5 Tips to Get More Out of Salesforce
Salesforce is an incredibly powerful customer relationship management platform, not only for managing your contact database but for employing full prospect and customer life cycle activities, lead generation, nurturing & management and a whole host of related business and marketing activities. This also means it can be an incredibly large and complex system to manage and run. That’s why Salesforce users get together throughout the year to share and learn tips & tricks from fellow professional Salesforce users.
A major focus of our search engine marketing agency is helping you mine and manage your Salesforce CRM system to generate leads. This month we were eager to see what nuggets of Salesforce wisdom our community would teach the group. There was a lot of great information, and here we highlight five takeaways to help you with your own Salesforce programs.
1) Reporting a Negative
Ever had to prove a negative or quantify something that isn’t there? This example came in the form of finding out what accounts in your CRM have never had an opportunity. A great segment to study and target with different approaches in order to generate more leads.
The solution is to use Cross Filters. Located in reports>accounts>filters this solution allows you to add rules around the qualifier “without”. You can also expand this to include various types of information including opportunities closed lost, opportunities closed won etc. to further segment the data for targeting.
2) Where Your Opportunities Come From
Most of us are tracking where our opportunities originate from. It’s a critical part of Inbound marketing and for guiding budget allocation. It can also be a messy report to look at if you have a large amount of channels to track.
This tip will make it easier for you to get a fast look at where the action is happening. In your leads header drop down there is an option to “show grid”. Think of it as a summary. You can add and format charts in a way that groups the data and presents it in an easily digestible format. Bonus tip, add the charts to various dashboards so internal stakeholders get the information they need to guide their efforts.
3) Grouping Data for Easier Analysis
Let’s face it. Although Salesforce is a great tool, some base reports can be downright ugly to view in their standard format. Try grouping data to save the day.
In this example we were looking at a report that provided deal close dates. From this report you can select a drop down to summarize data for easier viewing and consumption. Take it one step further by clicking on the matrix view icon to provide yourself a feature akin to Excel pivot tables.
4) Using Formulas in Reports
As marketers and salespeople we are always looking at our sales pipeline and how prospects are moving through the buying cycle. But sometimes we need to be tracking ratios and not individual figures. For example, what is my close ratio?
To help answer this question you can go to Opportunities>Group by Owner. Summarize the amount field. Then do a Lookup>Closed Deals and filter by your chosen time frames. When you group data this way to can easily create formulas to display in your reports.
5) Cut Through the Clutter by Using Dynamic Dashboards
Internal company stakeholders need access to different information that matches their responsibilities. Creating one report that can be easily filtered for these individual user needs is a great way to maximize information dissemination while reducing the number of reports that need to be created.
Using dynamic dashboards allows you to create one reporting dashboard and customize it so the information that displays is dependent on who is opening the dashboard, and which role is assigned to them in Salesforce. One more reason why it’s so important to define and administer user management throughout your Salesforce CRM.
Have fun implementing these tips into your Salesforce strategy. Don’t forget to share them with peers that will find them helpful, and share your tips with our community.
Want to learn more about how we can help you mine and manage your Salesforce CRM to generate and nurture leads? Contact us to schedule a free consultation.
We look forward to seeing you at the next Southern NH Salesforce Users Group event.
Special thank you and hat tip to our Salesforce user group host Scribe, organizing company Silvertech and sponsorship by Cloudbit, as well as all the presenters and attendees.
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