Back to Basics- Tools Every Salesforce Beginner Must Master
Here are 5 simple and easy ways to make your organization run more efficiently and seamlessly.
1. Custom List Views- By creating a specific list view for certain situations- your employees can save time and get to the records they need
You can create new list views to see a specific set of records such as contacts, documents, or campaigns. For example, create a list view of accounts in your state, leads with a specific Lead Source, or opportunities above a particular Amount. You can also create views of contacts, leads, users, or cases to use for mass email recipient lists.
2. Email Templates
If your company is an active user of Salesforce and has it fully integrated into all your business processes, their is a good chance you would have come across email templates. In a similar fashion to List views, you probably have some standard templates with a bit of mail merge functionality mixed in to make your life easier e.g. standard Lead responses or introduction emails to new Accounts. What a lot of people don’t know is that you can quite easily create personal templates for yourself. If you have a certain personal way you like to address Leads and find yourself typing the same message multiple times a day, having to remember bits of information from an account to personalize the email then personal email templates are for you!
3. Reports
If you are unfamiliar with Salesforce Reports, you have to get acquainted with them. If you’re like me and love stats (sigh), there’s no better way to get those statistics out of Salesforce than reports. Similarly to List views you will probably have a few reports your managers or administrators have created for you to show information. Common reports could be, My Opportunities closed for this month, Cases closed per agent month, Quarterly sales across the business. These types of reports can easily be created in a matter of minutes even with a pretty chart added! For those that have looked at reports before and have got scared off, I’m not surprised, it can be a bit overwhelming at first, but trust me they are extremely easy and intuitive to use.
Reports have a bunch of uses which really depends on what you are interested in doing, here are a few ideas. Finding out which cases take you the longest to close, could potentially motivate you to train up in a particular area. Find out your strengths and weaknesses in who you are selling to, which industries etc. Compare yourself to others in the company to see where you come in terms of Sales or Service. All of these can be built in a matter of minutes.
1. Drag available fields to include in the report
2. Add unique filters
3. Preview
4. Dashboards
So a natural follow up to Reports is Dashboards. Dashboards are visual representations of reports, you can have up to 20 charts, tables or lists. Each one of these is called a component and can be arranged how you like. Each component can only relate to one report. Personal dashboards are a great way to look at custom information that only concerns you as an individual. It’s fine just using the standard Dashboards that your administrators or managers have made, but I’m sure you can do a better job of creating custom Dashboards that give you the information you need. They are especially useful if you have got to grips with reports and just want to quickly glance at your statistics. Once you’ve mastered Reports, dashboards are a drag and drop breeze.
So to start off you need to navigate to the reports tab and hit “New Dashboard”!
5. AppExchange
A lot of users I’ve spoken to don’t even know what the AppExchange is. The way I usually explain it is that its like the App Store for iPhones. You can install free and paid App’s into your Salesforce Org that can provide extra functionality. When I worked as an administrator, it was always something I would check out on a weekly basis to see if there was anything that could make mine or the users lives easier. App’s range from simple free programs that install some pre-built Dashboards into your system to seriously clever and huge apps like FinancialForce (Cloud Accountancy Software). As users you are going to be able to see the benefit in some of these apps straight away, while an administrator might not know the ins and outs of your day to day job and therefore might overlook some. It’s always worth checking it out and if its a very simple app that could make your life a lot easier then I’m sure an administrator would have no hesitation installing it.
If you’re stopping by be sure to check out Conga Composer, I’m slightly biased as I work for them! But they wouldn’t have reached No 1 on the AppExchange without having an amazing product!
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/
The 3 websites below have lists of Essential and Recommended Apps. Take a look!
http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2014/01/admins-appexchange.html
http://www.cloudsherpas.com/partner-salesforce/18-essential-appexchange-apps-for-salesforce/
http://www.opfocus.com/blog/10-free-salesforce-com-apps-that-your-company-needs/
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