by Henry Abenaim | Oct 8, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Chatter is an awesome collaboration tool that lets you connect with your internal users, partners, and customers to ask questions, share ideas, and work together towards success. Salesforce has its own vibrant Chatter community, and we like to share our tips there to help other users and developers improve their systems. In turn, we frequently get fantastic feedback that helps us hone our own ideas and bring you better tips each week. Last week’s post on giving your users a guided workflow utilizing the Next Step field received such a response from community member Tyler Swinyard. It was so good, we wanted to share it with you! Check out his response below, and read the full thread here.
Thanks for the post @Henry Abenaim (CloudMyBiz). Your post’s workflow is great. I adopted a method like this while at my previous organization and loved it.
We’d use a “next step” text field paired up with a “next step due date” date field. We’d then use [list views] and found it to be an elegant way to remove the “thinking” from our daily activities. It also [eliminated] the need to create tasks. I’d go the extra step launch the list view results (next step due date less/equal to today) into PowerDialer by InsideSales.com. Basically, knowing what I should be doing and when were fully automated. I loved it.
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Additionally, enabling field tracking for your “Next Step” field is an easy way to automate visibility for the “previous step.”
Hoping to see you at Dreamforce and share more great ideas with all of you next week!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
by Henry Abenaim | Oct 3, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
Onboarding a new team member is always a challenge, and the more complex your sales or support process, the harder it is every time. It is especially difficult to deal with when your team works together to close deals or resolve cases. You’re always answering the question “what’s next?” You might have a flow chart or step-by-step instructions for your team to follow, but depending on the number of scenarios, following these instructions can require as much training as the onboarding process itself. It would be so much easier if you had a mentor to stand over the shoulders of your team to help them along the way while they’re still learning the process, and to help your seasoned team members when difficult scenarios arise. Well, with one custom field and a few workflows, Salesforce will let you guide them along every step of the way!
Create a text field on your Leads or Cases called “Next Step” (use the standard field on Opportunities). Write up a list of the step-by-step directions to follow in a spreadsheet with one column for Scenario, and another for Next Step. It should look something like this – Scenario: “If the Lead has been qualified and has requested more than 500 widgets.” Next Step: “Email warehouse to confirm inventory before converting.” Add another column to your spreadsheet called “SF Criteria”, then go through your scenarios and identify what fields and values in Salesforce correlate to them, such as “If Lead Status = Qualified, Decision Maker? = True and Qty. Requested > 500.” In Salesforce, create a Workflow Rule for each scenario using the criteria you just created with a field update listing the Next Step. Make the new field read-only on the page layout to ensure they always know what’s next in the official workflow, or leave the field editable to let your team add their own notes to help guide their teammates as they pick up each other’s records. Now, you can mentor your team every step of the way and not even break a sweat!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
by Henry Abenaim | Sep 19, 2014 | Blog, Salesforce-Apps-AppExchange
While they can be a little finicky sometimes, Salesforce Workflow Rules are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of any system admin or developer. From keeping your data clean to streamlining your sales or support processes, Workflows let you build custom automation with clicks, not code. But if your process requires updates to happen across objects when changes are made, Workflows have a limitation – the changes you want won’t go into effect until both records are updated. You can invest time and money in building Apex Triggers to do what simple Workflow Rules should be able to accomplish, or you can check out Aspira XObject.
Aspira XObject allows System Administrators to create “relations” between objects so that workflow rules that are cross-object dependent get updated as soon as the user changes a record on the “watched object” to fulfill the workflow criteria set on the “affected object.”
This awesome app is a fantastic free tool that will bring your Workflow automation to the next level.
by Henry Abenaim | Jul 24, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
It’s been a while since I’ve advised you to brew a cup of coffee before reading one of our posts, but that might not be a bad idea this week. Don’t panic though. This one is relatively easy – all you have to do is put on your thinking cap and watch a quick 5 minute video!
Workflow rules are the key to automating your Salesforce org. With Workflows, you can create Tasks, update values (including Record Type), send Emails, and more. When you’ve gotten used to an automated system, you come to rely on Workflows on a daily basis, and when something isn’t working right, it can be very frustrating, and can lose you time and money. Not to fear, the short video below will walk you through, step-by-step, how to troubleshoot and solve the most common Workflow issues and get you back up and running in no time. After watching this video, you’ll see that troubleshooting Workflow Rules in Salesforce is easy!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
by Henry Abenaim | Feb 21, 2014 | Salesforce Tips
A brand new lead is different from a lead you’ve been grooming for two weeks. The information you collect on call #1 helps you qualify the lead, but when they’re starting to show interest in your product, much of that information is far less relevant. Similarly, the information you need on call #8 is probably irrelevant at the beginning of the process. Having every field for every stage of the process on one page can get a bit messy and forces your team to sift through irrelevant data to find the pieces they care about at any stage in the process. This will slow down onboarding new team members and generally reduce productivity. Wouldn’t it be great if the page layout would change based on the stage of the lead to put the most important information right at your fingertips? No worries, Salesforce has you covered!
All you have to do to optimize page layouts for the stage of Leads (or any other object in Salesforce) is create multiple Record Types. Create a new Page Layout corresponding to each record type and assign the layouts accordingly. Now, create a few Workflow Rules to change the Record Type based on any number of factors on the record. Status and Stage are two great fields to base this logic on. Now when you change the Status from New to Qualified, the page layout will change to reflect the next pieces of information you need to gather to move forward and generate revenue!
-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
