Activity Sync and SFDC Activity Reporting Limitations

Salesforce has extensive activity reporting capabilities, based on an activity model that was designed close to 20 years ago. Because the way that Salesforce stores activity data is limited, so is the reporting.

Let's talk about how Salesforce stores activity, and how that impacts the Intelligence360 Activity Sync setup based on your desired outcome.

How does activity relate to other records in the CRM?

• Assignee / Owner is the person to who the task is attributed, ie. this is "their activity". You would use this if you were doing per-person activity reporting.

• WhoID in Salesforce refers to people things. So that would be typically a Lead ID or a Contact ID. The WhoId represents a human, such as a lead or a contact. WhoIds are polymorphic. Polymorphic means a WhoId is equivalent to a Contact’s ID or a Lead’s ID. The label is Name.

• WhatID in Salesforce refers to object type things. That would typically be an Account ID or an Opportunity ID. The WhatId represents nonhuman objects such as Accounts, Opportunities, Campaigns, Cases, or Custom Objects. WhatIds are polymorphic. Polymorphic means a WhatId is equivalent to the ID of a related object. The label is Related To.

Each of these relationships are 1-1. This means a single activity can only be connected to 3 other records in the CRM.

Where does this fall down in the real world? Let's look at some examples.

From: John Smith (prospect)
To: Sally Martin (AE), Alex Wonder (SE), Mark Johns (prospect)

Subject: hey what's up?

In this example, we have the following records involved:

John Smith → CRM Contact 1

Mark Johns → CRM Contact 2

Sally Martin → CRM User / Employee 1

Alex Wonder → CRM User / Employee 2

John / Mark Contacts → CRM Account

John / Mark → CRM Opportunity

But wait...that's 6 CRM records. Activities can only support 3 relationships. Houston, we have a problem. 🚀

When working with CRM activity reporting, you must make a choice (P.S. Intelligence360 Activity Reporting doesn't have these limitations!!!!). In order to link a given email to more than 3 records, you need to create "duplicate" records with the additional associations. In the above example, you might need as many as 5 duplicate, logged activities to represent the activity correctly.

Structuring Activity in SFDC

Deploying activity sync requires you to make a choice on how the data will be recorded.

• Do you want 1 activity per person per email?

• Do you want 1 activity per email?

• Do you want 1 activity per CRM record?

If you pick 1 per person, per person activity reports will be CORRECT, but activity counts per CRM record will be INCORRECT. You will get multiple duplicate activities per CRM record!

If you pick 1 per email, you will get a single record per email. Email Activity counts will be CORRECT. However, per person activity reports and per record activity counts will be INCORRECT!

If you pick one per email per record, you will get one email per primary record. Record activity counts will be CORRECT, but per person and per activity counts will be INCORRECT!

There's no winning with SFDC.

To learn more about our activity reporting and how we fix all these issues with Intelligence360 activity reporting, click here.