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Weekly Top 5 – Everything you need to track turnaround time in Salesforce

Weekly Top 5 – Everything you need to track turnaround time in Salesforce

When you’ve got a product to sell and your competitors are chomping at the bit to snipe your potential clients away, the name of the game is speed. If you can move faster than the competition, you maximize your chances to win the deal. In order to accelerate your sales process, you need to get a handle on the turnaround time for each step, identify the bottlenecks, and collaborate with your team to identify solutions for streamlining those rough spots. Below are the 5 things you need to start speeding up your sales cycle in Salesforce.

  1. Date/Time fields for each Stage – Creating a date/time field for each Stage lets you time-stamp when a Lead or Opportunity reaches that stage
  2. Workflow Rules to update the Stage date/time fields – For each date/time field, you’ll need a Workflow Rule to update that field when the Stage is updated to match that.
  3. Formula fields to calculate the time between each Stage – For example, if your first two stages are App Out and App In, you’ll need a Formula to calculate App In – App out.
  4. Reports to calculate average time per stage – It’s best to filter out open deals so that you’re working with the most complete data set. You might want to create one Report for deals you won and another for deals you lost to get a solid understanding of why you win some and lose others.
  5. Goals for improvement – Information is all well and good, but if you don’t set goals for future improvements, there will be no urgency to make those improvements.

This is a simple Salesforce solution for identifying bottlenecks and improving your processes, but it can be very powerful. If you need a more dynamic solution, something targeted at your specific Salesforce process, or recommendations on how to meet your goals, talk to the team at CloudMyBiz today!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Choosing between Formulas and Workflows in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Choosing between Formulas and Workflows in Salesforce

Becoming a superhero Salesforce administrator is easier than you’d think – it is surprisingly easy to learn the basics of creating Fields, Workflow Rules, Reports, and all the other day-to-day work required to keep your system growing and evolving. But becoming a true master is about more than just knowing where to click – you have to know how to think about a requirement and the implications of your design choices. One common situation that really separates the novices from the experts is in choosing between Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates in Salesforce.

Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates can both accomplish the task of taking data from one field, transforming it, and populating another field. Formulas are great if you need to populate data from a looked-up field onto a different object – maybe you want Contact Phone on Cases, or Campaign Cost on Leads. Workflows can do this too, but if that value changes on the parent, it won’t be updated on the child, so avoid Workflows here, unless you want the snapshot value from when the lookup was first populated. Formulas are a great way to sum up amounts from various fields – say Amount Billed – Amount Paid = Balance. But if you want something to happen when the Balance reaches $0, you need to know that changes to the values in Formula Fields cannot fire a Workflow Rule or Trigger, so if you want an email to go out to the Account Executive if a balance ever dips into the negative, you’ll need to update that field via a Workflow Rule rather than a Formula. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or share your own pointers below!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Tasks your team should know how to do in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Tasks your team should know how to do in Salesforce

Having a Salesforce consultant to help you along your journey to CRM success is an invaluable resource. Your consultant is an expert in building a strong architecture, anticipating future requirements, and identifying potential challenges and valuable improvements based on your needs. But consulting services can be expensive. Having someone on your team who can take care of simple administrative tasks is a powerful way to maximize your investment in your CRM. The following are some tasks your team should know how to do in-house.

  • Creating new fields is an easy process, and with a little googling or a quick training session with your consultant, anyone on your team can learn how to add more data points to your system. That doesn’t mean you should just create fields whenever you want – check in with your consultant if it’s something critical or if it would require a large number of fields.
  • Additionally, you should know how to update picklists – again, check with your consultant if this may effect automations or integrations, but otherwise, it’s an easy process.
  • Knowing how to build simple workflow rules lets your team take ownership of system automations.
  • Knowing how to create List Views, Reports, and Dashboards gives you power over your data.
  • Finally, your team should know how to create, refresh, test, and deploy from a Sandbox – this will let you test even more complex requirements without fear of breaking something important.

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Avoid sending your Salesforce emails straight to spam

Tip of the Week – Avoid sending your Salesforce emails straight to spam

As the office Salesforce superhero, you’ve put a lot of work into making things as streamlined and automated as possible, and you take a lot of pride in your work. Your team loves those automatic emails that go out when they make certain updates to their records, letting them move on with their day, but I know how frustrated you are when you find out that one of those emails is consistently going to spam. Well, here are a couple very simple pointers that you can implement today to help get your emails past spam filters and into customers’ inboxes.

To start off, there are certain words to avoid in your subject lines, such as having things like “alert”, “notification”, “approved”, or dollar signs. Additionally, avoid subjects with all capitals. If you’re using fancy HTML emails, be sure your HTML code is clean and as simple as possible. Perhaps most important, read, reread, and have others read your automated emails – if someone on your side feels it looks like spam, clients may flag it, increasing the possibility of your emails going to spam in the future. For more things to avoid in the subject, check this list, and for pointers on your emails overall, check this post by Pardot!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Workflow can update Master records in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Workflow can update Master records in Salesforce

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Salesforce administrators and developers have long been familiar with the classic workflow rule limitation where a field update on a related object just won’t work. If you’ve hit this limitation in the past, you’ve probably employed a number of solutions, including Triggers, apps, or the Process Builder, but each comes with its own limitations, quirks, and costs. Well, there are certain circumstances where you don’t need anything special to get the job done.

If you’re working with Master/detail relationships in Salesforce, Workflow Rules fired from the child record can immediately update the parent. This doesn’t work for Lookup Relationships (if you don’t know the difference, here’s an overview), but can be a huge time saver for Master/detail records. All you have to do is create a standard Workflow rule starting from the child object, then choose a field on the parent to update. It really is that simple. Now get building, and enjoy the time and frustration saved!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys