data entry.

4. Close the Handoff Gap

Map out the exact second a lead passes from marketing to sales. Ensure all marketing context, intent signals, and engagement history travel with the record. Fixing this single point of friction rebuilds cross-functional trust between Marketing and Sales faster than almost anything else.

5. Layer in AI and Advanced Automation

Now that the foundation holds, your data is clean, and your workflows are automated, AI becomes an incredible asset rather than a liability. This is where you can confidently execute an Agentforce or agentic roadmap. Start with a single high-friction use case, like auto-captured activity, next-best-action prompts, or signal-based prioritization—prove the time savings, and expand. For additional insight on the strategic approach to creating an effective AI roadmap, check out Jenna Packard’s blog, The AI Roadmap for Enterprise: A Framework for Identifying Value-Driven AI Use Cases.

6. Build Continuous Feedback Loops

CRM optimization is a continuous rhythm, not a one-time project. Establish a monthly cadence where your RevOps, Sales Ops, or Marketing Ops teams shadow an account executive to look for new layout errors, system speed bumps, or shadow spreadsheets.

Framework Step	Core Focus	Outcome
Define Ownership	SLA & Handoff Alignment	Eliminates lead leakage
Cleanse & Trim	UI/UX Minimalization	High CRM adoption & clean data
Automate Admin	Workflow Automation	Reclaims hours of selling time
Close the Gap	Data Context Syncing	Bridges the Marketing Visibility Gap
Layer AI	Agentic & Generative Tools	Massive operational leverage
Feedback Loops	Continuous Shadowing	Long-term technical scalability

Getting Started with Your CRM Optimization

Every technical change in this framework directly drives a business outcome. That is how you justify the work to leadership, and it’s how you ensure the changes actually stick. The ultimate goal is simple: transition your tech stack from a static tracking system to an active revenue producer.

But if the friction has been there so long that it has just become background noise, it can be hard to know which of these steps to prioritize first.

That is exactly why the Sercante l Trilliad team guides revenue teams through a structured Seller Experience Audit. We assess your systems, data quality, and cross-functional handoffs to turn guesswork into a prioritized, impact-driven roadmap tailored to this exact CRM optimization framework. Reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team to schedule your Seller Experience Audit.

Contact the Sercante | Trilliad team to get your CRM Seller Experience Audit.

Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
July 21, 2026

Exploring the Six Out-of-the-Box Flow Templates in Salesforce Agentforce Marketing

Catherine Williams

Accelerating Marketing Automation with Pre-Built Salesforce Flow Templates

Building effective marketing automation takes time, and staring at a blank canvas can often delay your first campaign. With Agentforce Marketing (aka Marketing Cloud Next), you can bypass those early hurdles with six out-of-the-box flow templates designed to accelerate your path from idea to execution.

Instead of building common campaign patterns from scratch, you can now select a proven framework, customize it to your business needs, and launch faster. These templates don’t replace your marketing strategy—they accelerate it, providing the structure and foundational assets you need to focus on what truly differentiates your brand: messaging, personalization, and customer experience.

Why Flow Templates Matter for Marketers

Marketing automation success is not just about sending emails. It’s about creating relevant, timely experiences that guide customers through their relationship with a brand.

These flow templates help marketers:

Reduce implementation time: Launch common marketing journeys faster.
Create consistency across campaigns: Follow proven automation patterns.
Focus on what matters: Spend less time building and more time optimizing.

For organizations adopting Agentforce Marketing, these templates spark a critical shift in focus: What does this experience need to accomplish now?

Register for the Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop.

Learn how to build your own Flows in Agentforce Marketing with this expert-led workshop. Register here.

How to Access the New Flow Templates

The new templates are available directly within the campaign creation experience.

To access them:

Open the Marketing app
Navigate to Campaigns
Select Add New to create a campaign
Fill out details on the campaign creation pop-up window
Enter your campaign details and check the “Active” box

Once in the campaign workspace, look to the “Let’s build your campaign” section, scroll down to “Need a faster start? Browse templates.”

Selecting Browse Templates opens up the available Salesforce-created flow templates.

From here, marketers can select the template that best matches their campaign goal and use it as the foundation for their automation.

After selecting the template, you’ll be guided through the configuration process, including automation settings within the flow template itself.

