What does the "Look Back Window (in days)" feature do?

The "Look Back Window (in days)" is designed to optimize how much data is processed by Align.ly Contact Role. Based on what you select for your "Source Object Type" (Task, Event, or Campaign Member) and the date/time field reference in "Source Object Date/Time Field", Align.ly Contact Role will query and process only the records that are within the "Look Back Window (in days)".

For example, if I select Task as my "Source Object Type" and use CreatedDate as my "Source Object Date/Time Field" and use 30 days as my "Look Back Window (in days)" then Align.ly Contact Role will query and process all Tasks created within the last 30 days.

What is best practice?

There are two main items to consider:

1. If you are running Align.ly Contact Role for the first time and want to backfill historical data, it is recommended that you increase the value. For example, if you want to backfill the last year, you'd set the value to "365" days. After you've run the backfill, you'll want to decrease the value so that Align.ly Contact Role runs more efficiently going forward.
2. It is recommended to have a value that is larger than the "Days Before Opportunity Creation" value. This is to make sure Align.ly Contact Role processes all possible records within the "Days Before Opportunity Creation" timeframe that could result in a Contact Role association.

Align.ly Contact Role can be scheduled to run automatically in the background on a schedule you set in the app.

What is best practice?

Most of the time running Align.ly Contact Role one time per day in the morning hours (ie 2AM) is sufficient. However, if you need more up-to-date Contact Role data, you can schedule Align.ly Contact Role to run several times throughout the day (ie 6am, 12noon, 6pm).

When you create a Contact Role Association Rule, you can set the "Priority" that controls in which order, grouped by Source Object Type, the rules execute.

What is best practice?

There are two best practices we recommend:

1. If you are setting Contact Roles based on something like the Job Title on the Contact, we recommend you execute "known" Contact Roles first and then fallback to an "Unknown" Contact Role. This will allow you to make sure "known" Contact Role associations are made first before making an "Unknown" Contact Role association.
2. Our personal preference is to start Task rules with a Priority of "1", Event rules with a Priority of "10", and then Campaign Member rules with a Priority of "20". This allows us to create several rules under the same Source Object Type and simply order them 1...2...3... or 10...11...12... or 20...21...22.

This setting is the number of days BEFORE the Opportunity creation date that the Source Object (Task, Event, and Campaign Member) is eligible to create a Contact Role association.

What is best practice?

The default is 30 days, which we find tends to work well. However, you may want to either extend or reduce the time period based on your business process.

SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) can be a intimidating for some Salesforce admins, but it doesn't have to be. We recommend writing your SOQL WHERE clause in the Developer Console to test and validate the SOQL query is valid and it returns the results that you expect before running the SOQL in Align.ly Contact Role.

Some Salesforce admins are more comfortable with Salesforce formula fields than SOQL. You can create a formula field on the Source Object (Task, Event, and Campaign Member), Contact, and/or Opportunity and then reference that formula field in the SOQL WHERE clause when creating a Contact Role Association Rule.

It is common to include an "OR" statement in a SOQL WHERE clause. A common mistake that will result in an error is to not wrap the "OR" statement in parathesis.