Today’s blog is the final in the series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features. 

Feature 5 – Data.com Search (for lead generation)

The features in this final blog come just in time for the new-year lead generation and management process. Desk.com search will help get your 2015 lead generation process off to a good start.

Data.com Search

Even without the additional purchase of Data.com’s Clean or Prospector license, you can still perform a basic search in Data.com to find additional accounts, contacts, or leads and then manually add those records to Salesforce. That’s right, out-of-the-box, Salesforce provides basic Data.com search that is powered by Dunn & Bradstreet up-to-date data.

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Today’s blog is the fourth in a series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features. 

Feature 4 – Content Libraries

How often have you wasted time searching for client presentations, white papers or other development documents? Have you ever communicated with a client about product offerings, only to realize later that the product presentation you referenced was out-of-date?

Salesforce Content is probably one of the most over-looked FREE features Salesforce.com offer. It easily solves the issue above and more.

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Today’s blog is the third in a series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features. 

Feature 3 – Non-duplicate Campaign Members

This tip comes just in time for the holidays! By using Salesforce Campaigns for your customer holiday card/gift list, you can eliminate duplicates quickly and easily.

That’s right, Campaign Members within a Campaign cannot be duplicated no matter how many times you try.

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Today’s blog is the second in a series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features. 

Feature 2 – Mass Delete Reports (plus bonus forgotten report feature)

Clean up the reporting folder quickly and easily 

In the past, if you needed to unclutter unused reports, the process was a bit tedious.

You would have to perform the uncluttering by locating each report and deleting one report at a time. The Mass Delete feature makes time-consuming report clean up a thing of the past. The instructions for using the Mass Delete report feature are as follows:

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Today’s blog post kicks off a series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features. 

Feature 1 – Email to Salesforce

Connect to Salesforce using any email client

Most people are aware of the Salesforce for Outlook Connector, but what if you don’t use Outlook? Sure there are Apps on the Appexchange that can connect your email client of choice to Salesforce, but why not use native Salesforce functionality?

The Email to Salesforce feature is a great productivity feature that is underutilized. It allows Users to send an email from their preferred mail client, BCC a unique email address, and have that email copied into Salesforce and associated with a Lead or Contact, Account and open Opportunity.  It even supports file attachments being copied into Salesforce. For a busy sales team that leverages email in their selling efforts, this is a must have!

How do you get it?

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Ever pull up a Salesforce tabular report and wish you could quickly edit records from within the report? Well, here’s a little trick that allows you to do that. This will save mouse clicks and make life easier for Salesforce users.

This trick provides the ability to edit records from within a report without having to get out of the report or regenerate the report. Users are linked to a new browser window/tab with an edit page….while keeping the report open in a separate tab. This trick can be used with any object and only requires the creation of a custom formula field on the object.

Here’s an example using the Opportunity Object:

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Salesforce workflows come in 2 flavors – real time and time-based workflows.  Time-based workflows are evaluated at the time interval you set – some number of hours or days after another date or time field on the record. But you can’t set any time increment less than an hour… or can you?

Here’s the thing… I’m an impatient guy.  Sometimes, I don’t want a workflow to fire right now, but I can’t wait an hour.  There may be some business processes that need to be completed in 5 minutes, or half an hour.

For example – a Sales Reps may make several changes to an Opportunity over the course of 15 minutes, but don’t want to send workflow update emails after every change.  But it is important that the Sales Manager is notified as soon as possible.  So I’d like to send a workflow email 20 minutes after the last change.

To create a workflow rule that fires in less than one hour, you have to trick Salesforce.

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There are a huge amount of Apps on the AppExchange, almost one for every possible use you could ever need inside Salesforce. What a lot of Salesforce Users/Admins/Consultants don’t know is that Developers have actually designed some really cool Google Chrome Extensions that are designed to have very simple uses but can be extremely effective and save people a lot of time. I’ve spent the time looking through a few of these and have come up with my Top 5 Salesforce Chrome Extensions. 

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What would happen if a new workflow rule or trigger ran amok on your Salesforce data without it being noticed for weeks? Or if a well meaning intern accidentally wreaks havoc while doing data cleanup? Would you be protected? It’s important to take responsibility for backing up your data. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to create a scheduled export of your Salesforce data. Once you have done that, here are some tips to make sure you protect your data:

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…with Salesforce1?

In our dynamic and mobile environment in today’s world. You and your team are always on the go. Salesforce1 allows your team to stay 10 steps ahead of the game by bringing the incredible Salesforce Platform to the palm of the user’s hand.

Getting directions on your laptop takes longer. Wake your laptop from sleep, open a browser, connect to the Internet, search, then obtain directions. You’ll have to enter your current location, unless your laptops has GPS.

Speed and simplicity win. You use your phone to navigate, and resort to a laptop only for complex mapping tasks. You use the phone because it does the task better.

With Salesforce’s mobile app, Salesforce1, you’ll handle daily Salesforce tasks on your phone. Salesforce1 lets you search and update customer records, collaborate with coworkers and clients, and access third party apps — all while on the go.

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