Creating a new automation and choosing which template you want.

Inside the Templates: Six Salesforce-Designed Marketing Journeys

1. Birthday Promotional Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The birthday promotional email automation template helps organizations celebrate customers while encouraging repeat purchases through a personalized promotional experience.

This template for organizations looking to create a simple but effective customer engagement moment to:

Recognize a customer’s birthday
Provide an offer
Encourage action before the promotion expires

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

Birthday offer email
Birthday offer reminder email

Why It Matters:

Birthday campaigns are great examples of personalized lifecycle marketing. They create a meaningful customer touchpoint while encouraging engagement. This template removes the need to build the basic journey structure manually, allowing marketers to focus on the offer, branding, and customer experience.

Pro-Tip: Before activating a birthday automation, validate that your customer birthday data is accurate and consistently maintained. Personalization is only effective when the underlying data is reliable.

2. Lead Capture Follow-Up Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The lead capture follow-up email automation template helps organizations convert new leads into engaged prospects through an automated welcome and nurture experience. This is one of the templates I expect many B2B organizations will recognize the value of because lead follow-up is one of the most common marketing automation use cases.

Inside the Flow:

This is an event-triggered flow. The template includes:

Lead capture welcome email
Lead capture product email
Lead capture brand value proposition email

Why It Matters:

Many organizations invest heavily in generating leads but struggle with what happens next. This template creates an immediate, consistent follow-up experience by helping organizations welcome new prospects, introduce their brand, highlight products or services, and provide valuable resources.

Pro-Tip: This is one of the templates I would recommend reviewing early during an Agentforce Marketing implementation. It provides a strong foundation for lead nurturing while allowing marketers to focus on content strategy and personalization.

Setting up an automation event-triggered flow.

3. Reengagement Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The reengagement email automation template helps organizations reconnect with inactive customers or leads. Instead of continuing to send the same messaging to disengaged audiences, this template creates an intentional journey designed to win customers back.

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

“We miss you” email
Benefits and social proof email
Second discount offer/reminder email
Final call to action email

Why It Matters:

A mature marketing strategy is not only about acquiring new customers. It’s also about understanding and improving engagement with existing audiences. This template helps marketers reconnect with inactive contacts using incentives strategically, reduce unnecessary communication, and create clear exit paths.

Pro-Tip: Define what “inactive” means before activating the flow. A customer inactive for 30 days may require a different approach than someone who has not been engaged in over a year.

Setting up a template that is meant to reconnect with inactive customers or leads.

4. Event Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The event email automation template helps marketers manage communications before and after webinars, conferences, product launches, and other events. Successful events require more than registration emails. Customers need reminders, confirmations, and meaningful follow-up.

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

Event registration confirmation
Event one-week reminder
Event one-day reminder
Event attended follow-up
Event did not attend follow-up

Why It Matters:

This template extends the customer experience beyond attendance. We also recommend using Campaign Member and Campaign Member Status to track attendance, creating strong alignment between marketing engagement and CRM reporting.

Pro-Tip: Many teams focus heavily on driving registrations, but underestimate the value of post-event communication. The follow-up experience is often where the strongest conversion opportunities happen.

Setting up an event email automation template.

5. Nurture Campaign Email Automation Template

What It Does:

The nurture campaign email automation template helps organizations build ongoing relationships with leads through a structured engagement journey. This is especially valuable for B2B organizations with longer buying cycles, where prospects need education and trust-building before making a decision.

Inside the Flow:

This is a segment-triggered flow. The template includes:

Welcome to our brand
Exclusive event or content invitation
Exclusive offer ends soon

Why It Matters:

Effective nurturing is about responding to customer behavior, not just following a schedule. The built-in decision paths help ensure that engaged prospects do not continue receiving irrelevant communications.

Pro-Tip: Define your entry criteria, engagement signals, and exit strategy before launching a nurture journey. The technology enables automation, but your strategic rules drive its success.

Setting up a nurture campaign email automation template.

6. Signup Form Automation Template

What It Does: The signup form template walks the user through what is needed to build a new form, such as Data Source, Fields, Form Content, and an optional Landing Page. This template also captures consent for communications immediately upon form submission.

