5 forgotten Salesforce features

This past week I compiled a ton of materials to help get users up to speed fast with Salesforce. It was a lot of the basic stuff, but for me it was a good review of features that I probably forgot or took for granted. As I was combing through some previous training materials I had created, along with all the Help & Training features- I came across some features that probably have been swept under the rug. Are these ground breaking features? Sort of, I mean they are ones that are like running water- they make life easier and we would definitely notice them if they were gone.

Here is my list of what I think are 5 forgotten Salesforce features and you can use them to drive adoption and keep an Admin sane.

5. Printable List Views

It’s a tiny symbol in the upper right hand corner of the list view. I bet after reading this post you will go back and look for it because you probably missed it. But I love the fact that list views are printable. Yeah, that makes me sound old school, but this one feature alone has been instrumental in driving adoption of Salesforce for users who are ‘less-than-tech-savvy’. I know many of us would love to think our whole company is mobile and internet savvy. But the fact is for some users who turning a computer on and answering an email still gives them sweaty palms, Salesforce useage can be low. For those users I love to show them how to create a list view and print it. Having that paper in their hands as a call list makes Salesforce more tangible for them. Printable List Views – fabulous and somewhat forgotten.

4. Non-duplicate Campaign Members

I had a client with a problem this week. They used Salesforce, loved it, but really needed to send Christmas cards out. The only problem was they went about it in a very old school way. All the sales people and execs would run reports and send excel spreadsheets to a Marketing person who did their best to de-duplicate them. The result was less than great, some people got more than one card. So I trained them on Campaigns and Campaign Members. When I showed them that no matter how they tried to add the same Campaign Member to a Campaign that member couldn’t be duplicated they replied with “So now we can send Christmas cards again”. That was a win-win. Now if only Salesforce could solve the duplicate Contact problem…

3. Setting Login Restrictions

Depending on your use case you may want to restrict certain profiles from logging in anytime. Now, when I was a lone Admin doing big changes or getting ready to roll out new features I would often create a profile that had Login Restrictions to zero minutes in the middle of the night. I called the profile “Blocked” and it worked well to move people that profile when I needed to roll out those features. I suppose this was freeze before freeze existed. So just in case someone asks you- yes, just because Salesforce can be accessed at any time doesn’t mean everyone should be able to access it at anytime.

2. Email to Salesforce

For all of the fancy plugins and connected apps that exist, Email to Salesforce is a great beginner’s way to getting executives and reluctant users to log emails without lifting a finger. If you haven’t heard of Email to Salesforce you can read more about it here, but basically each user gets a specific email address that they BCC when they send an email out and let Salesforce do the magic. If you are having users that are not logging emails, or want to increase it, Email to Salesforce is a great way to accomplish that.

1. Mass Email Users

If you click the following: Your Name | Setup | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Mass Email users. I love that Admins have this ability- it seems logical, and is probably something we forgot about with all the talk about Chatter. With the upcoming holidays just around the corner this is a great way to send a reminder to you users when you will be out of the office and what they can do if they need assistance.

These are probably the least blogged about features in Salesforce, which is fine by me. They are the great little features that make Admin life and user life much simpler. But for all of the features that Salesforce has what are the features you think are the most forgotten?