by Henry Abenaim | Jan 10, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Salesforce Activities can be an invaluable tool for your organization. Events can help your team manage and sync their schedules, Tasks help ensure everything gets done in a timely fashion, and when your team is good at logging their activities, the notes are available to keep everyone appraised on the status of every Account, Contact, and Lead. But everyone has their own style of logging calls and meetings, and it can be difficult to follow all of those notes. Well, we have a few suggestions to help you clean up your Activities in our first Tip of the Week for 2014!
“Call”, “Called client”, “VM”, “LVM”, “Voicemail”, you just want to know how much time your team is spending on the phone. Help your team out by giving them a list of the most used subjects (see instructions here) to keep everything consistent. It will also help them log their Activities in record time. Want to see a report with only notes from sales pitch meetings? Add a custom Reason picklist field to activities to help pull out only what you need. And if you really need to bring the most important notes to the top of the list for management, The ButtonClick Admin has some great advice! Check it out here.
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
by Henry Abenaim | Dec 31, 2013 | Blog, Tips and Tricks
Thanks to Salesforce’s No Software model, updates three times a year, and the open-source approach of the Salesforce community, new features and creative solutions to daily requirements are always coming out. The CloudMyBiz team works hard to stay on the forefront of all that Salesforce has to offer, and below are our Top 10 Salesforce features of 2013!
10) Dynamic Report URLs
Have you ever wanted to see a report based on a record you’re working on without having to manually customize another report? Maybe you want to see all open Opportunities for a specific Account, or maybe you want to pull a report of all Cases with the same type as the one you’re trying to resolve. With a custom Detail Page Link, you can create amazing dynamic reports based on any parameter from a record. GreatG has a great walkthrough here for setting up your first dynamic report URL.
9) Embedded Analytics
For years, users have been begging for a way to add charts directly to record detail pages. Previously, you’d have to work with a team of developers to create this kind of functionality, spend weeks or months in development and testing, and if you needed to make any changes, it was back to the drawing board. Well, Salesforce has heard your cries and has added Embedded Report Charts to the Winter ’14 release! Read more in our Tip of the Week – Increase visibility with Embedded Report Charts in Salesforce.
8) Analytics API
In the past, if your developers were trying to create a custom mobile app, a Visualforce page with charts and graphs, or an intricate integration with another system and wanted to include data from a specific report, this required some complex code and a lot of work. In the Winter ’14 release, Salesforce brought us the Analytics API which now allows programmatic access to Salesforce Reports from external systems and via APEX controllers. Check out the Developer Guide (PDF) for more information and full specs, and enjoy all the cool features!
7) Historical Trends
Wrapping up our favorite reporting features from the past year, we’d like to draw your attention to some new features for reporting on Historical Trends.
Historical trending comes with a new custom report type designed to highlight changes between any five snapshot dates. It adds the ability to analyse day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month changes in the Opportunities object and up to three custom objects.
Read more from our colleagues at Bluewolf on this and several other great new features from the Winter ’14 release.
6) Data Loader
The Salesforce Data Loader may not be a new feature, but with its power, versatility, and ease of use for quickly importing, exporting, and mass updating records, it is one of the first programs we open every morning. Developerforce has a great wiki about the Data Loader. If you’ve never used this awesome tool, you should check it out!
5) Email to Salesforce
Yet another oldie but goodie comes to us from Mike Gerholdt, the ButtonClick Admin.
For all of the fancy plugins and connected apps that exist, Email to Salesforce is a great beginner’s way to getting executives and reluctant users to log emails without lifting a finger.
Check out his blog (one of our favorites) for more about Email to Salesforce and a few other forgotten Salesforce features.
4) Salesforce Console for Sales
The ButtonClick Admin wrote a fantastic post about Winter ’14, and among other features, highlighted the Salesforce Console for Sales.
If your sales people ever saw the Service Cloud Console they wanted it immediately. Especially for Inside Sales reps who do a lot of repetitive calling, or list building. And let’s be honest, the Sales Cloud has a lot of clicks- which is ok if you have like 10 accounts, but when you manage hundreds or more you could get carpal-tunnel in a day.
Read more here for his breakdown of this and other new features.
3) Salesforce Side Panel for Outlook
If your team’s primary email tool is Gmail, you may already be familiar with the benefits of bringing the power of Salesforce directly to the email client with a tool like Cirrus Insight. But if your team is using Microsoft Outlook, the functionality was somewhat limited…until the Winter ’13 release. Since then, Salesforce has added some cool new features and tools to the Outlook integration. Watch Salesforce’s intro video to one of these new features below and read more here.
