How does Meldus work?

Overview

Meldus’s powerful AI engine is purpose-built to handle the complexity of Salesforce data and to answer your questions as simply and naturally as if you were asking a colleague. Behind the scenes, however, Meldus performs multiple sophisticated processes to interpret, translate, and summarize your questions with precision and accuracy.

Here’s a closer look at how it all works.

Interpreting your question‍

Meldus begins by interpreting your question’s intent; parsing your natural language to recognize its nuances and implicit meaning. Meldus understands variations in phrasing and context, even when specific concepts aren’t directly stated. For example, Meldus understands that “recent monthly performance” implicitly references relative date literals and comparisons.‍

Classifying based on meaning and topic‍

Meldus classifies your question according to its semantic meaning and topical categories. Meldus's language models go well beyond keyword matching, to classify your question and recognize different modes of analysis and data domains. Our models distinguish, for example, between requests for statistical summaries, growth patterns, or breakdowns across data subsets, even when phrasing is ambiguous.‍

Breaking the question into components‍

Next, Meldus dissects your question into its key components, isolating each required data point. This step parses entities like dates, quantities, and conditions, so each part can be linked to the correct Salesforce data. Meldus is designed to handle complex questions involving multiple conditions, such as “How did revenue grow in Q1 compared to Q4 last year for the top five accounts?” which demands precise identification of multiple, interrelated data points.‍

Mapping to Salesforce objects and fields‍

Meldus then maps each component to the correct Salesforce objects and fields. Since each Salesforce instance can vary in structure, with custom fields alongside standard ones, this step requires real-time retrieval of metadata to understand how your Salesforce environment is configured. Meldus dynamically adapts to customizations, to understand, for example, if “Revenue” refers to a custom field, or is used as a synonym for opportunity amount.‍

Translating into Salesforce-compatible commands‍

With all components in place, Meldus translates your question into technical commands that Salesforce can execute. This translation involves complex logic to ensure that the query captures each nuance of the question components, such as aggregations, filters, or nested conditions. Additionally, Meldus ensures that all fields are formatted correctly and cross-references relationships across multiple objects, even when the question involves indirect or inferred relationships.‍

Retrieving precise results from Salesforce‍

Once the commands are constructed, Meldus executes them against Salesforce to retrieve real-time data. This process includes optimization techniques to handle datasets efficiently and to avoid timeouts or incomplete data, even when the query involves cross-object references, aggregations, or complex filters.‍

Summarizing into natural language‍

Finally, Meldus synthesizes the raw data from Salesforce into a clear and concise executive summary, using natural language generation to interpret and phrase the results conversationally. This step is technically challenging, as it requires Meldus to accurately interpret numerical data, spot patterns, and contextualize findings, ensuring that insights are accurate and useful, at the right level of fidelity. Meldus endeavors to highlight what's import in your results from Salesforce, making complex data easy to understand at a glance.

The end result?‍

You can ask questions naturally, and Meldus handles the intricate technical steps — from parsing language to querying complex data structures and generating polished summaries — so you can focus on insights rather than the technical details.

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Getting Started with Meldus for Microsoft Teams (demo)

What is Meldus?

Meldus is an AI-powered business intelligence assistant that gives you great insights from Salesforce directly into Microsoft Teams.

Meldus gives you powerful answers from your Salesforce data simply by asking questions in natural language, with no complex setup and no technical skills required. Meldus works in Microsoft Teams on mobile, desktop or browser.

With Meldus, there's no need to understand the complexities of Salesforce's structure of data objects, or learn how to build complex reports or dashboards. You simply ask questions of your Salesforce data in plain, conversational language — Meldus does the all heavy lifting.

Under the hood, Meldus uses its powerful AI engine to:

interpret your question and understand its intent
classify your question based on its semantic meaning and its broad topic areas
separate your question into its component parts
map your question to the objects and fields in your Salesforce data
translate your question into a set of Salesforce-compatible commands
retrieve the necessary information from Salesforce to provide you clear and concise answers; and
summarise your results from Salesforce into a concise, natural language executive summary.

The result? Clear, concise insights from Salesforce just by asking questions.

Next, learn who Meldus is for and how it works.

