sales & marketing ideas blog

My grandma used to love to go on car rides. But never on the interstate, she would say “the cars and things go by so fast, I just can’t keep up.” I know that each of usworks for a company of varying sizes and with users of varying levels of experience. So the question for this post is- can you take your users on interstate? Or just drive them around town?

If we look back at 2009- 2010 we have seen massive rollouts of new features like : Chatter, the new UI, answers, etc. Not to mention any other features that we have rolled out in our orgs. I used to introduce at least two new features a month to my users. I realize know that that was too many to fast. My geekiness was on interstate and my users couldn’t keep up. Now maybe two new features a month is not enough for your users, maybe not. But knowing your users speed limit– the rate at which they can accept change– will help you be a more effective administrator.

So what can you do? And how do you know if your going to fast or not?
The first thing I did- which sounds obvious is to ask. Or utilizing your geekiness you can create a poll using snappoll.com or google forms- depending in your company size it’s your call. But what is important is that you take the time learn how fast you can implement, go that fast, and keep implementing change.

Last week I attended our Eastern Iowa Salesforce users group for the fourth time (its a very new group). During our breakout sessions the topic of having Salesforce ‘do things for you’ came up. I was surprised at how few of the members were aware of workflows. As the discussion continued they were fascinated at the number of things Salesforce could do for you automagically (shout out to @SFDC_Nerd for the term) or also known as Workflows.

To begin creating a workflow the first thing you need to do is decide what the ‘real world’ process is that your are trying to replicate. (I bet you thought I was going to say: Setup> App Setup> Workflows, right?) By first figuring out what the real world process you can reinforce the use of Salesforce and it will lead to more relevant tasks and/or emails being sent from Salesforce. Workflows can send emails, tasks, and perform field updates; I will focus on those three and give you examples of each. I do realize that Workflows can send Outbound messages. But we are button-click admins and need to focus on the simple solutions first.

The Situation: When a testing center comes online (or goes offline) the CA rep should be able to update 1 field in Salesforce to change its status. When the status changes all support staff should get an email that the status has changed. And when the center status is equal to offline the record needs to be locked and the CA rep should get a task to follow up with the center 1 month after the status has changed. Because centers go online and offline I can accomplish this criteria in two workflow rules.

Email Alerts
For the situation above we need to setup the workflow to fire on the field Center Status and set up two different email templates- one for open and one for closed.

Setup> App Setup> Workflow Rules> New Rule.
First we will select the object, in this case it will be Account and click next. Now we name the rule, you can choose anything but try and make naming consistant across all rules. In this case I would use: Center Closed Rule. Salesforce gives you the option of putting in a description. It is not an option for me, I always put in a description because I think it helps me when I have to troubleshoot later on.

Now we put in the evaluation criteria. Because centers can go online and offline at various times throughout the year I will chose “Every time a record is created or edited“. For the rule criteria we will use: (Field) Account Status (operator) Equals (value) Offline. Now click save and next.
Let’s add the workflow action, we will start with the email. So click on Add Workflow Action- New Email Alert. If you’re like me and probably forgot to create the email template first you can do a ctrl+click open a new tab and do that real quick. After doing that we can continue with the workflow by naming our email alert, selecting the recipients (additional emails if necessary) and saving it. For this case I created a CA Rep group to recieve the emails and include the CA Rep manager as well.

Tasks
The nice thing about creating workflows is that I don’t have to start over and create a workflow rule for every single thing I need Salesforce to do. For the field update action I can add it to my already existing “Center Offline” rule. Picking up on the Add Workflow Action step from above we select Add workflow action- New Task. Here I can set who the task will be assigned to, what the subject is and most importantly when it is due. Based on how Salesforce needs to work in the real world process I will set this to 30 days after the trigger.

Field update
For both rules (Center offline and Center online) I have salesforce update the record type via a field update. This will accomplish the goal of having the Account fields locked when the center is offline and unlocked when the center is online. Prior to creating this step in the rule I created a record type called “Center Offline” and associated a page layout to it where all fields are locked except for the status field. This action can be added to our existing Workflow rule- Center offline by clicking Add Workflow action- New Field Update.

So let’s double check our requirements- When a center goes offline and the CA Rep changes the status to offline Salesforce will send an email to the group- check. It will assign a task to the CA Rep with a due date of thirty days to check on the center- check. And lock the record with a field update- check. One click, three actions executed. To reverse just create a Center Online rule with the opposite criteria and a different email template, just don’t include the task.

Guh. That sounds like a lot of work Mike, I’m the admin but I don’t have time for this. Ok, if you are new to Salesforce creating workflows may seem like a lot of work. But let’s look at the time savings. If you spent an hour creating these two workflows does that equal time savings? In our case we manage over 250 testing centers each of which can go online or offline. If each center went online and offline once a year that is 500 emails alone sent. If it takes 30 seconds to send an email (compose and send to correct addresses) that is 250 minutes or 4 hours and 9 minutes you just saved the organization in sending emails alone.

Workflow emails are a big selling factor I use to get new departments onboard. By giving them the ability to change one field and have many actions executed it looks like magic and it happens automatically. So my question to you is this- “What can you do to make Salesforce execute actions automagically tomorrow that will save countless hours in the future?”

I take a lot of pride in the overall look and feel of my org. And I think it lends itself to user adoption because of it. By that, I mean I pay a lot of attention to the page layout. Because I am a button-click admin I don’t write any visualforce pages so I do what I can to make the experience the best possible. Just as a side note, this post is not about visualforce. I know that you can write some pretty slick pages with visualforce, so this post will focus on using the page layout editor to your advantage.