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2) Salesforce1
If you’ve been trying to increase your mobile reach with Salesforce, the new Salesforce1 app may be just what you’re looking for. Salesforce1 aims to bring the platform into the internet of things with powerful new APIs and a full suite of useful tools. Definitely a game changer! Read more here and check it out today!
1) Chatter Publisher Actions
Our favorite new feature this year dropped in the Summer ’13 release, and it has been a hit with users, admins, and developers alike. The biggest complaint we hear from users is that it takes too many steps to log a call, create a case, [insert daily task here], and there’s no time to go through that whole process to do one little thing. For admins, this means missing out on valuable metrics, and their requests to make the process faster and easier can leave developers scratching their heads. Well, no more with Chatter Publisher Actions. Read more about this feature here, and enjoy a better, faster, more intuitive Salesforce experience in 2014!
With all the amazing new features and powerful old tools from Salesforce, the possibilities for optimizing your system are endless. It has never been easier to access reports and charts from all over Salesforce and even external systems. Powerful email tools make communicating with customers a breeze. The extension of the Console UI beyond the Service Cloud will make everyone’s job easier, and Chatter Publisher Actions further extend that ease of use to everyone in your system. And the Salesforce1 app will no doubt bring incredible new functionality to your team even while on the go. Keep watching our blog for updates as cool new features start to emerge in 2014! And don’t forget to sign up for the Tip of the Week to get smarter week by week and become a Salesforce expert!
~Jared and the Salesforce Guys
by Henry Abenaim | Dec 20, 2013 | Salesforce Tips
For years now, system admins and users have been begging for the ability to choose Country and State from picklists in Salesforce. With the standard text fields, every time someone writes “Ca” instead of “CA”, or “USA” or “US” instead of “United States”, the reports you use to group accounts and contacts by their location loses value. Your company may have implemented complicated and lengthy validation rules and workflows to keep all the data consistent, but these take a lot of effort to maintain and can make a real headache for users just trying to enter data and move on to the next account. Well, with Salesforce’s new State and Country Picklists, your problems are solved!
Setting up State and Country Picklists in Salesforce is a several step process involving selecting or creating your list of correct values, mapping current values to the new ones, and several automated (and pre-built) data and metadata tests. It is a relatively painless process, and at the end, you will have cleaner reports, more useful dashboards, consistent and standard formatting, and your users will have a much easier time entering new data into Salesforce. And unlike some other updates to standard Salesforce functionality, you can always roll this feature back if you ever realize you need to revert to the original settings.
Check out Salesforce’s handy Implementation Guide “Implementing State and Country Picklists” and clean up your data before the New Year!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
P.S.: If you need another solution for cleaning up your Country and State data, check out: App of the Week – Clean as you go with CountryComplete
by Henry Abenaim | Dec 20, 2013 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Salesforce’s new State and Country Picklists can work wonders, but the process to implement this new feature can take some time and effort, including cleaning up your data before finally throwing the on-switch. While you can always roll back the State and Country Picklists, this process can be a bit cumbersome. If you need a faster, easier solution, the free CountryComplete App on the Salesforce AppExchange has your back with a powerful tool that gives you Country and State picklists along with address validation and some triggers to keep your data consistent and clean.
CountryComplete is a simple extension to the standard Salesforce interface which provides an Autocomplete list on the country fields and validation of values against the ISO standard country names. Your users will no longer be left wondering which names to use and will make the entry less error prone.
CountryComplete does not require you to make any changes to your Salesforce objects, custom triggers or form edits. Simply drop the CountryComplete component on to the sidebar and Autocomplete will attach itself to the standard country text boxes all over Salesforce. German and French support allows your users to enter values in their own language.
Watch their video below and check out CountryComplete today!
For more on implementing Salesforce’s State and Country Picklists, see: Tip of the Week – Clean up your org with Country and State picklists in Salesforce
by Henry Abenaim | Oct 31, 2013 | Blog, Salesforce Tips, Tips and Tricks
Graphs are great for getting an idea of what’s going on with an Account or any other object in Salesforce, and they’re even better when you don’t have to go any further than the Account page to see them. But adding a chart component to a detail page involves some heavy development. That tiny little bar graph could cost you dearly. Well, not anymore!
Winter ’14 is out, and with it comes Embedded Report Charts in Salesforce. Cut the code and take your SOW from 30 hours to 30 minutes! All you need is a report and you’re ready to add visual elements directly to any detail page. And when you need to make changes, all you have to do is update the report and the new view is ready. It’s so simple, even your CEO could do it! Have fun with Embedded Charts and keep an eye out for our next Tip of the Week!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
