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Tip of the Week – Top 10 Salesforce Tips you loved this year

Tip of the Week – Top 10 Salesforce Tips you loved this year

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It’s that time again. The year is almost at its end, and that means it’s time to share with you our annual countdown. In previous years, we’ve shared our favorites and the posts with the most hits, but this year, we wanted to share the posts you really focused on. This year’s top 10 is a list of the posts our readers have spent the most time reading and re-reading. If you’ve not seen them yet, pull up a comfy chair and pour over them. And if you have, I hope you’ll share with us how you’ve used these tips in 2016!

  1. JavaScript makes multi-select picklists work with dynamic Salesforce Reports

If you couldn’t tell, we use Dynamic Reports for a lot at CloudMyBiz, but we have run into some issues in the past when dealing with multi-select picklists. This trick helped us amp up the value of those reports.

  1. The long and short of Joined Reports in Salesforce

Joined Reports are an incredible tool in Salesforce, and one that many Salesforce customers overlook. This is an overview we prepared on how to leverage those Reports for your business.

  1. Choosing the right phone integration for Salesforce

This is an old favorite of ours. More and more of our clients are choosing a CTI (computer telephony integration) every day, and the document on this post has helped many of them choose the right tool for their team based on features and budget.

  1. Celebrating 100 posts: The Dreamforce Experience

I went to Dreamforce for my first time last year, and one of the next posts was our 100th Tip of the Week. In this post, I shared my experiences at Dreamforce. If you’ve never gone and are considering going in the next year, I strongly recommend reading over this post!

  1. Barcodes in Salesforce are that bleeping simple

Every time I pull up our numbers for the blog, this post makes the top 10. There are so many reasons you may consider implementing barcodes for your org, and this tip gives you a simple solution to get up and running today.

  1. Put your trust in Salesforce with the new Trust site

The new Trust site is up and running, and looking better than ever! If you’ve not seen it yet, I recommend checking out this post and heading over to trust.salesforce.com.

  1. Never lose a thing with Tags in Salesforce

This one surprised me – I never expected this post to make any of our top 10 lists! If organization is a struggle for you, I recommend checking out this post, as well as the newer feature, Topics!

  1. Track target vs. actual with a simple Report in Salesforce

If you had to choose a theme for our Top 10, it would be Reporting – hands down. And this cool trick helps you create a simple, powerful Target vs. Actual Report in your Salesforce org.

  1. LiveMessage connects Salesforce, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more

This year has been all about acquisitions for Salesforce, and this was one of the more exciting ones on the list. Check out this new feature that brings SMS messaging and more to Salesforce!

  1. Plan your move to Salesforce Lightning

Lightning has been all the rave in the Salesforce world, and this tip, the post with the longest read time, can help you decide when your org will be ready to make the Lightning transition. Check it out!

Thank you for reading our blog, and we look forward to sharing a whole bunch more exciting tips in 2017. Happy New Years!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Count down to the New Year with our Top 10 Salesforce Tips of 2014

Count down to the New Year with our Top 10 Salesforce Tips of 2014

Top 10 of 2014

2014 has been a great year for Salesforce, with cool new tools and awesome enhancements. We’ve had a blast sharing with you our favorite tips and tricks to make your Salesforce experience easier and more enjoyable. It has been fun seeing what you loved, and sometimes you surprised us. It is my pleasure to bring you our top 10 Salesforce tips of 2014, presented with limited comment in descending order of popularity.

10. Clean up your org with Country and State picklists in Salesforce

9. Improve Salesforce Activity reporting in the New Year

8. Chatter rocks at attachments, and Salesforce Summer ’14 is bringing you more space!

The next two surprised me a bit. We usually stick with stuff straight in Salesforce, but these two, a Google Chrome app (Record and Metadata Comparator) and a suggestion to turn your monitor on its side, got a lot of traction. It works, though, because the Record and Metadata Comparator app would be awesome to use with a vertical monitor!

7. Save time testing with Record and Metadata Comparator for Salesforce

6. A quick life hack to enhance your Salesforce experience

5. The Dos and Don’ts of Salesforce Chatter

The next one isn’t even relevant until next year, but this sweet enhancement is already one of the most anticipated new features for 2015, so we weren’t surprised when it made the list.

4. Maps in Salesforce will be a game changer Spring ’15

#4 is a super simple Visualforce page with tons of great use cases. I’ve been getting emails and phone calls ever since we shared this one. If you’ve not tried it, you should check it out!

