8 Simple Tips To Make Salesforce.com Easier (Predictable Revenue)

Hey, welcome. It's Aaron Ross, author of Predictable Revenue, and I put together a little video here of my simplest, best Salesforce.com tips. There's all these really, I think, simple and effective ways to use Salesforce that people don't know about just because they don't. So here are the best ones. I've got 8 here. I'll go through one by one. Let me start with the first one, hotlink your favorites. Now every page in Salesforce is a hotlink. So the neat thing is, whichever, wherever you go to the most, whether it's your tasks at home, or a report, or a dashboard, or some account, or anything, you can hotlink it. So for example, let's say I go to my outbound team dashboard all the time. So I click into that, and then just like any internet page, I can grab my URL. Let me highlight where my cursor is, right, just grab it. And I can drag it to my toolbar. So here it is. And then I can rename this if I want. So Properties, let's call it, you know, Dashboard, that's fine. And so no matter where I am in Salesforce or the web, Alright, if I click around, I'm on, I don't know, chat or file. Let's go to leads and then what's my dashboard say? Or I get in the morning, go to my dashboard. Just click it. Alright, just click it and here it pops it up. So you can do this with any page in Salesforce.com. And frequently what I used was I have links here for my dashboards. I might have it for my task list, for working accounts, active accounts. These are all views I might use, so here's Clients. I can click in here with Clients and so on. So this is probably the simplest, best way to start. The second tip is called Email to Salesforce. I think a lot of people struggle with getting your email into Salesforce because you want to copy it, you might forget. But literally the simplest thing to do is you set up, it's called Email to Salesforce, I'll show you what it does. So when you're emailing somebody, let's say this is to a client, client@client.com. Put my marker on here. And in BCC, it's called email address, which is custom to you. And when you send your email, or let's say you're responding to someone, When you email this, this will actually copy it into Salesforce.com. So for example, if I just pull up an account, it just ends up as a task, as an activity history. So here's an example where someone emailed me and then I responded. I just BCC'd, emailed that email to Salesforce address, and it copy the whole email in here. I never did automatically. So the way to set that up to make it really easy to email, send emails in Salesforce, is just go to your— go to Setup up here, Setup. And then in Setup you've got this section on Email, and there's— here's Email to Salesforce. And you just use this here as the email address you use to put into your BCC line. And what I'd suggest is just adding this to your contact list. So you— I just call it email to Salesforce, and I type it in and it just pops it up. Now if you go to this section and it's not here, it means your administrator hasn't activated it for you. So in this case, if you need it done, or if maybe you're the administrator and it's not set up, the place to go activate Email to Salesforce for your company is just down here in Administration Setup, Email Administration, and here's Email to Salesforce. And then you can just activate it, right? Active. The third tip is Salesforce for Outlook. Now, I don't use Outlook, so I can't show you what it looks like, but we— there is a plugin for Outlook which offers you desktop integration to Salesforce.com. It's pretty simple to get. Again, you go to your Setup up here, and in email— I'm sorry, in Desktop Integration, there's Salesforce for Outlook. You just click on it, and then you'll be able to say— there's just a process to set you up and to download it and install it. Alright, and I would suggest there's training and so on for Salesforce for Outlook. I'm actually not an expert because I don't, again, I don't use Outlook, but it's a great tool. It makes it really easy to create, I think, to create, copy emails into Salesforce, look up contacts, other things right within Outlook. My fourth tip is declutter your tabs. Do you have all these tabs up here? Actually, let me highlight this. All these tabs. You know, and to me, the more clutter you have, the harder it is to find what you need. So everyone has too many of these tabs up here. First step is, as a user or as a company, to get rid of the stuff that you're just not going to need. It's very simple. Again, you go to Setup, and in Personal Setup, there's an area here, Change My Display. It'll look like My Personal Information. Click it open. Change my— oops, let's change my password— change my display. So you have two places here, you have Customize My Tabs and you've got Customize My Pages. So Customize My Tabs will let you choose which tabs you want to show and which ones you want to hide. So for here I've got a bunch of stuff I don't need and they're just distracting me. I don't need Products, Forecasts, Contracts, Cases, Campaigns. I'm just going to get rid of all these, hide them. Actually, I don't even need Chatter. File, I don't use Files. All right, that's pretty much it. This is your basics: Home, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Reports, Dashboards. And then sometimes companies, you might have, you know, one or two more things. Maybe a data.com or documents, but these are your basics. I'm gonna save it. Now watch. Now, a lot simpler, a lot cleaner. My tabs up here, there's just a few. Just makes it a lot easier to get to where I wanna go. All right, the fifth way to clean up Salesforce or use it better is to declutter your leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities. When you go into your account page, into any of your pages, your most frequently used ones, which are usually leads or accounts, opportunities, you're gonna have a bunch of stuff you don't need. So both fields you don't need, which is gonna be something that only your administrator can help you sort of declutter and clean up. And there's also gonna be some subcategories or related lists that you don't need, like Contacts, Opportunities, Open Activities, Activity History, Notes, Attachments. So these are actually— I've already cleaned this up, but let me show you You might have 5 more of these things, you know, partners, cases, I don't remember, there could be a whole bunch of these related lists on your pages that are distracting you. So to change what you show on that page, hit Customize Page. Actually, let me make sure you see this. Okay, so to change, there's 2 places you can change clean up these related lists. The easiest place to get to that is just go here to Customize Page, and you can do this on accounts, or if I go to leads, I have to open a lead first. Same thing here is Customize Page. So I'm going to look at leads. There's not too