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How to connect to Salesforce

Connecting Meldus to your Salesforce account is a quick and secure process that enables you to start asking questions and getting insights from Salesforce right away. Here’s how:

1. Use the Connect to Salesforce command

From within Meldus, select the Salesforce Connection command. (NB: commands are sometimes known as "prompts" in Teams.)

From the Connect to Salesforce card, select the Connect to Salesforce button.

You'll be redirected to Salesforce to log in with your usual Salesforce credentials, including multi-factor authentication if enabled by your organization.

2. Grant read-only permission

During the login process, you’ll be asked to grant read-only permission. This allows Meldus to read your Salesforce data and present it to you, but prevents any modification, ensuring your data remains intact.

3. Complete the connection

Once you grant permission, Meldus will securely connect to your Salesforce account, and you can return to Teams to start asking question in Meldus.

For further details on how Meldus securely manages data access to Salesforce, see Understanding Salesforce data access in Meldus.

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What are Question Templates?

Question templates are pre-configured sample questions designed to help you get started with Meldus. They serve as drafts that you can edit and run against Salesforce, just like asking a question.

Question templates are organized into functional topic areas that cover common aspects of Salesforce. They're a handy way to quickly get a feel for the types of questions Meldus can answer across your Salesforce data.

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What question templates are available?

Meldus includes 15 question templates across five topic areas of sales team performance, regional breakdown of deals, product sales success, industry breakdown, and marketing campaign progress.

Sales Team Performance

Questions that dig into the performance of your sales team.

Show me our pipeline by stage, with value and count: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped and ordered by stage, with a sum of opportunity amount and the count of the number of opportunities in each stage.
Who are our top 3 salespeople for closed deals last year?: Shows a summary leaderboard of your top three salespeople (using the owner of the opportunity), filtering for won opportunities that closed last calendar year.
Who's in our leaderboard for pipeline deals over $50000 in value?: Shows a summary leaderboard of salespeople (using the owner of the opportunity), filtering for open opportunities where the opportunity amount exceeds $50,000.

Regional Breakdown of Deals

Questions that explore the spread of deals by region across the US.

Show me our pipeline by state, with value and deal count: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped by billing or shipping state on the account related to each opportunity.
Which were the top 5 states for closed deals last year?: Shows a summary of won opportunities by shipping or billing state on the opportunity account, filter for opportunities that were closed last calendar year. It returns only the top five states sorted by opportunity amount or count.
I want to compare open pipe for Florida, Texas and California: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped by billing or shipping state on the account related to each opportunity, filtered only for deals in the selected states. (NB: Meldus typically does a good job of checking both billing and shipping address fields, and checking for full state names and state codes.)
Give me a breakdown of our pipeline in the Northeast: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped and sorted by state, filtered for opportunities where the account's billing or shipping state would typically be considered to be in the northeast of the US. (NB: if you want to check which states Meldus filtered for, just ask a follow up question like "What states did you filter on there?".)

Product Sales Success

Questions that help you understand how your products are performing in the market.

Show me our pipeline by product, with value and count of deals: Shows a summary of opportunity line items for open opportunities, grouped by product, showing sum of line item amount and count of opportunities.‍
Which products have generated the most deal volume in the western states?: Shows a similar summary to pipeline by product, but filtered for opportunities where the account's billing or shipping state is in the western states of the US. (NB: if you want to check which states Meldus filtered for, just ask a follow up question like "What states did you filter on there?".)

Industry Spread

Questions that examine the spread of our customer base and pipeline across industries.

Show me our pipeline by industry, with value and count: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped by the account's industry, showing sum of amount and count of opportunities.‍
What's the industry spread for Zoe vs Paula's accounts in California?: Shows a summary of accounts grouped by industry, filtered for accounts owned by two users ("Zoe" and "Paula").‍
I want to compare open pipe for the Legal and Consulting industries, by salesperson: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped by opportunity owner, filtered for opportunity accounts in two industries ("Legal" and "Consulting").

Marketing Campaign Progress

Questions that explore the success of your marketing campaigns.

