Best Practices Archives

Six Simple Steps to Improve Your Salesforce User Experience

When configuring your Salesforce org, it is important to present your data in a manner that makes it easy for your users to access and interpret. If you hide a required field at the bottom of a page layout many of your users are going to become frustrated. I have seen many organizations spend countless hours and much effort configuring page layouts so information is presented in a logical, legible format. But you have to push forward! There are a number of other places where you should spend time configuring Salesforce to improve your users’ experience. Showing key information to your users when and where they need to see it will not only make things easier, but will improve data integrity as you provide the information they need to select the appropriate records.

Moving House: Steps for a Successful Data Migration

It doesn’t matter if8ixn547AT you have 100 records or 1 million records, the data import phase of a project can seem like a daunting task. It’s kind of like moving a 5 bedroom house. There’s extracting the data from your old system, or gathering it from various places it may live. There’s prepping it for import by removing duplicates and making sure that email and phone number fields are formatted properly. And let’s not forget figuring out what pieces of data you actually want to bring over into the new system. Once these steps are completed, along comes the biggest piece – actually importing the data. This is either done by someone within your organization or by an outside consultant. A variety of tools are used, some magic is performed and then you have a new system with data that looks familiar to you.

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries: An Admin’s Must-Have Tool

Rollup summaries are great things to have in your admin toolkit. With a rollup summary, you can summarize information about child records on a parent record when those records are in a master-detail relationship.

Simplify Salesforce Requirements Gathering with Use Cases

Defining system requirements and grouping them into a usable format is often a daunting task, but is a key component to successful Salesforce implementation. Utilizing use cases to capture requirements and some best practices to outline requirements are discussed in this post. We want to make sure you get the most out of your Salesforce account!

Salesforce Analytics for Nonprofits eBook

Organizations who best understand and translate their data into actions will be able to raise more funds, provide better programs to their constituents, and communicate with their supporters more effectively. This eBook includes an overview of the standard Salesforce analytics included within your Salesforce instance, and best practices for using and understanding your data.

Organizing an Awesome Salesforce Training Program for Your Users

Poorly trained users can wreak havoc on all of your hard work implementing Salesforce. We’ve explored six steps to create an awesome training program so you can maximize your Salesforce experience!

Appearances Do Matter…in Your Salesforce Org! A Tale of Configuration

As your organization grows and evolves, so too do the influences on your Salesforce organization such as change of staff for administration, change of leadership within the organization, change of business processes, change of customers and/or partners and changes in technology. Each of these influences can impact the growth and evolution of your Salesforce organization in very subtle and gradual ways, but more often than not, the impact is in very rapid and hastened ways that can harm your Salesforce story.

Best Practices: Salesforce Fields

Salesforce fields are so important to a successful implementation, yet you may completely forget to really think critically about these “building blocks” of your CRM. A good analogy is this awesome lego model of the University of Colorado (your entire Salesforce instance) and an individual lego piece (one field). Miss a few fields? The history building may fall to pieces if you’re not careful. Fields organize and display your data and prompt your users to input the right data in the right spot.