Salesforce comes with many useful standard fields that are ready to use right out of the box. However, Salesforce fields can also be customized to fit your business’s specific needs.
Salesforce custom fields can store specific information that is important to your organization and make it easier for your Salesforce users to find that information.
When you log into Salesforce, you most likely land on your Salesforce Homepage. The Salesforce Homepage can be a wealth of information when set up properly.
If your administrator has enabled the Salesforce Dashboard section, you can use the “Customize Page” (highlighted in yellow in the picture below) link to select which dashboard to display. The top row of that dashboard will then display on your home page for easy viewing.
If your administrator has enabled the “Collapsible Sidebar”, you can click on the line dividing the two sections (or press Alt + S) to hide the sidebar. This is helpful for users with limited screen space.
By Darren Starr, CEO, StarrForce
As a Salesforce Partner, we’ve seen that for more than eight years Windows users have had Salesforce and Outlook integration while GMail users have walked in the desert waiting for the sea to part.
Gmail went from invitation only to general release in early 2007. Since that time–and even earlier for those of us who have been using Gmail since it was first released in 2004–Salesforce users who wanted Gmail Salesforce integration have been out of luck, while Windows users have had Salesforce for Outlook.
As a sales manager, you most likely have a lot on your plate and spend a considerable amount of time tracking down the answers to questions such as:
By implementing Salesforce Best Practices for Sales Managers and with some help from your Salesforce CRM, all this information and more can be available with a few clicks.
You can even have it auto emailed to you every morning or once a week/month.
By using the “Team” or “Hierarchy” filters in your reports, you can easily see what is happening and be proactive instead of reactive.
Using best practices when organizing Salesforce page layouts will make it easier for your users to find the information they need and will increase user adoption.
These are some simple things that you can do that might solve a nagging Salesforce page layout problem and can make a big difference to your users:
Organize Your Salesforce Page Layouts
by Melissa Sopwith – Marketing Manager, Guidon Performance Solutions
Guidon Performance Solutions (www.guidonps.com) began using Salesforce seven months ago because we wanted a CRM system that had the flexibility to evolve with our growing company. With other CRM systems we used in the past, as our company grew, our CRM system was not robust enough and did not have the flexibility to change along with our changing needs. It ended up taking too much time and money to force the CRM to keep up with our business.
The flexibility of Salesforce has been the most significant advantage for us so far. Not only has the flexibility saved us time and money, it has been fun as well. We are constantly evaluating ways we can customize Salesforce to make our sales, business development, and client management processes easier.
by Geoff Talbot – VP of Member Services, Sourcing Interests Group
Sourcing Interests Group (SIG) has been using Salesforce.com for about 4 years, but as of the past 18 months or so we have redefined our strategy for how we use Salesforce and what we want to produce with Salesforce.
We incorporate Salesforce on a day-to-day basis within our business as a means to manage our event registration attendees, contacts, and prospective members along with membership, market intelligence and sponsorship sales opportunities.
We all like company reports and dashboards that show us how everyone is doing.
But clicking into them and changing the criteria to just see your own (or your team’s) data can be cumbersome.
The reverse is also true: who wants to create or wade through a bunch of reports just because you are a big company and have a lot of users and roles?
Salesforce has some great Salesforce dynamic reports and dashboards that help to do away with all the clutter.
The first would be the “My” filter on reports and list views (like My Contacts, or My Open Opportunities) that allow you to create one report that is different for each user viewing it. If you have Salesforce Enterprise edition or above, you can take this one step further by using Salesforce Dynamic Dashboards.
Dynamic date ranges in Salesforce reports are also quite helpful.
Why create new reports for each month when you can use the criteria of “This Month” or “Last Month”? Static date ranges (like 2/1/2012 to 2/28/2012) become stale after the date passes. (more…)
StarrForce is now a certified HubSpot provider.
We’ve been using HubSpot internally for about a year and have been amazed with the results! And in the process we’ve learned a lot about HubSpot Salesforce integration.
The days of cold calling from mail lists, advertising, and direct mail are over for most companies. Now your future clients will learn about your product or service by your educating them on it via the internet.
How inbound marketing works is simple. When you provide someone information they find useful, say in a blog post, it begins to build trust. The more information you provide to them the more trust you build. In the process you’re warming up a potential lead.
HubSpot provides a lot of great information on how and why this works on their website so we won’t reinvent that here. They have a short video about it too:
You may be using Salesforce campaigns. But are you using them correctly so that you understand the performance of each of your campaigns?
How do you know which Salesforce campaigns to invest your time and money into and which ones to stop?
The majority of companies using Salesforce campaigns are not making effective use of them. Many companies start to set them up and then, for a variety of reasons, loose interest in them. Or resources needed to see their campaigns through to completion are diverted somewhere else in the company and the campaigns sit untouched.
Another mistake companies make is that they try to reinvent Salesforce to better meet their needs when in fact they’re making it impossible to use Salesforce Campaigns. A common example of this is companies who decide that they’re not going to use the Lead object in Salesforce and instead try to use the Contact object for tracking leads. (more…)