Show me the lead gen progress across our active campaigns: Shows a summary of campaign members grouped by campaigns, filtering for active campaigns.
How are our active campaigns performing in terms of deal value?: Shows a summary of open opportunities grouped by primary campaign source, showing the count of opportunities and sum of amount.
How well is our GM Outreach campaign generating deal value amongst Harold's customers?: Shows a summary of open opportunities, showing sum of amount and count of opportunities, filtering for a single campaign ("GM Outreach") and a single opportunity owner ("Harold").

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What are Favorites?

We know that if you're need an answer to a question from your Salesforce data today, there's every chance you might need the latest answer to the same question again in future. That's where Favorites can really help. Favorites are a super fast way to get the latest updates from Salesforce to your routinely important questions.

Favorites let you quickly re-run the questions you’ve previously asked about your Salesforce data. If you find yourself coming back to the same question — for example, “What’s our current pipeline for this quarter?” or "How many new leads have we received this week?" — once you have an answer from Meldus, simply select Add to Favorites to save it. You can then run that favorite to get an up-to-date answer to your saved questions quickly and easily, whenever you need it.

Running your saved Favorites

Select the Favorites command to retrieve your list of favorites. Select a favorite, then select Run to run it immediately. Running a favorite bypasses Meldus's AI processing engine, simply providing you the up-to-date answer to your saved question based on current information in Salesforce.

Managing your Favorites list

You can save up to 30 favorites, and its easy to manage them. Select the Favorites command to retrieve your list of favorites. Select a favorite, then select Rename to rename it, or Delete to remove it.

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Installing Meldus

Meldus is designed to be as turnkey as possible. There's no complex setup or technical configuration required. With the right permissions to install apps into Microsoft Teams, you can get Meldus up and running quickly, without technical support.

System requirements

To get started with Meldus, you'll need these minimum requirements:

Microsoft Teams: Meldus is a personal app that runs within Microsoft Teams. You'll need to have Microsoft Teams installed and ready to use in your organization.
Salesforce user account with API access: You'll grant access for Meldus to your Salesforce data through Salesforce’s API. Make sure you have an active Salesforce user account with API access. API access is enabled by default in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Edition instances of Salesforce. Check with your Salesforce administrator if you're unsure.

Installing Meldus into Microsoft Teams

Follow these simple steps to install Meldus into Teams:

Open Microsoft Teams: Open the Microsoft Teams desktop app, or in your web browser. Sign into Teams with your usual organizational account.
Find the Meldus app for Teams: From the left side of Teams, select Apps and search for Meldus.
Select Meldus and add: Select Meldus in the search results and review its details. To add the Meldus app into Teams, select Add.

Once installed, Meldus appears in your Teams sidebar.

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Who is Meldus for?

Meldus is designed for time-poor businesspeople who need quick, easy answers from Salesforce.

Meldus is tailor-made for busy execs who need to stay informed and make data-driven decisions on the go. Leaders of sales, marketing and customer service teams — in fact anyone who needs clear answers from Salesforce — find Meldus to be the ideal decision-making companion.

If you don't have time to build a report, and are sick of asking your IT team for help, Meldus is for you. It gives you great insights from Salesforce just by asking the business questions you want answered.

For busy execs on the move

Meldus is perfect for businesspeople on the move. It runs in Microsoft Teams, right where you already are, so it fits easily into the way you work every day. Meldus is designed with mobility in mind — just dictate into Meldus between meetings, in an Uber, or on your way to the office, and get the information from Salesforce you need in an instant.

Keeping it simple, and smart

Meldus is simple to use because it responds to your natural language questions. The AI engine at the heart of Meldus translates your business-speak into a set of commands that Salesforce understands and maps them against Salesforce's data objects and fields for you. You don't need a training course, and you don't need a user manual. Just ask questions, and quickly get the insights you need from Salesforce.

Escape the IT help queue

Most busy businesspeople hate being dependent on IT, but equally hate struggling to learn new tech platforms. Meldus allows you to skip the training and self-serve, so you can get the information you need from Salesforce without waiting for IT support. Rather than asking IT to build yet another report, you can get insightful answers from Salesforce just by asking Meldus, all using natural language.

