by Mike Walsh | Oct 8, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Chatter is an awesome collaboration tool that lets you connect with your internal users, partners, and customers to ask questions, share ideas, and work together towards success. Salesforce has its own vibrant Chatter community, and we like to share our tips there to help other users and developers improve their systems. In turn, we frequently get fantastic feedback that helps us hone our own ideas and bring you better tips each week. Last week’s post on giving your users a guided workflow utilizing the Next Step field received such a response from community member Tyler Swinyard. It was so good, we wanted to share it with you! Check out his response below, and read the full thread here.
Thanks for the post @Henry Abenaim (CloudMyBiz). Your post’s workflow is great. I adopted a method like this while at my previous organization and loved it.
We’d use a “next step” text field paired up with a “next step due date” date field. We’d then use [list views] and found it to be an elegant way to remove the “thinking” from our daily activities. It also [eliminated] the need to create tasks. I’d go the extra step launch the list view results (next step due date less/equal to today) into PowerDialer by InsideSales.com. Basically, knowing what I should be doing and when were fully automated. I loved it.
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Additionally, enabling field tracking for your “Next Step” field is an easy way to automate visibility for the “previous step.”
Hoping to see you at Dreamforce and share more great ideas with all of you next week!
-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 3, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Onboarding a new team member is always a challenge, and the more complex your sales or support process, the harder it is every time. It is especially difficult to deal with when your team works together to close deals or resolve cases. You’re always answering the question “what’s next?” You might have a flow chart or step-by-step instructions for your team to follow, but depending on the number of scenarios, following these instructions can require as much training as the onboarding process itself. It would be so much easier if you had a mentor to stand over the shoulders of your team to help them along the way while they’re still learning the process, and to help your seasoned team members when difficult scenarios arise. Well, with one custom field and a few workflows, Salesforce will let you guide them along every step of the way!
Create a text field on your Leads or Cases called “Next Step” (use the standard field on Opportunities). Write up a list of the step-by-step directions to follow in a spreadsheet with one column for Scenario, and another for Next Step. It should look something like this – Scenario: “If the Lead has been qualified and has requested more than 500 widgets.” Next Step: “Email warehouse to confirm inventory before converting.” Add another column to your spreadsheet called “SF Criteria”, then go through your scenarios and identify what fields and values in Salesforce correlate to them, such as “If Lead Status = Qualified, Decision Maker? = True and Qty. Requested > 500.” In Salesforce, create a Workflow Rule for each scenario using the criteria you just created with a field update listing the Next Step. Make the new field read-only on the page layout to ensure they always know what’s next in the official workflow, or leave the field editable to let your team add their own notes to help guide their teammates as they pick up each other’s records. Now, you can mentor your team every step of the way and not even break a sweat!
-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 | Sep 19, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Have you ever searched for that one specific record, but couldn’t remember enough details to find it? Is keeping track of all the Leads and Contacts you saw at that tradeshow a hassle? Is this sounding familiar? If you’ve been reading our Tip of the Week for a while, you may remember my post on Tags in Salesforce. Tags were a great way to cut the clutter and organize your records, but as they say, that’s so last year! Topics in Salesforce, part of the Spring ’14 release and still hot out of the oven, is the latest, greatest tool for organizing everything.
Topics help you find what you need and who you need to talk to fast. Like Tags, Salesforce lets you add Topics to nearly any record (including Reports and Dashboards) in the system, building on the popularity of adding #hashtags to categorize Chatter posts. Topics let you organize and quickly find all records related to a specific topic. You can find records related to a topic from the Global Search bar, by clicking on the Topic from a record, and even in List Views (which is a fantastic way to promote user adoption and build on the value they provide). If you’re already enthused about Topics, tell us how they’re helping your team succeed!
-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 | Aug 22, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Salesforce Chatter premiered several years ago now (who remembers the Super Bowl commercials?), and thanks to constant updates and cool new features, it still remains the hot topic everyone talks about. Chatter can do so much more than just serve as a social platform for collaboration, like making things easy to find, helping you keep your team up to date on the latest company news, and managing attachments with ease. In the past, we’ve talked about the dos and don’ts of using Chatter, but some of you may be struggling with something more basic – “you say Chatter is like Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t use those! How can I succeed with a social media tool when I don’t use social media!?” Don’t worry, I hear you loud and clear, and I’m here to help!
There are four basic weapons in the social media and Chatter arsenal – mentions, tags, links, and likes. Mentions (sometimes called “at-mentions”) look a little different on every platform, but they all act the same. Start by typing the @ symbol followed immediately by a person’s name, click on it when it pops up, and when you click Share, that user will get an email notification. Tags (also called “hashtags”) are uniform across most any platform. When you’re writing a post, identify a keyword and place a # immediately before it (ex. #Salesforce, #Chatter). Hashtags help you find other relevant posts and identify what other people are talking about. Links are exactly what they sound like. You read a really good blog post, saw one of your clients mentioned in an article, or maybe just want to share a cute cat video (if that’s cool in your office), copy the link and add it to your post. Finally, likes are your way to tell others what is relevant to you. When you “like” something by clicking the Like button, you’re telling the person who posted the original message that you want to see more posts like that.
-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 | Aug 22, 2014 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Chatter is the cool tool for connecting your teams and concentrating on collaboration. One of the great things about Chatter is that, like your social media, you can get a good pulse on how well it’s being used just by looking at your Chatter feed. Lots of posts, comments, and likes speak to a thriving community. But if you want to measure your team’s engagement on Chatter, identify which users might need support and which might make good mentors, and find areas of growth within your system, there’s going to be a lot of hard work involved building challenging Custom Report Types and working out the most crucial Dashboards. Well, that, or you could just download the Chatter Usage Dashboards by Salesforce Labs.
The Chatter Adoption Dashboard includes 20 dashboard components and reports for a broad view into your org’s usage of Chatter. Extend it with your own new reports by using the 7 included Chatter custom report types!
As usual with Salesforce Labs, Chatter Usage Dashboards is a free app, so why not give it a try today!
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.