Inside the Flow: This is an event-triggered flow. The journey follows this sequence:

Customer submits form
Create record
Create consent request
End flow

During configuration, marketers define the record type created (options include Lead, Contact, or Account), the marketing channel, the communication channel (Email or SMS), the consent status, and specific record type settings.

Why It Matters: Strong marketing automation starts with strong data practices. This template connects lead generation, data creation, and consent management into one unified, automated process.

Pro-Tip: Before activating this flow, confirm your organization’s data model and consent strategy. Decide what records should be created, what information sales needs, and how communication preferences should be managed.

For more tips on building Agentforce Marketing Forms, check out the Building Better Form Flows with The New Agentforce Marketing Flow Template blog post.

Automation event-triggered flow template.

Summary of Flows

Flow Name	Trigger Type	Primary Benefit
Birthday Promotional Email Automation	Segment	Celebrates customers and encourages repeat purchases with personalized offers.
Lead Capture Follow-Up Email Automation	Event	Converts new leads into engaged prospects via automated welcome and nurture journeys.
Reengagement Email Automation	Segment	Reconnects with inactive customers or leads through strategic, incentivized re-engagement.
Event Email Automation	Segment	Manages end-to-end communications for webinars, conferences, and product launches.
Nurture Campaign Email Automation	Segment	Builds long-term relationships through structured, behavior-based engagement journeys.
Signup Form Automation	Event	Captures consent and automates record creation immediately upon form submission.

Moving from Building Automation to Optimizing Experience

The six flow templates in Agentforce Marketing represent an important shift in how organizations approach marketing automation. Instead of spending hours recreating common journeys, marketers now have pre-designed frameworks that provide a strong starting point. Whether you are launching a lead nurture program, reconnecting with inactive customers, managing an event experience, or capturing new subscribers, these templates help reduce implementation effort and accelerate time to value.

The future of marketing automation is not about removing the marketer from the process. It’s about removing repetitive work so marketers can spend more time where they provide the most value: understanding customers, creating meaningful experiences, and driving business growth. Open the Agentforce Marketing app today, explore the new templates, and see how much faster you can get your next campaign live.

Need Assistance?

If you need any assistance with your Agentforce Marketing platform, please reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team! We would be happy to help you navigate your next steps in starting to use the platform alongside your existing technology to drive better results.

Contact the Sercante | Trilliad team for help with your Agentforce Marketing Platform.

Pro Tips, Strategy
July 15, 2026

AI Can’t Fix a Junk Drawer: Why the CRM Seller Experience Matters More Than Ever

Heather Rinke

The painful reality of a clunky CRM configuration is low adoption, messy data, and an estimated 14% drop in closed deals. When your CRM is built for management oversight instead of seller enablement, everyone suffers, especially your buyers. But knowing you have a problem is only half the battle. The real questions for Marketers, RevOps, and Sales Operations leaders are: What does an ideal CRM seller experience actually look like in 2026, and how do we get there? Why does this matter now more than ever?

As we outline in our 2026 CRM Optimization Playbook, three major industry forces are shifting CRM optimization from a “nice-to-have project” to an absolute revenue priority. If you want your tech stack to act as a force multiplier for sellers rather than a budget drain, you need to understand the modern blueprint for a frictionless CRM.

Why Are the Stakes Higher in 2026?

We aren’t operating in the same B2B landscape we were a few years ago. If you are still running a CRM configured for 2018 reporting needs, you are actively fighting three major headwinds:

ROI is Under a Microscope: CFOs are holding the tech budget to a much higher standard. It’s no longer about whether a platform is successfully deployed. It’s about whether it’s actually being adopted by the front lines.
Buyers Are Further Ahead: Prospects are over halfway through their buying journey before they ever talk to sales. Sellers need instant, unified context the second a lead routes to them to add value in the few moments they have left.
AI Raises the Stakes on Clean Data: Everyone is eager to layer in AI assistants or platforms like Agentforce. But here is a sobering reality: at least 50% of generative AI projects were abandoned after proof of concept because of factors including poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value (Gartner).

The Modern Blueprint: An Ideal CRM Seller Experience

When you optimize the seller experience, the wins ripple across the entire lead-to-revenue lifecycle. It stops being a “Sales Ops project” and becomes a multi-department win.

