Author: Ruth Cawdron

Welcome back to another dive into the Salesforce Clouds! If you’re new to our Head in the Clouds series, you can take a look at the full list of Clouds we’ve covered.

This time, we’re looking at Salesforce Government Cloud so stick around to learn more!

What is Salesforce Government Cloud?

Salesforce Government Cloud is a bespoke, securely partitioned instance of the Salesforce 360 platform which offers an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It’s aimed at:

• US federal government
• Local government customers
• US government contractors
• Public sector
• Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)

Why does Salesforce Government Cloud exist? 

Salesforce explains the challenges facing government authorities and public offices in a Trailhead module:

“In the modern digital landscape of online applications, customer self-service, and automated workflows, government authorities and public offices must rethink and reinvent their task flows. The ultimate goal for any public sector authority is to increase constituent engagement and streamline internal workflows. Public Sector Solutions from Salesforce do just that.”

Government Cloud’s main objective is to provide government entities with an industry-leading, security-compliant platform on which to scale and secure resources in order to complete their mission effectively. We’ll dive into the specifics of how it does this later.

Quick glossary

Let’s take a minute to dive into some helpful terms and definitions:

Government Cloud: a bespoke-for-government and public sector suite of tools built on the Salesforce CRM platform. Government Cloud is designed for agencies around the world including central government, local government, police and healthcare. Salesforce Government Cloud maintains a FedRAMP Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) at the Moderate Security Impact Level.

Government Cloud Plus: runs on AWS GovCloud (US), a dedicated instance of Salesforce’s Government Cloud designed to support the security needs of U.S. government agencies and contractors. It has achieved a FedRAMP Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the High Security Impact Level.

Check out this comparison chart of the differences between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus.

FedRAMP at High / Moderate Security Impact Level: a differentiator between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Government Cloud Plus is compliant to the highest level whereas Government Cloud is compliant to the Moderate level. This means FedRAMP has evaluated these cloud services via a significant, thorough security and compliance review that is annually reassessed. In short, having authority to operate at this highest security level allows Salesforce Government Cloud Plus customers to use Salesforce for the most sensitive, unclassified data.

What can you do with Salesforce Government Cloud?

Since Government Cloud is already built on Salesforce and its 360 CRM, it casts a wide net in what it can provide for the public and government sector. Salesforce offers out-of-the-box security-compliant applications designed for government service.

Here are some of the applications and functionality available with Government Cloud:

• Emergency response management
• License and permit approvals processes
• Inspections management applications
• Grants management applications
• Contact Centre functionality
• Scalable call, web, chat and text response systems
• Centralised communication with stakeholders across email, SMS and social platforms
• The power to give public servants a 360-degree view of citizens, stakeholders and partners in a single source of truth – Salesforce CRM!

💡 Did you know: The UK Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Salesforce to enable the UK public sector to benefit from access to Salesforce products and citizens.

Why should you use Salesforce Government Cloud?

Overall, there’s clearly a lot that you can do with Salesforce Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Since governments are vast, multifaceted, and public-facing institutions, Salesforce provides a single source of truth digitally with Government Cloud to empower governmental and public sector employees to accelerate their mission impact. There are other benefits too:

• Low code / no code Saas platform that integrates with legacy systems
• Gain access to a broad range of solutions from contact centres to case management to citizen engagement and many more
• Security-first infrastructure compliant with the demands of government
• See time to value in days not years

Learn more from these Salesforce demo videos.

Salesforce Government Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

ProvenWorks is a Salesforce Partner offering a number of solutions that enhance out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality. We have customers around the world who are government entities with interesting use cases around importing.

Empower external stakeholders, business entities and programmes to import data to your Salesforce org quickly and securely.

Whether you are reporting on local outreach programmes, analysing state-wide employment data or outsourcing contracts for efficiency, you need to collect all that data into your single source of truth – Salesforce CRM.

Our spreadsheet data importing solution, SimpleImport, empowers government entities who want to streamline data input by removing manual workload and empowering users to import themselves. Unlike security-compromising solutions access via third-party website or inefficient admin-only tools, use SimpleImport directly from your Salesforce org or a digital experience.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your mission impact!

Reach out to the ProvenWorks team and find out more about our solutions and how we can help meet your Salesforce needs.

So what’s next? The choice is yours.

You can either go back to the first blog in our Head in the Clouds series: What is Experience Cloud and what can you do with it? Or… you can access all the blogs in the Head in the Clouds series.

This is the second part of our deep dive into ZIP+4 Codes for Salesforce. If you’re not sure what ZIP+4 Codes are and why you should care, here’s where you can read the first blog post.

A recap in 3 sentences

Want to get up to speed quicker than that? Here’s the 3-sentence version.

ZIP+4 Codes were created by the USPS to provide even more precise address matching to a more granular level, since they represent only a handful of houses or even a single building.

