by Mike Walsh | Nov 11, 2016 | Salesforce Tips
List Views in Salesforce are a reliable tool for giving you the information you need to prioritize your day, letting any user quickly filter and sort your records so that they can start tackling work in an organized way. The problem with List Views is that there may be a lot of information you want to see before clicking into a record. While you can fit all those fields in the view, they won’t all fit in the limited space on your monitor, forcing you to constantly scroll left and right to get what you need. If this has been a frustration for you, don’t worry, there is a simple solution!
We’ve written a lot of posts about strategic ways to leverage formulas in Salesforce for some pretty cool and powerful results. In this post, I’d like to add another useful formula to your Salesforce arsenal. When there’s a lot of information you want to add to a List View without taking up significant horizontal screen real estate, you just need to create a “Record Overview” formula. Include a label followed by a reference to the appropriate field, then a BR() tag to add a line break before the next one (i.e.: "Account: "&{!Account.Name}&BR()&"Contact: "&{!Contact.Name}). You’ve got 255 characters to work with, which can go a long way. On a Lead, you can include valuable qualifying details. On a Case, you can include information such as the last time you communicated with the client. One or two of these simple formulas let you narrow your List Views enough that you can just scroll down to see everything you need, making it easier for your team to quickly identify where they should focus next. Pretty cool, and really easy!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Oct 13, 2016 | Salesforce Tips
No matter your industry, it’s important to be in touch with your customers on a regular basis. Regular touch-points allow you to nurture incoming leads, earn repeat business, and keep customers in the loop while you resolve issues or get answers to their questions. Because it is so crucial, you want it to be as fast and easy for your users as possible, so you may have already created powerful call lists with Reports or List Views. The problem with these, however, is that they still require quite a few clicks: into the record, the Log a Call button, Save, then navigating back to the list. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just click a button, Log the call, then Save and be redirected back to your call list? I’ve got a simple solution for you!
You may recall that Salesforce Formula Fields can do a lot more than math. They can also be used to display images and create dynamic hyperlinks. By using a hyperlink formula alongside some simple URL hacking, you can create a field that will let you know if a call is required, click into it to immediately log a call, and when you save, be directed straight back to the list. The code is mostly copy/paste and easy to modify to meet your team’s needs. Just replace who_id for what_id if you’re working with anything other than Contacts or Leads, and replace the retURL parameter with a link to your Report or List View. What’s more, a little simple dev work can take it to a whole new level. Give it a try today!
IF( TODAY() - LastActivityDate < 7,"DONE!",
HYPERLINK("/00T/e?title=Call&who_id="& Id &"&tsk5=Call&followup=1&retURL=%2F003?fcf=00BE0000001VaYc", "Call","_self" ))
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | May 11, 2016 | Salesforce Tips
Becoming a superhero Salesforce administrator is easier than you’d think – it is surprisingly easy to learn the basics of creating Fields, Workflow Rules, Reports, and all the other day-to-day work required to keep your system growing and evolving. But becoming a true master is about more than just knowing where to click – you have to know how to think about a requirement and the implications of your design choices. One common situation that really separates the novices from the experts is in choosing between Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates in Salesforce.
Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates can both accomplish the task of taking data from one field, transforming it, and populating another field. Formulas are great if you need to populate data from a looked-up field onto a different object – maybe you want Contact Phone on Cases, or Campaign Cost on Leads. Workflows can do this too, but if that value changes on the parent, it won’t be updated on the child, so avoid Workflows here, unless you want the snapshot value from when the lookup was first populated. Formulas are a great way to sum up amounts from various fields – say Amount Billed – Amount Paid = Balance. But if you want something to happen when the Balance reaches $0, you need to know that changes to the values in Formula Fields cannot fire a Workflow Rule or Trigger, so if you want an email to go out to the Account Executive if a balance ever dips into the negative, you’ll need to update that field via a Workflow Rule rather than a Formula. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or share your own pointers below!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Mar 11, 2016 | Salesforce Tips
List Views and Reports in Salesforce are critical tools to your day-to-day process flow. List Views help you identify what needs your attention, and Reports let you understand your data on a deeper level and help determine your next steps. Giving your team dynamic Lists and Reports to let them act on their most critical records is critical, but if you’re relying on a User lookup other than the Owner field to determine who has the next steps, you may have built dozens of Reports and List Views, one for each user, to meet their needs. If you feel this pain, try this more dynamic solution and pare down your lists in five minutes!
Create a new Formula Field, make it a checkbox, and enter the following, replacing Owner for your User lookup: Owner:User.Id = $User.Id . If the current user is the same as the Owner, the value will be True, so you can use this in your Reports and List View filters, choosing that field, the operator of “equals” and a value of True. Now, log in as any user or stand over one of your users’ shoulders and make sure it looks good. Now, you have one Report or List View that works for your whole team. Give this simple formula a try today and let us know how it’s helping you!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Jul 17, 2015 | Salesforce Tips
Formulas in Salesforce are a real powerhouse. They can do so many things, it’s hard to list them all. We’ve written a number of posts about the power of formulas in Salesforce, but many of them come with the caveat that they will take you some time and effort to implement. Certain types of formulas, such as CASE(), have very specific, very repetitive syntax that can be a chore to prepare. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some tool available to speed up the process? Well, have I got a treat for you!
This spreadsheet is immensely powerful in its simplicity, and I use it (and versions of it) frequently when I’m creating anything from basic Case formulas to more complex formulas involving Case statements. Simply enter the API name of the picklist field you’re working with in B2, then fill out columns A and B with the picklist values and formula results. Columns D and F will generate the formulas for you. All you have to do is copy it from the spreadsheet and paste it directly into Salesforce. Couldn’t be easier!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