Understanding Salesforce data access in Meldus

When you connect Meldus with your Salesforce account, it's important to understand the scope and limitations of the data access permissions you're granting. Here’s an overview of the permissions involved, how Meldus interacts with your Salesforce data, and the security measures that protect your information.

Granting read-only access

By connecting Meldus to Salesforce, you authorize read-only access to your Salesforce data. This means Meldus can retrieve or view your data but cannot create, update, or delete any records. This permission allows Meldus to gather the necessary information to respond to your questions while maintaining your data integrity.

OAuth2: industry-standard authentication

The connection between Meldus and Salesforce uses OAuth2, an industry-standard protocol for user authentication. During the OAuth2 flow, you’ll be prompted to log into your Salesforce account and explicitly grant Meldus the permissions it requests. This approach ensures only the permissions required for operation are granted, following the principle of least privilege.

Respecting Salesforce user permissions

Meldus adheres strictly to the access controls granted to your Salesforce user account by your Salesforce administrator. This means that if your Salesforce user account lacks permission to view certain data, Meldus will also be unable to access it. By design, Meldus respects your Salesforce security and permission settings, functioning as an extension of your user account's capabilities.

Security and compliance

The read-only access you grant to Meldus does not compromise the security of your Salesforce data. All data interactions between Meldus and Salesforce are encrypted and securely transmitted over the internet. Meldus cannot access your Salesforce credentials, nor does it access your data except at your request, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and maintaining the integrity of your business information.

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Learn about Actions

Actions offer additional options to perform with the data Meldus returns in response to a question. Action buttons are displayed conditionally in the data results card, depending on the content of the card.

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View Chart

To display the data results in a simple bar chart for quick visualization. View Chart is available only for queries that summarize data. The first grouped field is used as the chart's x-axis and the first summarized field is plotted on the y-axis. Each time you select View Chart, Meldus reruns the query against Salesforce, so the data results may have changed.

View Table

To display the data results in a simple table with summary totals; the default display. Each time you select View Table, Meldus reruns the query against Salesforce, so the data results may have changed.

‍Save as Favorite

To save the query as a favorite, allowing easy access to run or rename later as needed using the Favorites command. You can save a maximum of 30 favorites.

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What question templates are there?

Meldus offers templates in several categories, including:

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Sales Team Performance. Questions about the performance of your sales team.

- "Show me our pipeline by stage with value and count." This template helps you understand the distribution of your sales pipeline across different stages, including the total value and count of deals at each stage.

- "Who are our top 3 salespeople for closed deals last year?" Use this template to identify the top performers in your sales team based on the number of closed deals in the previous year.

- "Who's in our leaderboard for pipeline deals over $50,000 in value?" This question highlights the leading salespeople managing high-value deals in the pipeline.

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Regional Breakdown of Deals. Questions about deal distribution across regions.

- "Show me our pipeline by state with value and deal count." This template provides a regional analysis of your sales pipeline, broken down by state, including the total value and count of deals.

- "Which were the top 5 states for closed deals last year?" Use this template to identify the top-performing states in terms of closed deals over the past year.

- "I want to compare open pipe for Florida, Texas, and California." This question allows you to compare the open sales pipeline across these key states.

- "Give me a breakdown of our pipeline in the Northeast." This template focuses on the sales pipeline in the Northeastern region, providing a detailed breakdown.

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Product Sales Success. Questions about how your products are performing.

- "Show me our pipeline by product with value and count of deals." Use this template to analyze your sales pipeline based on different products, including the total value and count of deals for each product.

- "Which products have generated the most deal volume in the western states?" This question helps you identify the top-performing products in terms of deal volume in the western region.

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Industry Spread. Questions about your customer base across different industries.

- "Show me our pipeline by industry with value and count." This template provides an industry-wise breakdown of your sales pipeline, including the total value and count of deals in each industry.

- "What's the industry spread for Zoe vs Paula's accounts in California?" Use this template to compare the industry distribution of accounts managed by different salespeople in California.

- "I want to compare open pipe for the Legal and Consulting industries by salesperson." This question allows you to compare the open sales pipeline across the Legal and Consulting industries, broken down by salesperson.

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Marketing Campaign Progress. Questions about the success of your marketing campaigns.

