by Mike Walsh | Oct 31, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
So you’ve finally outgrown the standard page layouts in Salesforce and are ready to graduate to the exciting world of custom Visualforce pages. Congratulations! Whether you’re just looking to spice up your records with a basic Visualforce element or want to totally reinvent the way your users interact with your Salesforce org, the possibilities are nearly endless. You may be dreading the chore you’ve heard it is to add charts to a Visualforce page, but with several recent updates to Salesforce, adding Visualforce charts is as easy as dropping a new field on the page!
To add a chart to your Visualforce page, first go and create a Report with a chart in it. As an example, why not try a bar chart of Leads created by month. Copy the ID (check out this post for more on Salesforce URLs if you’re having trouble finding it), paste it into the following element and add it to your Visualforce page: <analytics:reportChart cacheResults="false" size="small" reportId="00O90000007fzQc"> </analytics:reportChart> . And there you have it! With this one line of code, you’ve just saved yourself and your developer team hours or months of work! And no need to refresh like typical Dashboard elements – these refresh every time you load your page. Have a blast, and let us know what awesome things you’re doing with Visualforce.
-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.
by Mike Walsh | Jul 18, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Tracking performance against your goals is an essential part of any business. Having the tools you need to compare target vs. actual gives you the ability to move resources, change your approach, and improve on your team’s successes over time. Salesforce offers many valuable tools to help you meet this need, including the built in Forecasting functionality and hundreds of fantastic apps on the AppExchange. But sometimes less is more, and simple form can have more function than the most detailed dashboard. You need a quick, clean, easy to understand tool for tracking performance and goals, and we’ve got a great approach for you from Jesse Lingo of Opfocus!
Start out by creating your simple Opportunity Report in Salesforce. Add any fields you think you’ll want, group it by Closed Date and group dates by Calendar Month (by clicking the little down arrow next to Closed Date), then summarize the Amount Field (you’ll want to get the Sum). Next, create a Formula called Monthly Target, set the Format to Currency, and use a Case formula to identify the target for each year or month – for more details on preparing this formula, check out the Opfocus post. Finally, add a vertical bar chart, set the Y Axis to Sum of Amount, plot additional values, and choose Monthly Target. And there you have it! A simple, clean, no-nonsense report and chart to track target vs. actual in Salesforce!
-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 18, 2014 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Information is key to success, and when you’re trying to choose and close the right deals, having the information you need at the tips of your fingers can be the difference between getting a killer contract and killing a great opportunity. When you’re on the phone with a client, you need to find and process info like previous buying patterns and potential areas for growth fast. Salesforce Labs knows how important this information is (sometimes I think they read minds) and have developed Account Dashboards just for you!
This free app adds dashboards to your Account record pages. See year over year sales, identify buying trends, and get visibility in to what products customers have bought in the past, to quickly and visually identify areas for growth in key accounts.
Check out Account Dashboards and start closing more deals 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.
by Mike Walsh | May 16, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
As I have noted multiple times in the past, Reports and Dashboards are the bread and butter of your Salesforce system. From salespeople in the trenches to top executives, Reports give you the 360 view into your data that lets you make the most informed decisions, and Dashboards help tie that data together and bring it down from the cloud and into a powerful visual representation of your standings. With low costs and high gains, properly leveraging your Salesforce Dashboards is one of the best investments you can make into your system. But with everything you can do with Salesforce Dashboards, it can be hard to wrap your head around making the necessary judgment calls to get the full value out of your system. Are there any tips or tricks for building powerful Salesforce Dashboards? I’m glad you asked!
The best Dashboards should tell a story about the data they are representing, and that story should be clear and easy to understand. Rather than naming it “KPIs by Region”, consider “How are we performing nationwide?” as a Dashboard title. Don’t try to show too much information in one Dashboard element, or it will get confusing. Set up filters, slice, dice, and segment your data to break it down into byte sized pieces. Rather than creating a separate Dashboard for every user and having hundreds of Dashboards to manage and update over time, use the “Run As” feature. Now, when fields are added or your KPIs change, you only need to update one Dashboard. Let your Dashboards tell the big picture, and instead of clicking on them to drill down into the source report, have them drill down into another Dashboard that gives more details. And don’t forget to leverage AppExchange Reports and Dashboards. We’ve highlighted a number of apps in the past (here and here are a couple examples) which will give you a number of pre-built canned Reports and Dashboards which will help you get a head start to maximize the value of your Salesforce Dashboards!
-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.
