Salesforce Best Practice of the Week: Salesforce Activity and Task Management Tips

While Salesforce is an extremely robust tool that allows users across the world to streamline the way they work on a daily basis, if not used correctly the platform can certainly be more than a bit overwhelming. Utilizing Salesforce Activity and Task management tools is a surefire way to be successful in the system and will help you/your teams organize and prioritize your workdays.

With Salesforce Activity and Task management, you can easily schedule tasks and events, assign tasks to other team members, prioritize your tasks and events by due date, and track events and tasks through custom lists, reports, and dashboards. You can also easily configure system automation including email alerts, push notifications, and in-app alerts to remind and help you improve prospect follow-up.

Team managers can also use Salesforce Activity and Task management to view individual and overall team progress on tasks from a macroscopic level. This will help them stay abreast of team management needs, boost effectiveness, and monitor work trends and statistics.

Here are a few tips to help you be more effective using Salesforce Activity and Task Management:

• Create Tasks/Events from Lowest Level Records – for example, if you are creating a Task associated with an Opportunity, be sure to create the Task on the Opportunity record rather than on the Account record or Contact record. Given Opportunities are associated to Accounts, by creating the Task on the lowest level in the record hierarchy, linking is automatically populated by the system and you’ll reduce the chance of relating to a wrong record.
• Log Calls During or Immediately After Calls – If you wait until the end of the day or week to log calls for your Accounts, not only do you run the risk of forgetting something occurred, but your co-workers will not have access to that information if needed. This can cause awkward prospect/Account interactions if multiple members of your sales team reach out for the same purpose within a short time span.
• Utilize Salesforce Calendar Sharing – See our related blog post on how to best leverage Salesforce Calendar Sharing to view all free and busy times for each person on your team.
• Utilize Delegated Tasks – When viewing the Task object in Salesforce, there is an out-of-box list view called “Delegated Tasks” that allows you to see all tasks you have assigned to others. Utilize this to follow up on those tasks.
• Utilize “My Tasks” Homepage List Views – The view “Next 7 Days + Overdue” will be the best for most people. Be careful with the other views as you might miss an important task.

These are just a few of our favorite and most notable tips and hope that you find them helpful!

StarrData is a Salesforce Partner that helps companies deploy, optimize and support Salesforce.com. If you would like information on the services we offer call us at (888) 391-4493 Ext. 103.