- "Show me the lead gen progress across our active campaigns." This template provides an overview of lead generation progress across all active marketing campaigns.

- "How are our active campaigns performing in terms of deal value?" Use this question to assess the performance of your active marketing campaigns based on the value of deals generated.

- "How well is our GM Outreach campaign generating deal value amongst Harold's customers?" This template focuses on the effectiveness of a specific campaign, evaluating its impact on a particular segment of customers.

Shortcut commands

Meldus allows you to ask questions of your Salesforce data using natural language. In addition, you can use shortcut commands to the core features of Meldus in Microsoft Teams.

There are five commands available in Meldus:

Favorites‍

Favorites allow you to quickly rerun successful questions that you've saved from previous results returned by Meldus.

Custom Instructions‍

Custom Instructions allow you to provide specific guidance about the nuances of your Salesforce data, allowing Meldus to provide better responses.

Question Templates‍

Question Templates are pre-built draft questions that you can customize and run; an easy starting point to see what Meldus can do. To learn more about Question Templates, see What are Question Templates?.

Salesforce Connection‍

To connect to Salesforce, or manage your existing Salesforce connection. To learn more about connecting to Salesforce, see How to connect to Salesforce.

Getting Started‍

To display Getting Started, which offers useful guidance on the basics of using Meldus.

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To use a command in Teams mobile, simply type any characters from the command name into the message compose box and select the command. Or select the command from the Suggested Prompts button.

In Teams desktop or browser, select the command from the View Prompts button.

Take a Tour

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to try Meldus and see what it can do, and taking our Tour is the perfect way to start.

The Tour provides a step-by-step, interactive demonstration of how Meldus can answer your questions about Salesforce data. Simply follow the prompts to see Meldus in action, moving from an initial, simple sales question to more detailed drill-throughs and complex requests.

You'll be invited to start the Tour in a welcome message when you first install Meldus into Microsoft Teams. You can run the Tour again at any time from the Getting Started command.

Start simple

Kick off the Tour by asking the simple question: "Show me our current pipeline by salesperson."

To keep things easy, Meldus runs this question — and every question in the Tour — against a demonstration Salesforce dataset. This lets you explore Meldus’s functionality and see its results in action, even before connecting your own Salesforce instance.

When you press the question button, Meldus will quickly process the request and display a clear executive summary with detailed results.

You can then continue through the Tour by following the prompts.

More sophisticated examples

The Tour introduces you to some of Meldus’s potential, gradually building from a simple question to showcase more advanced interactions:

Adjust results by adding fields and sorting: Meldus responds to requests to adjust the fields and records in your returned results. The example in the Tour adds new fields and changes the sort order with the request: “Put average deal size in there, and sort it top down.” Meldus understands that it needs to add the average opportunity amount into the results, alongside the summed amount, and sorts the results in descending order.
Filter by fields on related objects: Meldus lets you filter results by any field, even on related objects, to get specific answers (subject to the permissions assigned to your Salesforce user profile by your Salesforce administrator). The Tour example filters sales results by a campaign name, with “How much of that is from the GM Outreach campaign?” Meldus understands and narrows down the results to reflect just those opportunities related to the campaign.
Drill into data points for further insights: If you see an interesting data point and need to explore it further, Meldus allows you to drill into more detail with ease. The Tour example investigates a salesperson’s specific opportunities in the campaign, with the request “Drill into Hilda’s opportunities to break them down by stage.” Meldus finds Hilda's record in the result and uses that as a filter for a new request to Salesforce for a pipeline summary by stage.
Ask complex, multipart questions for comprehensive answers: Meldus can handle multipart questions, letting you get multiple answers in one step (up to a maximum of three component questions) — ideal when you’re on the move and need quick insights. The Tour example asks “Show me our top 3 salespeople for closed sales last year. And also tell me our top 5 accounts for closed sales from last year.” Meldus returns a simple summary of both metrics, giving you multiple pieces of valuable information from just one request.

Ready to dive in?

Once you've completed the Tour, you're ready to connect Meldus to your own Salesforce instance to start exploring your organization’s Salesforce data. Once connected, you’ll be able to ask questions unique to you and your business, enabling the quick, meaningful insights that Meldus is designed to deliver.