Matt Kaufman

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The best way to enter a new account in Salesforce is to use the Create New drop-down list located on the sidebar of the home page. From the Edit Account page, you get a clear picture of the account fields that are most important to your company. To create accounts by using the Create New drop-down list, follow these simple steps, starting with searching for whether this account already exists. Before adding an account (or any other record, for that matter), always search for it first. You might not be the only person to have worked with a particular company. By searching first, you avoid creating duplicate entries, you can potentially profit from prior history on an existing account, and you don’t waste time chasing accounts that don’t belong to you. Follow these steps to add a new account: Enter the name of the account that you want to create in the Global Search field at the top of any page, and then click the Search button. A Search Results page appears with a list of records that match your query. If you see records that match particular account or lead records, don’t throw in the towel yet. Click links listed in the Name columns to drill into the details and see whether the account is being worked. If you don’t get any results, select Account from the Create New drop-down list on the sidebar. The Edit mode of a new account appears, as shown in this figure. Fill in the fields as much as you can or as required. At a minimum, you must complete the Account Name field. Try to provide as much detail as possible to make this new account record valuable for your selling objectives. You can make this data as simple as basic phone and address information, or as detailed as account segmentation data, such as type, industry, annual revenue, and so on. When creating account records, strive for accurate and consistent spelling of the corporate name. Your customer database is only as good as the data being entered into the system. As a best practice, look up and use the name of the company from a reliable source (for example, Dun & Bradstreet, Hoover’s, or the company name as displayed on its corporate website). For suggested naming conventions, go to the salesforce.com Community website () and search for “naming convention” to see more ideas and documents from customers. When you’re done, click one of the following buttons: Save: After you click the Save button, the Account detail page appears. On this page, you can click the Edit button whenever you need to modify information on the record. Save & New: Clicking this button saves the current account record and automatically opens a new, blank account record in Edit mode. A link to the first account appears in your Recent Items list in the left sidebar. If you have an existing spreadsheet of companies that you want to import into Salesforce, you can use an import wizard tool and avoid the manual entry.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Some sales reps refer to tasks on Salesforce as action items; others call them reminders or to-dos. Whatever your favorite term, use task records when you want to remind yourself or someone else of an activity that needs to get done. You can create a task from the My Tasks section of your home page or from the Create New drop-down list on any page within Salesforce. You can use both methods, depending on whether you’re planning out your weeks or strategizing about a particular account, contact, or other record. To create a task from the relevant record, follow these steps: Enter a name in the Search bar for the record to which you want to link the task and click the Search button. For example, if you want to set a task to review a proposal that relates to an opportunity, search for the opportunity name. After you click Search, a Search Results page appears. Click the name of the record you want. The record’s detail page appears. Select Create New Task from the sidebar or click the New Task button on the Open Activities related list of a record, as shown. Either way, the result is the same. A New Task page appears. When creating tasks, go to the record that the task is most directly related to before adding the task. By taking this path, you ensure that your task is easy to find because it’s automatically associated with the correct record and its account. For example, if you’re creating a task to follow up on an e-mail to a contact, you most likely add the task from the contact record. Creating a new task in Salesforce Fill in the relevant fields. Like the event record, your fields may vary, but here are some tips on adding a task: Assigned To: Defaults to you. Use the Lookup icon to assign the task to another user. Subject: The task’s subject, which appears on the My Tasks section of the Assigned To’s home page. Click the combo box icon. A pop-up window appears, displaying a list of your company’s activity types. When you click a selection, the window closes and your selection appears in the Subject field. To the immediate right of your selection, add a brief description. For example, you might click the Send Letter link and then type Introduction to explain the task’s purpose. Related To: Shows two drop-down lists that you can use to link the task with relevant records similar to the event fields. First select the type of record and then use the associated Lookup icon to select the desired record. Priority: Denotes the task’s importance. High-priority tasks display an exclamation mark (!) to the left of the activity on the assigned user’s home page. Status: Defines the status of the task. Due Date: The date by which you expect the task to be completed. This is typically optional. Clicking your cursor in this field makes a calendar window pop up, and you can select a date from this calendar. (Optional) Select the Send Email Notification check box if you want to notify the user to whom you’re assigning this new task. You can’t guarantee that every user will log in to Salesforce daily, so e-mail notifications are an effective way to make sure that tasks are delivered to the right people in a timely fashion. Click Save. The page that you started from reappears, and the task displays under the Open Activities related list for the associated records. The task also appears in the My Tasks section of the home page of the user who’s assigned to the task. Make sure that you set your My Tasks view on the home page so that your tasks are included in the filter. The view defaults to Overdue, which can confuse some people when they don’t see a recently created task in that area. Always link your tasks with the relevant records in Salesforce. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing valuable customer information that might have been captured in that task.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Sometimes, you perform a task and just want to log the activity in Salesforce after the fact. For example, a contact calls you on the phone, or you get stopped in the coffee room by your boss to talk about a customer issue. In these situations, instead of creating a task and then completing it, use the Log a Call feature. When you click the Log a Call button, you’re simply creating a task record that has a Completed Activity Status. To log a call, go to the record that the call relates to (an account or lead record, for example) and follow these steps: Scroll down to the Activity History related list and click the Log a Call button. The Log a Call page appears, displaying fields for a completed task at the top of the page and fields for a follow-up activity at the bottom of the page. Fill out or modify any of the fields to log the call. The Status field is preset to Completed, as shown in the figure. Logging a call in Salesforce. If applicable, add another related task by filling out the fields below the Schedule Follow Up Task header. Although certain fields are labeled as required, the follow-up task is optional. Select the Send Notification Email check box for the logged call (and for the follow-up task if you choose to schedule that) and click Save when you’re finished. The detail page that you started from reappears. The call record appears under the Activity History related list. If you set up a new follow-up task, that record appears under the Open Activities related list. Rather than using the Notes feature in Salesforce to track details of your interactions with customers and prospects, try using Log a Call to record this type of information. Tasks allow for easier reporting, timestamping, editing, and viewing capabilities. You can even track interactions with multiple people at once using the Shared Activities feature. If you don’t see this feature when creating a Task, ask your Salesforce Administrator to turn it on. If you’re an administrator and someone asks you to allow Shared Activity tracking, you could enable that from Settings→Customize→Activities→Activity Settings→Allow Users to Relate Multiple Contacts to Tasks and Events. However, this is an irreversible request, and you should reflect on the majority use case for this. For example, in some financial services businesses, tasks often involve contact in addition to your prospect. However, no one’s going to use this (maybe not even the person who asked for it) unless it’s properly announced, along with benefits derived from its use.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Before you can begin using Salesforce to close opportunities, first you must get the records into Salesforce. Here are some of the best ways to create opportunities so that they link to the correct accounts, contacts, and other records. The best method for creating a new opportunity is to start from the relevant account or contact record, which guarantees that the opportunity associates to the correct record, making the opportunity easily trackable. And, if you add the opportunity from a contact, you link both the account and the contact at the same time. To create an opportunity, go to the relevant Account or Contact detail page and follow these steps: Select the Create Opportunity option from the Create New drop-down list on the sidebar. Alternatively, scroll down the detail page to the Opportunities related list and click the New button. The result is the same. The Edit mode of a new opportunity appears; see the figure. The Account Name field is conveniently filled in for you. Fill in the fields as much as you can or as required. At a minimum, you must complete the required fields. Depending on how you set up your opportunity record, you might have to fill in other required fields, which are highlighted in red. Click Save when you’re done. The Opportunity detail page appears. You can click the Edit button on this page at any time if you need to modify the record. If you have the good fortune to need to enter multiple opportunities, one after another, instead of clicking the Save button, click the Save & New button. A new opportunity record appears in Edit mode. You have to fill in the Account Name field, but this technique can save you time. Completing opportunity fields.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

If you already have a file of leads, you probably want a faster way to get them into Salesforce than entering them manually. You must be an administrator to import leads, so if you’re not, find your administrator, and tell her what you’re trying to do. Although you can import up to 50,000 leads at the same time as an administrator, test an import with five or so leads first, just to make sure that you know what you’re doing. After the test data is imported, review your new lead records to make sure that they contain all the information that you want to have brought in. Delete the test records, refine your import file, and then run through the final import. If you’re a new salesperson who just came from a competitor and you happened to bring all your leads with you to upload into your new company’s CRM system, hold up. It is terrible practice to dump in tens of thousands of unreviewed data into your nice CRM system. You’re just