Salesforce Best Practices

Field updates in Salesforce only work from one to many. For example, a field update cannot populate a field on an account from a contact…but it can populate a field on all contacts from an account. Want to receive our list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here. We promise not to […]

Create tasks or events from related records at the lowest level in the relationship. For example, if you have a task associated with an Opportunity, create the task from within the Opportunity you are working on, rather than creating it within the Account or a Contact associated with the Opportunity.

Sharks have to keep moving so water rushes against their gills so they can breath. If they stop moving they die. Your opportunities in Salesforce are very similar in that if they don’t receive regular activity from your sales people they’ll die.

If you delete a record in Salesforce you have 30 days to restore it from the Recycle Bin. (The Recycle Bin is located in the left sidebar. If you sidebar is hidden you will not see it.)

When first using Salesforce’s Connect for Outlook, if you sync with a full Outlook folder, you will most likely end up with duplicate records in both Salesforce and Outlook.

When adding notes and attachments in Salesforce, add them to the appropriate case or opportunity instead of the contact or account record. If you have parent cases and child cases and are not sure which to associate with choose the parent case.

A new section and a few fields on the detail page may meet your requirements, but if you find yourself creating five of the same field, like look-up fields to the same object, because you might need them for some records, then a custom object would be a better solution. Avoid cluttering the page with […]

Each custom Lead field you create should be mapped to the same custom field on either the Account, Contact, or Opportunity page or that data will be lost when the Lead is converted and Salesforce will not warn you of the mistake being made. Dazzle users with your ability to modify Salesforce to satisfy their […]

Be sure you have the fields available for the data that your users need to track. A second email address in a Description field or in a Note is worthless. This is the type of oversight that results in poor user adoption. Talk with your users and make sure you have the fields they need. […]

Use “Required Fields” where needed, but don’t over do it. On certain objects, required fields may be necessary, such as Phone or Status fields. But if you make too many fields required, records may not be created or false data may be entered.

A quick search will tell you if the contact or account already exists before creating it. This will prevent you from entering a new record which may already exist.

Keep Salesforce related lists the same across all objects in Salesforce with the intention that the most used should be closer to the top. Want to receive our list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here. Make sure you are making the best use of Salesforce: Our best practices audit compares your […]

Logical and simple arrangement of the page layout is important for ease of use and increasing user adoption of Salesforce.com. Do not assume that a default page layout is appropriate for your organization. Talk with your Salesforce users and get their feedback on how they think a page should be arranged. As a best practice, […]