Right now I am working to bring another department into Salesforce.com and as I do I am paying attention to the page layout and design for this department’s Account and Contact layout. Certainly, I don’t claim to be a webpage designer, but I think there are a few key elements that admins can focus on to make sure that the user experience is the best it can be.

Balance
I work really hard to group fields together and ensure that each section has an equal number of fields on the left side as the right side. When possible I use the ‘Blank Space’ to keep fields like up and to visually separate sections more.

Jumping around
For the department I am bringing on board I’m making sure that I have talked to each of the users who will primarily entering data to see what the patterns are and how to group fields that make sense. The biggest hurdle- as I see it- is the prevention of jumping around. Going to the bottom of the page to enter a piece of data, then the top to put in a phone number. So when possible we are grouping fields together into sections that logically make sense and logistically lend themselves to smoother data entry. I realize that this isn’t always possible, but we have smoothed out some wrinkles.

One interesting idea that Brandy Colmer (@forcedotmom) gave me was to make a page layout for entering text that had all the fields left justified to make data entry faster. I haven’t implemented this idea, but I think it’s pretty cool.

Make it better
Currently this department uses Access, so one of the note pages I keep is a list of pros and cons of what they liked about Access. One of the cons was how the fields and sections were laid out. And with this group I am also focusing on the order of related lists and the columns displayed in those lists.

Page layouts are probably one of the simplest tweaks you can make but I believe one of the most impactful. Being a button-click admin means focusing on what you can change to improve the user experience and page layouts do that.

If you’re a button click admin the one thing you need to capitalize on is creating buttons on objects. Sounds ironic right? But it’s true. For almost every object in my instance I have created custom buttons to ‘do-things’ and ‘make Salesforce.com look smart.’

To be fair it would be easy to publish a book on the number, type, and actions that buttons in salesforce could do. I realize this and really just want to spark some thought and get you on your way to creating buttons for your users. I also don’t want to clutter up this post with a bunch of  code. So I have put the codes for the three buttons I will talk about on this handy-dandy downloadable pdf (you will want to download this to follow along). I’ll start off simple and get a little more complex as we go.

Current News
This button- in my opinion- is simple and easy. It’s a detail page button that displays in a new window and pulls in the Account name (or whatever data you want to pull from the record) and inserts it into the URL in a google news search. My users absolutely love this. The code I give you is for a custom object I created for tracking competitors. A word of advice- I use the behavior of “Display in a new window” that way the user doesn’t lose where they are in Salesforce- and potentially not have to log back in.

Pull data from another site
Here is my theory- I can’t track everything. And some websites do a really good job of tracking data that is important to my users. Hmmm. Sounds like a job for a custom button. We have the need to regularly check corrections data for a particular state. I can’t keep up with all of that data so I created a custom button to fetch that data for my users. Like the previous button it pulls existing record data and plugs it into a URL and opens in a new window.

Left voicemail
This button is different from the previous two in that it executes an action and keeps you in salesforce. I can’t take credit for creating this so I have included the youtube video below so you can see it for yourself. This button saves countless clicks. My Inside Sales staff use this button a lot when making calls and thanks to Brandy (@forcedotmom) for helping me to dissect the code.

Sometimes being the best damn button-click admin means creating buttons. They can be another way to keep your users in Salesforce or execute time saving procedures. However, I don’t think we will see Buttons Galore being the next James Bond villan.

It’s been a little over a week now since I launched Chatter in my organization. Cliches aside it really added a whole new level of energy to my org. Of course it also gave my users another way to get information. One comment a user made during the launch has stuck with me and maybe it’s something you have had to work with as well. The comment was: “Somedays its like drinking from a fire hose, and now you just upped the pressure.” I can totally see where they are coming from, the addition of chatter gives you another way of getting information from Salesforce. So here is how I broke it down for my users and maybe this will help you as well.

Chatter
This is really good for quickly keeping track of records that in the short term are important you. For example: Opportunities closing this week. Or collaborating real time with users outside of email. For us admins it’s really the easiest way to set up an alert system for our users if you think about i. But by no means should this replace scheduled reports or dashboard freshes- you just can’t take in that kind information. I actually had one user ask me “I want to automatically follow all Contracts.” When I pressed them for why, their only response was- “I want to make sure that I know when anything changes on any contract.” Boy, talk about drinking from a fire hose. Sure Chatter can do that, but why not build a clean report and schedule a refresh once a week, or once a day. Thankfully, that answer worked for them.

Email Alerts
My users love this feature. When a field changes on an Account they love to get an email alert. But this can be overwhelming as well. Too many alerts and your users can be disenfranchised with Salesforce- as it can fill up your inbox. Use these wisely. When your users ask you for an email alert ask them for their motivation for it, and then give them a worse-case scenario. My org isn’t that big- 6K+ accounts. But what would happen if their statuses all changed- that is worse-case scenario.

Scheduled Dashboard refreshes
Not to sound like a broken record, but I’m surprised my users haven’t started a fanclub for this feature as well. To date I have over 35 scheduled dashboard refreshes, many that run weekly. My users like these because its a lot of aggregate data packaged in one neat email. And its colorful.

So there is the three nozzles to my fire hose. As you can see between Chatter, email alerts, and dashboards there is a lot of information to take in. As a button-click admin we need to be very aware of the number of emails that Salesforce is sending to our users everyday. Too many and they can be overwhelmed- i.e. you don’t know what your doing or the classic ‘Salesforce is broke and sending me a ton of emails.’ Too few and they think that nothing is going on or you didn’t set up your org correctly.