What does it take to be a top Salesforce admin? It’s not just about knowing the ins and outs of the product or being able to find your way around in the organizational hierarchy. Here are a few best practices for both new and experienced Salesforce admins. Which of the following statements describes a purchase order?
Understanding what you’re doing – Don’t just keep adding users, tasks, fields and other objects without understanding their purpose! Know what each object is used for, how it relates to others in the system, what kind of data you can enter into them, etc. Read any articles or discussions relating to those topics before proceeding with changes.
1. Ideation
Ideation is an important part of the sales process. You need to make sure that when you’re managing members and contacts, you give every account executive (AE) enough information to be able to do their job. One of these key pieces of information is the account executive dashboard. The AE dashboard is where a user can go to see all their accounts. It’s also where they can edit information on a contact or member specifically if that particular member’s access level is set up for it.
This task is relatively simple, but so is trying to figure out the real purpose for all the other bits of information stored in Salesforce. So just think about what you should be doing with this task and then make a list of the items you can and cannot input into your system. For example:
Useful: Account executive dashboard
Inappropriate: Frequent flyer details, which are viewed by Account Managers only.
2. Account Executive – Contacts & Reports (C&R) Tasks
You’re creating accounts, though they may not be ready to be used yet. You’re assigning contacts and adding them to groups within those accounts. You’re going to be creating reports and you’ll be adding contacts, accounts, and opportunities to those reports.
Useful: Reports forms
Inappropriate: Processes, which are used by process owners only.
You might have noticed that while we created an account, we didn’t assign its owner yet. This is a rather important step as it allows us to see every task that needs to be performed on the new account in one place – the account’s page (Access level < = Owner). You can find the task list by clicking the Tasks tab on a particular account record and choosing “View All”.
If you don’t assign an owner, then there will be no tasks available for Salesforce admins to perform. The first step in getting this task done is to click the “Assign Owner” button on the Account record. However, we don’t want to assign each account with a different owner just yet. That will take far too long. We need to be able to create a link that will let us go directly to the page of an account record, which has all its tasks listed there. The best way to accomplish this would be by creating an outgoing link from PDQ Inventory , which is an application that many people already have installed.
3. Create Send-to-Contact and Send-to-AE Paths
This task is quite easy. Just create a send to contacts or send to account paths, whichever you prefer. This will allow you to select an email address and be taken directly to the page that shows all the tasks that need to be done on a particular account or contact.
Useful: Send To Contact and Send To Account Paths
Inappropriate: Personal email addresses of Salesforce admins, which could result in spam.
Salesforce admins are going to have people they can send tasks to; some accounts have many contacts while others may have only a few. Salesforce admins may also have multiple paths. However, you can’t use one path to send a document or task to many different Salesforce users; you’d have to create one path for each user as well as a separate Send To Contact / Send To Account path.
4. Use Reports Wisely
Reports are a great way to take in-depth looks at your data without having the burden of having to add it into your system yourself. You can create reports about accounts, contacts, opportunities and more in just minutes. For more insight on how to work with reports, check out this article .
Useful: Access levels that allow Salesforce admins the ability to create reports and dashboards.
Inappropriate: Access levels that restrict Salesforce admins from creating reports and dashboards.
You must make sure that you’re able to create reports. Although you may have access levels that allow you to see the data, if you don’t have access levels that entitle you to create reports based on those fields, then what’s the point? For example, if I can see all my contacts in one place but I cannot use a report form to pull them up and see them in another, this defeats the purpose of having a custom report in the first place.