much on here. If I click on this, then it lets me choose what I want.. And for me, I don't need campaign history. I'm going to ignore that. And I'll just save it. So that's easy. Campaign history is now gone and I have— it's just a leaner, meaner, simpler page. So you want to do this with whichever your main pages are: leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, whatever you think is important. And it's just that easy. Go into contacts. Customize Page, and I'm going to get rid of— I don't need Cases, I don't need Campaign History, that's about it. So now my Contacts all will be just leaner and meaner and easier for me to make sure that I can see what I need to see without getting distracted. Alright, the 6th tip is to use Views. Now Views are like mini-reports. In any of these tabs, reporting for some people, reporting can be, you know, it's just a more complex way to put together data or a list. But Views can be a really simple way to create lists. Whether you're in Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, it's all pretty much the same. In fact, let me go to Accounts because that's where I have the most lists already. So you go to— you pick up— go to one, click on your tab. At the top, you're automatically going to have this view. So these are like mini reports, simple reports. So for example, I have views here for my working accounts, active prospects, clients, and there's some other stuff that are standard. So you can either create a new view— whoops, that went to it. Here's what it looks like. Actually, let's do clients, for example. Boom, little report. And again, even I use this, remember that first tip with hot linking, so if I just click here, clients, it comes up with my client list. If I want to look at active people who are actively in our pipeline, clients, whatever, I can just click through it. When you create a view, it's pretty simple. You just name it and then you have some choices for— there's really two areas I'll cover. These are just your filters to show you which accounts or which leads or whatever, right? So in this case, I'm going to look at all accounts and just our account status equals current client. Pretty simple. You know, again, if I wanted to, I could say, you know, account status equals current client, state equals California, whatever. And then the next thing is, the nice thing is you can then choose what columns you want to show. So okay, I want to see their name, their state, their telephone number, and last activity. Alright, just simple. And then you can decide whether only you can see it or everyone can see it, and you save it. And that's it, really simple. So you should do this for— you can use these for making quick account reports, lead reports, you know, in, for example, an inbound market response role. It's really great to have lists of views for sort of new leads or open leads and whatever your working leads are and maybe qualified leads. If you're doing outbound, it could be your active, your working accounts, your qualifying accounts, check back quarterly accounts. It just makes it really easy to click around to sort of say, "Hey, here's a list of something I need to look at so I can make it easy to take action on." The 7th Salesforce.com tip is Dashboards. Now, Dashboards is probably the most important part of Salesforce.com to use. I'd say it is the most important. And they can be simple, it's just you gotta have to— you have to do a couple of them first to practice in order to get into the flow of how to make Dashboards. So here's an example Dashboard. Actually, I don't have any data in this, but just to show you, you can put in one place a very simple view around the things that are going on with your business. So if you have an outbound team, this is more of a demo, you can say, here's all the mass emails. Who is sending how many mass emails per month? Who is having how many call connects per month or week? How many responses are people getting? What open opportunities do we have? Actually, in the book I go through what reports should be on an outbound team dashboard, but the point is you can create a dashboard for yourself if you're a sales rep. If you're a sales manager, the point is you can have a one-click place to get to all the key things that are going on in your business, no matter whether you're a manager or a rep or an executive. I always, for my key dashboards, I'll just put them I'll hotlink them, so I just click to it and I can see it anytime. This is one of my— really is the most important thing you can do to get the most out of Salesforce. Now to get started with dashboards, if you're new to it, if you haven't found Help and Training, it's up here, Help and Training. There's an online class called Getting Started with Reports and Dashboards. You go to the training center. Again, here's Take Training. Find an online course, online training. And then simplify it by your role. So sales rep or manager. Let's do that. Getting Started with Reports and Dashboards. 10 minutes. It's pretty simple. And again, it's hard— don't try to do a dashboard perfectly up front. You build it.— you know, put a basic one together and then you evolve it as you go. Alright, the 8th Salesforce.com tip is online training. Well, as I just showed you with the dashboard report— dashboard class, there's a lot of online training here with Salesforce.com. So I would highly recommend that you take it. They're not long. So these are typically 15 to 30 minutes. For sales rep, there's only 6. There's a whole bunch of— if you don't have paid support, you'll notice there's a bunch of grayed-out classes. I don't know, I have never watched a lot of these. I'm not sure of the quality of them. I think that these simple ones should be plenty to get you started. What I'd recommend is you should take, at least check out all of them, especially— again, there's this one, Getting Started with Salesforce CRM Sales. And then there's Getting Started with Reports and Dashboards. Those are two of the key ones. And, you know, there's no reason why you can't have fun surfing around in here to see what else they have. If you're an administrator, they've got some administration courses you should for sure take. Alright, well, it's been Aaron Ross here with a few simple ways to improve your use of Salesforce.com. I really encourage you to try all of these one by one. Take some training. Again, the more comfortable you can get with Salesforce, you and your team, it makes it so much easier to learn and implement sales processes or to get the results you want. I think there's a lot of fear or uncomfortableness with Salesforce. And even sitting down with someone who's an expert and having them showing you a few things really can get you over the hump and a lot more comfortable and familiar and makes it a lot easier to, again, just be successful with sales. So, all right, enjoy, and I'd love to hear what you think of this.