7 Salesforce Hacks to make life easier

Ever heard of life hacks? Like how you can make your shoes waterproof by using Burt’s Bees Wax and a hairdryer. Maybe you’ve even heard of growth hacks if you’re familiar with the startup world.

Well here are 7 Salesforce hacks that will make you life easier. As a Salesforce Admin we want to make everything as easy as possible so that our users can be as productive as they can be.

1. Integrate your Email Client
Consolidation of correspondence is a quick win for faster user adoption. Most people work out of their email client, not their CRM. Rather than jumping back and forth, utilize an email client integration to eliminate the need to jump back and forth. ContactMonkey allows you to view, create, edit and delete standard and customized Salesforce data from Outlook and Gmail. This will help increase the quantity and quality of data going into Salesforce, making an Admin’s life infinitely easier when it’s time to run activity or opportunity reports.

2. Integrate your Document Sharing
Document integration is one of the most affordable simple wins for admins. The idea of a CRM is to consolidate information through one portal experience. Instead of having users squirreling away documents on their desktops or personal cloud storage, guide them to use one standard accessible through Salesforce. Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com are some such examples that have integrations with Salesforce. Check out these apps from the AppExchange (By Rob Jordan – CEO of Idealist Consulting)

3. Wisely use filters on lookup fields
Instead of having users do a standard Lookup to decide who the “Primary Contact” is for an account or opportunity, use a Lookup Filter to narrow down the available values. Well constructed filters speed lookups, promote clean data, and keep users happy. Poorly thought out ones can bring your processes to a dead stop.

4. Multi-select picklists are bad!
None of us like to limit our choices if we don’t have to, so on the surface Salesforce’s multi-select picklist (MSP) seems like a great field type. Users can select multiple options while you can still enjoy the standardization that picklists bring, right? For the sake of your data and future reports, just say no to multi-select picklists. Please. (By Paige Van Riper – Cloud for Good)

5. Use Salesforce Chatter
Simply put, Salesforce Chatter can literally change everything for overworked Sales and Marketing directors, even if they’re tasked with managing very large, busy, or remote team. Stop them from repeatedly emailing team members to know if important documents have been read. No more productivity loss waiting for internal feedback on a proposal, budget or marketing campaign concept. You will be a superstar once you implement Chatter. (By Gary Galvin – CEO of Galvin Technologies)

6. Remove unneeded fields
Like a busy intersection, too many distractions make navigation difficult. Run a report on unused fields and if they’re not mandatory, just get rid of them. Don’t be a packrat with your fields! (by Paul Young – Salesforce MVP Alumni, Director of Business Operations at Basati)

7. Don’t go it alone.
Know when you’re in over your head and seek professional advice in optimizing your Salesforce org. As an admin, you can usually handle day-to-day work with ease. But when you’re staring down the barrel of multiple, simultaneous large projects and still have to juggle your day-to-day work too, it’s easy to become overwhelmed very quickly. Don’t get backed into a corner; take advantage of your local user group or a consulting partner. (By Mike Martin, Solution Architect, Appirio & Salesforce MVP)