7 Salesforce hacks for business admins

Salesforce applications are easy to use, deploy, and integrate on top of being intuitive, but if you want to get the best out of Salesforce, here are a few business tips and tricks that will supercharge your CRM deliverables using the platform.

The company offers a tech platform which you can leverage to build and run custom applications for your unique needs.

For most businesses, building valuable customer relationships and collaborations is a vital part of everyday business. Customers must be contacted at the right time. One second too early, you risk alienating them, a second too late, and they will no longer be interested. For this reason, automating customer relations is a prerequisite for any business, small or large.

Salesforce provides a comprehensive package of customer and collaboration relationship management service across all industries; here are seven hacks to grow your business.

1) Securing Your Salesforce Platform

While just about everyone loves a good disappearance act, you won’t be mightily impressed if your business data hosted pulls a Houdini on you. Security is still a major concern on each Salesforce cloud-application. While the company takes all the necessary steps to safeguard your data, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are immune to data security hocus-pocus. Rather, as an administrator of Salesforce, you need to structure your data integrity and demand strict discipline among your users.

Salesforce is built on a sound foundation of security that enforces deep data security as well as application security. At the same time, the platform allows you to implement your own security measures. Allowing administrators to roll out their custom security measures brings in a whole host of problems, and it seems rather counterintuitive.

But it’s not. When done right, you can lock down your Salesforce platform like Fort Knox. But you need know how to do it. Here are a few pointers from experienced Salesforce admins.

2) Implement native Salesforce security protocols

Always enforce security control features such as password policies, session management, login access policies, account activations, and network access religiously across your Salesforce platform. These are native security measures and not just bells and whistles. They are meant to keep your platform as secure as it can be. Remember, one simple slip up and your business data may be visible to just about anyone curious enough to look.

3) Avoid Shared Accounts

Having an account accessible to anyone within your organization is a big no-no. It’s hard to keep track of who logged into such accounts. If a breach occurs through such an account, who would you hold accountable?

Additionally, what if an employee leaves your organization to work for a competitor with full knowledge of the account? At the very list, you have to change passwords to all accounts, which might break the authentication on your Salesforce apps. So avoid shared accounts.

4) Know Your CRUD

Salesforce allows you to secure your data through object level security through a mechanism called CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete). Essentially, this mechanism allows you to assign one, or several, of these actions to user accounts. For instance, if you want a user only to view data and not modify it in any way, you can set the user’s account to read only.

Consequently, you avert any accidental deletions and updates on such accounts. For instance, you can use CRUD to restrict the ability for a particular “auditor” to create, update, or delete any records across your Salesforce implementation. Combining CRUD and access levels lends well to protecting your business data. It compartmentalizes your business data such that only people with the right access view certain data points. Take a look at the Enhanced Profile User Interface overview page to manage permissions.

That’s about it for securing your business data. Now let’s take a look at how you can supercharge your Salesforce applications.

5) Reporting

You are familiar with Salesforce reports, right? If not, take some time to get acquainted. Reports give your performance stats. You quickly generate an overview of a particular, or even a group, of cases which helps you make the right business decision. Reports are similar to List Views, covered in the next section, and they show what managers and other admins have been up to.

Common reports might be Cases Closed per user, Quarterly Sales, or even Opportunities. Salesforce allows you to create these reports in a matter of minutes, throwing in a nice chart for each report. Now, there are a few tweaks you may want to add such as custom formulas and search parameters that give you detailed feedback on what you are interested in. Look at these features. Although at first they may seem daunting, learn them and you’ll thank yourself for doing it.

6) List Views

So, 99% of the time, you will be looking at a List Views on your Salesforce platform. The list of Opportunities Closing or even Today’s Leads may be some of the most common lists admins look at. For the inexperienced user, the standard List View that comes with Salesforce seems more than enough. But for the power user, such as yourself, you want to glean a lot more of information.

Salesforce allows you to do this in simple, easy steps. But you need intimate knowledge of your company to take advantage of this feature. You can opt for multiple particular List Views that you can switch across to get the information you want, or you can go for a broader list. The preference is pretty much up to you and what you want to check out. So, get familiar with list views.

7) Email Templates

You may have integrated most of your business processes in your Salesforce platform. If you have, there’s a good chance that Salesforce handles your communication process, and you have come across email templates.

The templates make it easy for you to respond to leads, or introduce yourself to numerous prospects, automatically. But most people don’t know they can create custom templates giving their responses an extra personal touch. Personalized templates increase your chances of getting a response from leads and prospects. You may want to leverage them while you are conducting your customer relations.

Using these tips and tricks will help you conquer your business segment with Salesforce.

Girish Jashnani is an expert in Application Lifecycle management at Flosum.com with over 15 years of domain experience in this area. At Oracle and Salesforce, he ran a lot of different initiatives with respect to security, compliance, manageability and supportability of business applications. Girish’s initiatives help customers reduced their cost of ownership by over 22%. To know more about him visit his linked-in profile here.