So, ZIP+4 Codes are incredibly useful because they help the USPS more effectively sort and distribute mail.

For you and your business, this means faster deliveries, reduced misdeliveries, granularity even down to a specific PO box, and all of this translates to saving money and time!

Salesforce CRM and ZIP+4 Codes

Salesforce as an organisation is quick to highlight the importance of ZIP Code data: 

“Without geographic data to structure and enhance existing CRM data, and no market data to track against current market share, it’s impossible to effectively manage sales territories for growth.”

What does bad geographical data look like in practice?

• Allocating sales resource to geographic areas with little potential
• Spending time marketing to places where ROI is unlikely
• Struggling to report on market share across regions, leaving your organisation without a clear forward-looking strategy

All of this boils down to an alarming amount of time and money wasted.

You’re probably thinking that we’ve spent enough time preaching about the perils of inaccurate or missing ZIP Code data for your organisation. So, let’s take it one step further; let’s look at why you need Zip+4 Codes for your Salesforce CRM. 

We’re going to use Salesforce CRM as our case study here, but you can easily swap out Salesforce for your CRM of choice. The information remains completely relevant.

Why you need ZIP+4 Codes for your Salesforce CRM

1. Give yourself the competitive advantage

“Poor quality data costs businesses around $700 billion a year, or 30 percent of the average company’s revenue” according to Salesforce.

If you’re working in a competitive industry (and aren’t we all these days?), have you considered how cleaner, more precise datapoints like ZIP+4 can give you an advantage over your competitors?

As we work through the points below, we’ll see how more granular data sets you up for a better understanding of your market, clearer reporting and business analysis, and greater opportunity to succeed in your niche.

💡 Bear in mind that here we’re discussing the ‘big picture’ wins. We’re not even going to cover how a cleaner, more accurate CRM database empowers your users to to do their daily tasks more efficiently, increases CRM adoption and allows for faster, simple business processes – all things that can give your business the advantage over your competitors.

2. Many integrations require a ZIP+4 Code

It’s worth considering that, along with the list of benefits we’ll be investigating, for many integrations and delivery services that you use alongside Salesforce CRM, ZIP+4 Codes are not just recommended but required. So why not make your integrations smoother by retrieving ZIP+4 Codes within your CRM?

3. Combine ZIP+4 Codes with market data

We’re completely aware that a ZIP+4 Code alone is not going to provide you with useful market insight. However, when you think about that ZIP+4 Code as the data backbone of your market analysis and white space strategy, you begin to see its potential. Let’s imagine the power of having every CRM record associated with a specific ZIP+4 Code.

Taking a B2B example, imagine displaying the number of companies within a region by NAICS industry code*, connecting this data with a ZIP+4 Code directly on a record in your CRM. As a B2C example, imagine combining a dataset related to age, income and spending habits with the granularity of a ZIP+4 Code to have the most accurate consumer targeting available.

Hopefully you can see that by combining a ZIP+4 Code with market data, you’re creating micro-markets that are giving you the best available information about your white space for growth. A more exact idea of the number of businesses in a ZIP+4 area, a truer picture of the demographic breakdown of an even smaller region… Sales territories, targeted marketing and allocation of resource just got more intentional.

*We’ve got a Salesforce-native tool for looking up industry codes! Check out IndustryComplete.

4. Dig deeper into your analytics

We’ve seen how ZIP+4 Codes can underpin other market datapoints for detailed planning and allocation of resource in your market. Now let’s look at how ZIP+4 Codes can improve your analytics and reporting.

With a ZIP+4 Code associated with each Salesforce record, whether it’s an account, lead, opportunity or something else, you can track sales performance and identify with even more geo-specificity your areas of success. With that information, you know more definitively where to focus your time, resource and efforts to maximise your success.

💡 Once you take into account the possibility that two cities may share the same five-digit ZIP Code, you can see how ZIP+4 Codes empower you to drill down more than your competitors to identify your high yield regions.

5. Succeed in your industry niche

It’s always helpful when talking about niches to avoid generalisations. So, let’s dive straight into a case study for this one.

We have a client who supplies parts in the aerospace industry. They need to ship parts to aircraft hangars that are often situated in the middle of nowhere. Providing a ZIP+4 Code for these airport hangars is the best possible way they can ensure their parts will reach their destinations quickly and efficiently.

Whether you work in a niche aerospace sector or something completely different, getting ZIP+4 data into your Salesforce CRM means you’re setting yourself up with the best possible data for success in your (extremely specific!) business processes.

6. Avoid paying excess tax

No one likes talking about taxes, thinking about taxes or doing taxes. Yet it’s what Benjamin Franklin famously called one of the two certainties of life. It’s worth considering that ZIP+4 Codes can take some of the sting out of your tax process.

