by Henry Abenaim | Sep 27, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
The reports and dashboards in Salesforce can be customized to show you just about anything you want to see. This can be a great benefit for any business because you can get in-depth details on your sales team and performance, marketing initiatives, overall ROI and more. Of course, becoming a master of reporting can take quite a bit of time and practice.
One situation that occurs often is when you want to group a few different elements into a single summary report to show a bigger picture. So what do you do if you’re looking to show a report grouping’s share of the grand total? Pretty simple. You just a add custom summary formula at the summary level from the “Fields” pane in Reports. Here’s the steps to make this happen:
Standard Reports
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- Under ‘Formulas’ in the field window, double-click Add Formula.
- Enter a name for the formula and a short description
- From the ‘Format’ picklist, select Percent.
- Under “Decimal Places,” select the number of decimal places to be displayed.
- Select the Display Area where the calculated formula should be displayed – select Grouping1 to calculate percentage according to rows.
- Note: Grouping1 won’t display if your report has not already been grouped prior to creating the formula.
- Build your formula:
- To display the percentage of fields by grouping at a summary level, select the RowCount to consider total number of rows in each grouping and use the formula structure PARENTGROUPVAL(summary_field, grouping_level)
- Complete Formula: RowCount / PARENTGROUPVAL(RowCount, GRAND_SUMMARY)
Matrix format reports
If you have a Matrix format report, the formula “RowCount / PARENTGROUPVAL(RowCount, GRAND_SUMMARY)” will result in an error reading “Error: Invalid custom summary formula definition: Incorrect number of parameters for function ‘PARENTGROUPVAL()’. Expected 3, received 2.”
This error occurs because 3 parameters must be defined for this report format, for example: PARENTGROUPVAL(summary_field, parent_row_grouping, parent_column_grouping)
For Matrix format reports, your complete formula would be RowCount / PARENTGROUPVAL(RowCount, ROW_GRAND_SUMMARY, COLUMN_GRAND_SUMMARY)
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Need to learn more about how to group your reports? Click here!
by Henry Abenaim | Sep 19, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Today’s modern Salesforce administrator is someone who wears many hats. They are responsible for setting up applications, enabling new features, training users and more! Not only that, but admins are more and more filling roles that used to be filled by traditional IT departments, such as answering user questions, setting up reports and dashboards and configuring application customizations. Luckily, because Salesforce has been built with the mindset of ”clicks not code”, doing all of these things has never been easier.
All of that being said, you still need to choose your administrator wisely and make sure that you are providing them adequate support. Additionally, administrators themselves need training and guidance, to ensure they fully understand their role and are equipped to tackle the problems that come their way. Below, we have a couple of tips and thoughts that should help you achieve outstanding Salesforce CRM Administration, and set your business on the course for success.
Choosing an Administrator
Not everyone makes a good administrator. Let’s face it, there are some people who do fantastic work, but you wouldn’t trust them to organize a birthday party, even for your dog. Organizational skills and vocal leadership are important but most important is someone who can find the balance between meeting the needs of your users, and understanding the capabilities of the system. Below are a few more characteristics of great CRM admins:
- A solid understanding of your business processes
- Knowing how to build and maintain relationships within the team, groups and understanding how they all work.
- Be a bit of a business analyst. Having the ability to understand issues or change requests, and figure out how to bring them to life.
- Strong communication abilities. Willingness to stand up in front of the group, speak and motivate
Poor administration drags down just about everyone in the company and will have an especially negative impact on your Sales team. Not taking your administration seriously will likely lead to your Sales team underperforming, and will also leave your admins frustrated and themselves unsupported.
Make sure you invest in your administrator and provide them whatever Salesforce CRM training they may need. Alternatively, keep in mind that some customizations or jobs may be a little too complex or technical for your in-house admins, and you may need to bring on a certified Salesforce consultant and developer.
Support Staff
How many admins and/or business analysts do you need for your company? No, this isn’t a rhetorical question and has nothing to do with screwing in light bulbs. In fact, there are some pretty easy to understand guidelines for just how much administration you need, based on the number of people in your company. Of course, keep in mind that for more complex implementations, you may need additional resources above what is listed in the chart below.