Here is what happens when you design a CRM for your front lines:

Focus Area	The Frictionless Workflow	The Impact
Smarter Prospecting	Intent and signal-based outreach take the guesswork out of who to call and what to say.	~47% higher conversion rate over traditional scoring models (Landbase).
Frictionless Activity Management	The system automatically captures email, meeting, and call data, giving sellers next-best-action coaching without manual data entry.	~4.8 hours per week are saved by AI (Gartner).
Strategic Account Growth	Data-driven whitespace identification points account for teams exactly where cross-sell and upsell potential is highest.	~Sales teams using AI are 30% more likely to report year-over-year revenue growth (Salesforce).
Seamless Sales Processes	Headless CRM systems, like Salesforce, allow data and actions to be used inside additional tools sellers are already using, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, email inboxes, or AI agents. Allowing them to access clean data in their flow of work, across all channels.	~49% increase in seller productivity and 28% shorter sales cycles from process automation (Rox).

How AI Acts as the Ultimate Friction-Reducer (If You Let It)

Once you lay a solid data foundation, AI can step in to eliminate the heavy administrative burden that has plagued sellers for decades. Instead of forcing sellers to be data-entry clerks, optimized platforms allow AI to do what it does best:

Capture the Busywork: Auto-logging meeting notes, participants, and next steps directly from calls without the salesperson typing a single line.
Read the Room at Scale: Surfacing real-time deal health alerts and coaching prompts to catch stalling deals before it’s too late.
Draft the Follow-Up: Triggering timely, personalized outreach based on real-time buyer engagement signals so hot leads never go cold.

By removing the digital drag, you free up your sellers’ brainpower to focus on what they actually do best: building relationships with buyers.

The 2026 Mandate: Trade the Junk Drawer for a Seamless Seller Experience

At this stage in the B2B landscape, a CRM configured merely for management oversight is an active drain on your pipeline, your budget, and your team’s performance. The modern blueprint for growth requires shifting away from the digital drag of manual data entry and embracing a frictionless, optimized CRM seller experience. By laying a clean data foundation and allowing AI to automate the busywork, capture real-time deal health, and surface actionable intent signals, you transform your system from a static reporting tool into a high-powered revenue engine.

Tackling this all on your own can be overwhelming, and you may not have the bandwidth or the resources to evaluate your CRM and the friction it’s causing on your sellers and your pipeline. Tap into the expertise of the Sercante l Trilliad team with our Seller Experience Audit to fast-track your path to an optimized CRM and get a customized blueprint for quick wins and major revenue impact.

Contact us to get your Seller Experience Audit

Marketing Automations, Pro Tips
July 13, 2026

Your Guide to Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals

Erin Duncan

Artificial intelligence and real-time data are shifting the landscape under our feet. For a long time, Salesforce Flow was considered “admin territory.” Marketers stuck to traditional journey builders and engagement programs. But things have changed. Flow is no longer just a backend automation tool for admins. It can now be directly harnessed by marketers in the Agentforce Marketing platform (also known as Marketing Cloud Next, or Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition) to streamline workflows and deliver personalized, multi-channel journeys at scale. And for marketers with Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, they can already access these features. To start taking advantage, it’s critical to start learning Agentforce Marketing Flow fundamentals.

Register for the Agentforce Marketing: Unlock Data and Drive Measurable Growth webinar

See how fellow marketers at Denver Public Schools are already using Flow and Agentforce Marketing features to streamline campaign workflows, deliver multi-channel campaigns, and track attribution. Register Here

The Foundation: Diving into Flow Basics

Historically, Flow Builder was seen as a tool reserved only for Salesforce Admins because of its ability to perform deep backend activities like creating records, automating heavy backend logic, or running APEX.

With the arrival of Agentforce Marketing, we now have Marketing Flows—sometimes referred to as “citizen flow”. It uses the exact same interface and requires a similar foundational skillset, but it gives marketers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Don’t worry, admins: access to Marketing Flow does not equal full admin rights. Granular control remains secure through specific user permissions.

What is Flow Builder?

Flow Builder is a drag-and-drop visual interface used to automate complex business processes, workflows, and user interactions. Think of it as the core automation engine of Agentforce Marketing. It seamlessly orchestrates your three most vital assets:

Segment: Your targeted audience.
Content: Your dynamic messaging.
Actions: Your delivery mechanisms.

