The new year inspires many of us to become healthier, more organized and more productive. A clean slate just feels so motivating, doesn’t it?
That’s why we’re challenging you to stick to a few extra resolutions this year — Salesforce resolutions, that is. There isn’t a better time than now, after all, to achieve the same outcomes listed above — better health, organization and productivity — for your Salesforce org. Take the opportunity to optimize your platform, and you’ll set up your customer-facing teams for even more success in 2019.
Here are our recommendations for getting started.
#1: Make the switch to Salesforce Lightning.
If your company hasn’t already transitioned to Salesforce Lightning, 2019 is the year to do it. Considered the company’s next-generation platform, Lightning offers a more modern UI than Salesforce Classic, plus a ton of new features. Together, these updates can lead to a major boost in ROI: 41% increase in productivity, 40% increase in collaboration, 44% increase in conversion rates. The list goes on.
Thankfully, making the switch to Lightning doesn’t have to be painful. Check out our blog, “The 5 Key Stages of Converting to Salesforce Lightning,” to learn more about the process.
{{cta('08493866-0a0d-44f0-8fff-708c09d499a2')}}
#2: Get your whole team using Chatter.
As the name implies, Chatter is Salesforce’s built-in communication feature. You can use it to send messages or files to colleagues, comment on a particular record or post to a group. Visually, each Chatter discussion more closely resembles a social media comment thread than it does an unwieldy email chain, making it easy to read through whole conversations quickly.
At Torrent, we use Chatter over email for all internal communication. Why?
- Chatter lets you find messages easier
- It allows users to customize how often they receive notification alerts
- It’s more secure than email
- Higher use of Chatter boosts overall Salesforce adoption
You can read our post, “4 Reasons to Ditch Your Inbox for Salesforce Chatter,” to learn more about each of the points above. And if you’re worried about the cost of buying a Salesforce license for every one of your employees just so they can use Chatter, you don’t need to be. The company offers what they call a “Chatter Free” license that grants free access to standard Chatter items such as people, profiles, groups, and files to any user.
#3: Take advantage of standard reports.
If your company is new to Salesforce — or even if it isn’t, and you just feel some of your users aren’t getting the most out of it — it’s time to familiarize yourself with the platform’s standard reporting capabilities. Right out of the box, Salesforce comes with a number of pre-built reports designed to give leaders across your organization better insight into their team’s activity and performance. After all, one of the main goals of the platform is to provide actionable takeaways based on the data you collect.
For a list of some of our favorite reports (in Lightning, of course), head over to our blog, “A Consultant’s 11 Favorite Salesforce Lightning Standard Reports.” There, you’ll find valuable resources for marketing, sales and customer service managers/execs.
#4: Automate, don’t validate.
If you were a regular reader of this blog in 2018, you might’ve seen us use the phrase, “automate, don’t validate.” What do we mean by that? Well, when you’re setting up your Salesforce instance, it’s better to rely on automation rules rather than validation rules to ensure clean data. That’s because automation takes work away from your users by populating information for them, while validation slows them down by making them fix mistakes themselves. In the long run, this can save your employees a ton of time — and therefore save the company quite a bit of money.
If your Salesforce instance was built with the opposite strategy — validation over automation — 2019 is your year to fix that. You can learn more by reading our post, “How to Keep Salesforce Data Clean With Automations, Not Validations.”
#5: Make use of global quick actions.
Speaking of saving employees time, global quick actions are another great Salesforce feature to lean on. They allow users to create different types of records with pre-populated information from anywhere in Salesforce. Sales reps can log opportunities on the fly, service reps can do the same with cases, etc.
And the best part? Global quick actions are fast and easy to set up. You can read more about how our internal platform lead took just an hour to build one in our blog titled, “How I Transformed Our Salesforce User Support Process in 1 Hour.”
Stick to these resolutions, and your business will have a great year — at least as far as Salesforce is concerned. Make sure to subscribe to our blog to receive more actionable tips and advice throughout 2019.