moving potentially dirty data from an old home into a new one. Think that’s someone else’s problem? Just wait until people start going through it and finding quadruplicates, old job titles, and other pollution. Instead, take a more measured approach. Can you name the top 50 companies that you should be targeting? See how many leads are from any of those companies, and start with that as an upload. Broaden your range slowly. To import lead files, follow these steps: On the Leads home page, click the Import Leads link at the bottom of the page, below the Tools heading. The Lead Import Wizard page appears, providing you with a four-step process to import your records, plus helpful hints. In your existing lead file or system, compare your fields against the lead fields in Salesforce. Map all your fields between your current system and Salesforce. If you can map all the necessary fields, move to the next step. If not, add fields to the lead record by customizing Salesforce. While someone is mapping the fields from your current system to Salesforce, you should also be talking with your company about cleaning up that data. Now’s a good time to discuss which of your current system’s fields are still needed in the new world. Some fields may have been used several years ago, but no one’s been filling them in since you can remember, and no one’s bothered to remove or hide them from the current system. Even worse, no one can recall what those fields were for, or maybe you have multiple fields with very similar names! Also, you could have lots of duplicate or partial records. Discuss with your company and your Salesforce consultant about best approaches to cleaning up this information. Mapping is a technical term for matching one field to another field, typically in different databases, to properly move data. For example, in Microsoft Outlook, you type a corporation’s name into the Company field. In Salesforce, you typically use the Account Name field. These two different labels have the same meaning. Mapping is the process by which you decide that data from the Company field in Outlook should correspond to the Account Name field in Salesforce. Export your file. You might have leads in an existing database or spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel, Oracle CRM On Demand, or Microsoft Dynamics. Most systems like these have simple tools for exporting data into various formats. Select the records and the fields that you want. Then, export the file and save it in a format. If your leads are already in spreadsheet format (such as Excel), just resave the file in format. Review your lead data. You’ve probably heard the old adage “garbage in, garbage out.” Regardless of whether your company spent some time with initial housecleaning before this step, it’s important to review this data again at this point. Clean up your information before you bring it into Salesforce so that you can save yourself the effort later. When you’re done with the preparation, click the Start the Import Wizard link on the Lead Import Wizard. A pop-up window labeled Step 1 of 3: Upload the File appears, as shown in this figure. Uploading the lead file. Complete the fields in Step 1 of the wizard. Assuming that you already prepared your file, you probably just need to follow these steps: Load the file by clicking the Choose File button and selecting the correct file on your computer. Select a default lead source, if relevant. Apply an assignment rule if you want leads to route directly to assigned reps. If you don’t use an assignment rule, all the leads that you import are assigned to you unless you otherwise specify a lead owner in the file. Select the check box if you want to use assignment rule settings to send e-mail notifications to the record owners. Verify the character coding. Salesforce prefills this picklist based on your company profile, and you rarely have to change it. Select the matching type. If you want Salesforce to avoid importing duplicate records, choose whether you want to identify a duplicate lead by matching Salesforce ID, name, or e-mail. If a lead record with the matching criteria already exists in Salesforce, that record is updated with the information in your file. Select the check box if you want to trigger workflow rules to new and updated records. When you’re done with Step 1 of the wizard, click Next. The Field Mapping page appears. Map the fields between your file and Salesforce and then click Next. The Field Mapping page displays all the Salesforce lead fields as labels with drop-down lists that correspond to the fields in your file. Simply go through the list of fields and select the field from the corresponding file that you’re importing which maps to the Salesforce field, as shown in the figure. After you click Next, the Review and Confirm page appears, displaying a list of warnings, if any, on your impending import. Review the messages for possible errors. This step basically warns you about problems with the data or lets you know about fields that you haven’t mapped. If you discover an error, you can click the Back button and refine your mapping, or even close the wizard so that you can improve your import file. You might have to start over, but at least you avoid importing bad or incomplete data. When you’re satisfied with your mapping, click the Import Now button. An Importing page appears to let you know that the import is in progress, including an estimate of how long it will take. Click the Finish button. The pop-up window closes. Mapping the lead fields in Salesforce. Check the lead records that you imported. Salesforce sends you an e-mail after your file has been successfully imported. To check your handiwork, click the Leads tab to go to your Leads home page. In the View drop-down list, select Today’s Leads to see a list of the leads that were created today. Click the link for a lead that you just imported and review the information for accuracy. Importing leads is one of the fastest ways for you to set up your leads in Salesforce so that you can begin working them.