| Number of users |
Administration resources |
| 1 – 30 users |
< 1 full-time administrator |
| 31 – 74 users |
1+ full-time administrator |
| 75 – 149 users |
1 senior administrator; 1 junior administrator |
| 140 – 499 users |
1 business analyst, 2–4 administrators |
| 500 – 750 users |
1–2 business analysts, 2–4 administrators |
| > 750 users |
Depends on a variety of factors |
Source: Salesforce Help Article
Top CRM Complaints
Now that you have picked out a qualified Administrator, and have the right amount of support staff for your business, there is one more consideration: what pain points can your Admin best help relieve? While all business will certainly have their own unique challenges, the list below (source) outlines some of the top complaints users have with their CRM:
- CRM gets in the way and reduces my selling time
- Different processes or data sets don’t sync up as they should
- It takes too long to enter notes
- It takes too long to update a forecast
- It takes too long to find the correct prospect or customer record
- Manual data entry is taking up too much of my time
- Every weekend, I need to copy my sales forecast data to Excel, update the deals and email it to my boss
- My CRM system doesn’t sync with MS Outlook (or Google mail) …or sync just doesn’t work
- Sales Managers spend too much time on the weekends to prepare reports for their bosses
- CRM doesn’t link with the order system, inventory system, support system, phone, social, marketing, etc.
- There are too many duplicate records in the CRM, so I just add another new record rather than figure out the correct record
- I was never trained on the original or new version of the CRM system
We could go on, but you get the idea. However, with proper Salesforce CRM administration, most if not all of these complaints can be solved, and your team given the tools they need to have their best chances of success.
Want More?
6 Admin Tips to Make Your Salesforce Org More User Friendly
8 CRM Administration Best Practices
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
by Henry Abenaim | Aug 29, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Salesforce Cloud Flow Builder, as any admin knows, is one of the most versatile and functional features of Salesforce, and it’s about to get even better. The easy to use process builder is getting a few upgrades that will help admins better automate and guide users through their flows.
What is the Cloud Flow Builder?
For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s the skinny: The Cloud Flow Builder is a tool that allows any Salesforce admin or developer to automate business processes — without code — at enterprise speed and scale. This takes a lot of pressure off IT and puts the business process creation in the hands of admins who know it better than anyone. Admins are guided by simple, visual interfaces, allowing IT to focus on more complex projects.
Almost any kind of business process can be automated, helping just about anyone, from Sales to Support, to have better, faster and more intuitive processes. What’s more, the Flow builder’s intuitive design allows admins to automate processes quickly, and smartly, saving them time and money as well. Streamlined and efficient business process help employees focus on their jobs, rather than the time-consuming busy work. The Cloud Flow Builder empowers admins, eases the IT workload, boosts efficiency and increased productivity.
The New Flow Builder
So if the Cloud Builder is so good, what is changing? Well, first of all, Salesforce has revamped with a new design style, using the four design principles of clarity, efficiency, consistency, and beauty.
What’s more, the Flow Builder needed a new foundation. The Cloud Flow Designer was originally built upon Adobe Flash. However, Adobe is retiring their Flash player by 2020, and so Salesforce is getting ahead of the game, and switching off Flash early.
The new Flow Builder includes:
- More familiar and intuitive shapes to make flows easier to read.
- Faster performance, built off newer technology
- Standardized, efficient controls, taken from the Lightning Design System
- A simpler toolbox to make building flows easier
Salesforce is hoping that the new Flow Builder will be easier to use, easier to learn, and easy to transition to. As of now, the New Flow Builder is scheduled for release in Spring of 2019. The other good news is that the change will happen automatically for all users. That’s right, the New Flow Builder will be available for both Lightning and Salesforce Classic, and you don’t have to do anything to get access.
All previously created flows will continue working like normal, but any new changes or modifications will be translated into the new flow version and saved separately.
So stay tuned, and before you know it, your Cloud Flow Builder will get a fantastic new facelift and improved performance!
Click Here to Learn More About Using the Cloud Flow Builder!
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
by Henry Abenaim | Aug 28, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Creating, planning and organizing a large event comes with a large set of challenges. From processing payments to registrations to creating sessions and agendas, there is a lot to keep track of. Fortunately, if you use Salesforce, you can also use Fonteva Events to manage over 50 different event types, and keep all of your data directly within your Salesforce CRM. You can eliminate data transfers or manual re-keying from external event software because with Fonteva Events all event data is directly in Salesforce.
From online registration to agendas and planning logistics, Fonteva will integrate seamlessly into your events operation, turning Salesforce strength into successful events.
Check it out here!
by Henry Abenaim | Aug 21, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
Getting quality integrations for your different business applications very often requires a dedicated IT department with a deep programming background. However, if you don’t have those IT resources available, or would rather free up valuable engineering resources for other tasks, Scribe Online Data Integration is for you. This Salesforce app provides pre-built connectors and mappings for common applications, such as SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, ON24, and GoToWebinar. The data from these applications can then be moved from Salesforce to a cloud database for reporting, analytics and more.
Scribe Online easily brings your customer data anywhere it’s needed with a cloud-based platform so you can create business value faster.