Did you know that if your address isn’t accurate enough, you could end up paying more due to local boundary lines? Having a ZIP+4, from which you can establish an exact County, is a sure-fire way to ensure you provide the most accurate address data possible.

How to get ZIP+4 Codes for Salesforce

Now that you can see why ZIP+4 Codes are incredibly powerful in Salesforce CRM, it’s time to start using them!

You can easily retrieve ZIP+4 Codes for your addresses in Salesforce using AddressTools, our award-winning package for address validation, standardisation and verification.

Book a free demo

In case you can’t tell(!), we love talking about all things related to address data in Salesforce. Why not schedule a call with one of our team to chat about your ZIP+4 and wider address data requirements for your Salesforce org.

Here at ProvenWorks you’re going to find some of the biggest advocates for buying a solution off the shelf, or what we call a ‘managed package’. We’re fully aware that when it comes to the Build versus Buy debate, we’re pretty biased. We’re a Salesforce ISV (Independent Software Vendor) so we make a living off creating managed packages that businesses using Salesforce CRM can find on the AppExchange.

This is why we look to get other people into the debate too. We’ve done a number of sessions working with developers to raise awareness over the debate around Build Versus Buy – just watch this session we ran with Bitwise Industries at CenCal Dreamin’ 2022.

You will find an endless amount of content from Salesforce ISVs advocating the choice to buy a managed package. You will also find the same number of developers in favour of developing a custom solution. 

What takes us by surprise is when developers speak out in favour of managed packages. And this happened to us recently. 

helpfulbits, a German Salesforce consultancy who implements custom software and delivers training, recently wrote an in-depth review of our data import solution SimpleImport. 

As a system integrator that writes custom software, but also offers a prebuilt standard solution, helpfulbits are the perfect case study for understanding better the choice between build versus buy.

An interview with a developer on managed packages

As software developers (who typically fall into the “build” side of the build versus buy argument), what’s your 1-minute elevator pitch for choosing custom development?

Well, if your business has very complex processes that are unique to your segment or industry, it can be difficult to find a software that fits your company off the shelf. The larger your company is, the more likely this will be. Moreover, the larger your userbase is, the higher the return of investment of custom software. For example, it does make a lot of sense to develop a custom software for support agents if you can shave off 1 minute of processing time for hundreds or even thousands of agents – that’s a huge ROI.

Using data imports as an example, we typically choose custom development when there is business logic or any kind of data transformation involved. For example, a customer might have an excel layout that does not directly translate to records in Salesforce. Other clients might need to join data from multiple sheets into single records.

That said, a lot of the time, service providers and their clients internally simply shy away from the process and the bureaucracy involved in procurement, even if there is a good standard solution, because the developers have already been hired.

On the flip side of that, can you share the story of what led you to develop your own out-of-the-box solution, helpful sync?

I’ll gladly do that! Basically, my buddy and me were having a beer and thinking hard about a product that would solve a real-world problem. We figured that we’d need an easy way to push complex data around Salesforce Orgs and Sandboxes, to debug errors in production for example. The situation escalated quickly and we built a sandbox seeder and anonymizer that we and our clients like to use. Back when we started, we didn’t even know such tools already existed and that there was competition. Had we known, we probably wouldn’t have done it. However, we tried some of the existing software and most solutions were not to our liking, as they were either too complicated and cumbersome or too narrow in their scope.

In your review of our solution SimpleImport, you mention that “custom code is not always economical”. What do you mean by that? When do you find that custom development is not the right decision?

Custom software basically has two price tags. One for the solution itself and the other one for maintenance. Custom development is expensive. For the price of a custom solution, you can probably pay the license fees of something like SimpleImport for a few years. Moreover, it is likely that the custom solution will have to be modified and maintained every now and then, for example, when a new Salesforce release is published. Those costs can be comparable to license fees.

Personally I think custom development can only be justified when your business logic is really special and complex and, in the case of importing, the data has to be transformed before it is imported into Salesforce. The latter can often simply be done with an additional excel sheet, though.

Is there anything you think customers don’t give enough consideration to during the build versus buy argument?

I think most customers are already working with their development teams and rely on their opinions and counsel. However, developers in general often don’t like to look for existing solutions. There’s even a name for it, the so called “Not invented here” syndrome. I am guilty of that myself! Most of the time, when it comes to standard tasks, there are off-the-shelf solutions that simply are better and less expensive.

Looking towards ISVs like ProvenWorks, what do you want managed package providers to know? What do you want to tell them?

Pitch your products more to consultants and developers! They are the ones who implement the solution for the customer and who will receive the user story requesting the “Excel Import” for implementation. If they know about your product and like it, they will recommend it during backlog refinements and the like.

About helpfulbits

About SimpleImport