What can you do with Flow?

Marketing Flows provide a massive playground of strategic options:

Send: Deploy emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages directly through the canvas.
Wait: Pause an individual’s progress for a specific amount of time (from minutes to months) or until a specific event occurs.
Update: Dynamically push data to multiple objects or auto-create tasks for your internal team members.
Customize: Branch engagement paths using real-time data or user interactions.
Optimize: Utilize built-in Path Experiments to split-test channels, content variations, and delivery cadences.

What are the types of Flow?

There are several core marketing flow types tailored to your specific orchestration needs. Below are the most common flow types you’ll need in Agentforce Marketing:

Automation Event-Triggered: Runs quietly in the background and fires immediately when an action occurs—such as a form fill, an email click, or a new subscriber signup. These are frequently used as completion actions or to instantly route leads.
Segment Triggered (recently renamed to “Audience Flow”): Targets a specific group of people (segments, lists, campaign members, etc.) when the flow runs. It is ideal for nurturing new leads or managing ongoing communications, allowing users to exit via rules or end steps.
Data 360 Flows: Powered by Data Cloud permissions, these flows can auto-convert records or trigger automation based on calculated insights and real-time score changes.
CRM Record-Triggered Flow: This type fires the moment CRM record data changes or updates.
Autolaunched Flow: Background automation kicked off by subflows, Apex code, or REST APIs.

Elements: The Building Blocks of Flow

Every flow you build is constructed using three basic types of canvas elements:

Logic Elements: Includes options like Decisions to branch your paths, Wait Time based on a date, time, or event, and Path Experiments to test different paths.
Data Elements: Elements that let you directly Create, Get, Update, or Delete records across the platform.
Interaction Elements: The execution steps, where you can Send Email, Send SMS, Send WhatsApp, create Consent, or trigger a Subflow.

Agentforce Marketing Flow: Three Ways to Build

Building out your vision doesn’t mean staring at a blank whiteboard. Agentforce Marketing gives you three flexible onboarding paths depending on your technical comfort level and campaign complexity.

Start learning how to build your own flows with this hands-on training, Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop. Learn more and sign up here.

Building Flows with Agentforce

If you are a new Flow user or simply want to quickly stand up a simple nurture, you can use the conversational Agentforce Campaign Creation interface. By providing a prompt grounded in a campaign brief, Agentforce will automatically generate a campaign preview and lay out the flow steps for you. From there, you can ask the agent to refine text tones, add messages, or alter paths using natural language.

Building Flows with Campaign Canvas

The Campaign Canvas is perfect for simple nurtures and straightforward customer journeys that do not require complex decision splits. It offers a streamlined “Quick Start” interface where you can rapidly add linear steps for your triggers, target segments, message content, and wait periods.

Using Flow Builder

When your campaign demands advanced nurtures, exit rules, behavioral decisions, or experiments, it’s time to open up the full Flow Builder. Here, you get full access to the toolbox, manager tabs, canvas layout, and the ability to cleanly cut, copy, paste, and configure every element.

You can also combine these approaches to building flow. Using Agentforce or the Campaign Canvas is a great way to start your flow structure. You can then use the Flow Builder to fine-tune the flow details and add more advanced flow logic.

Lean on Flow Templates to Save Time

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new campaign. Salesforce provides over 300 out-of-the-box templates, including multiple marketing-focused options.

Furthermore, once you build a custom flow architecture that works perfectly for your brand, you can save your own flows as templates for your wider marketing team to replicate safely. Flow templates are a great way to avoid starting from scratch. Learn more about Flow Templates from Mike Morris’ blog, Saving Time with Flow Templates in Agentforce Marketing.

Getting Started with Flow & Agentforce Marketing

It’s critical for marketers to start learning Flow to take advantage of the latest automation, AI, and real-time data features in Agentforce Marketing. However, the path to not only learn Flow but also figure out the best deployment approach for your organization to start using these features alongside your current platform can feel overwhelming.

You don’t have to continue on this journey alone. Tap into the expertise of the Sercante | Trilliad team. We’ve developed a proven Marketing Cloud Convergence Path that we tailor to each marketing team’s business outcomes, ensuring you can continue maximizing your existing platform while fast-tracking your overall time to value.