3. A whole new world in Salesforce with one simple Visualforce page

2. Calculate business days between two dates in Salesforce

Finally, coming in as our #1 post from 2014 is another surprise. Instead of being a quick tip, this one takes you through the meticulous and sometimes frustrating process of URL hacking. It may be long and a little complicated, but the power of URL hacks will knock your socks off! If you’ve not tried it, check out #1 today and give your users a sweet surprise for 2015!

1. Hack away at work with URL hacking in Salesforce

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys.

Tip of the Week – Top 10 reasons to celebrate Salesforce this holiday season

Tip of the Week – Top 10 reasons to celebrate Salesforce this holiday season

Whether you’re lighting candles, decorating a tree, headed to your place of worship, giving and opening gifts, or just sitting by the fire with people you care about and enjoying a day off, this is a time of year where many of us slow down and celebrate the things that make our lives jolly. As the holidays roll in, we bring you our top 10 reasons we will be celebrating Salesforce this holiday season.

10. Salesforce is easy to customize and use

Yeah, I know some of you are rolling your eyes and saying “yeah, right!” But it really is fantastically simple. There are great little shortcuts all over Salesforce to make your life easy as a user, and as an admin, you can introduce everything from new fields to sweet automations in minutes with just a few clicks.

9. Salesforce helps you collaborate with your team

Collaboration is seamlessly woven into the very fabric of Salesforce, never more so than now, with all the great updates to Chatter. Chatter groups let your team work together to learn and achieve goals, and Chatter on records lets you reach out directly for support right when and where you need it most. If you’re still a Chatter newbie, we put together some tips on how to use it and shared some best practices.

8. Chatter even lets you collaborate with your customers

Yup, that’s right, with Chatter, you can open up the conversation and collaborate with your customers straight from Salesforce. You can even schedule reports to be sent to them automatically. And you get a number of free Chatter licenses with your org, so it’s easy to get started collaborating with your customers.

7. Formulas are amazingly powerful in Salesforce

A lot of people look at Salesforce Formula fields as nothing more than glorified spreadsheet functionality, but they’re so much more than that. Formulas can display images and help you qualify Leads, help prep records for mail merge, and so much more.

6. The Salesforce community is always there for you

If you’re having troubles accomplishing something in Salesforce or just want to know if your cool new idea is possible, the Salesforce community is there for you, 24/7. Between the forums and social media, you’re never alone. And you can get help with everything from choosing the right field type to track important information to deciding how to resolve an issue with your complex Apex code.

5. If you will it, it is no dream in Salesforce

Salesforce isn’t just for managing sales or support, and its power doesn’t stop at the built-in functionality. With Workflows, Apex, and Visualforce, the sky is the limit. A little creativity and elbow grease, and you can completely redesign the user interface, or even manage turning on the lights via an approval process.

4. Visualforce opens a whole new world of customizations

Even if you’re not looking to redesign your entire user interface, Visualforce can open up some amazing possibilities. And the great thing is that it couldn’t be much easier. If you know HTML or are a quick learner, you’re already able to start getting creative. Here’s a great use case of super simple Visualforce you can implement in 15 minutes, no background required.

3. The AppExchange opens even more doors

The Salesforce AppExchange hosts thousands of powerful tools to bring your system to a new level. If you’ve got some crazy idea to improve your processes, you should pop over there and see what’s available. Someone may already have an app for that. We’ve highlighted more than 50 apps in our blog so far, and we’ve not even begun to scratch the surface.

2. Automation in Salesforce lets you stay home for the holidays

With all the powerful automation tools Salesforce has to offer, you can let your system do a lot of the heavy lifting, giving you more time to focus on what’s really important. You can be wishing 100 customers a happy holiday while you sit down for turkey dinner and following up on all the contracts you’re waiting for without missing a moment of gift-opening glee. And since Salesforce can update your records automatically as they move from one stage to the next, you may even save enough time to go home a little early and have an extra glass of champagne before you watch the ball drop.

1. Salesforce is constantly growing and improving

Beyond all the things you can do to make Salesforce really work for your team, Salesforce is always making improvements to give everyone more reasons to celebrate. Chatter and Salesforce1 are two recent examples, and the upcoming maps features are really going to rock. Salesforce comes out with new features and improvements several times a year, so there are always new reasons to love this awesome platform.

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys.