Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re switching it up and focusing on productivity. We pull together some of our best interviews of 2018 to bring you the best tips we’ve heard focused around productivity. We talk to Carlos Umana, Principle Business System Analyst at BMC Software, Matt Vickery, Salesforce Administrator at the Washington State Housing and Finance Commission, and Anusha Surepeddi, Product Manager for Analytics at Salesforce.
Join us as we talk about how Carlos, Matt, and Anusha each approach productivity and the tools that you can use for your own org.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Carlos Umana, Matt Vickery, and Anusha Surepeddi.
How Carlos simplifies complex lead processes.
Carlos Umana came to the admin role from more of a development background. He focuses on productivity at a big organization, particularly in the area of lead processes. He does a lot of customizations, both in declarative and in code, to help make their complex marketing and sales teams work more smoothly.
“We have a unique process around leads,” Carlos says, “so we had to devise a way to ensure, based on extremely specific criteria and logic, that leads would open for our reps.” He first tried to solve it with code but ended up realizing that using Workflows was a more efficient way to make that happen.
As far as favorite apps that help Carlos get more done, he’s a big fan of SalesEdge by Savo, which renders content in your opportunity based on the stage that you’re in. LeadData lead-to-account matching has also been really helpful for leveraging account information on the lead. Finally, Andy and the Cloud’s Declarative Rollup Summaries tool, which improves customization and gives the reps the information they need.
Productivity for social good.
Matt Vickery is an admin in the public sector, so his interview is an interesting window into how those orgs are able to accomplish complex tasks for a good cause. The Washington State Housing and Finance Commission runs a tax credit program focused on building housing for low-income families, the elderly, farm workers, and other targeted populations. Another program helps first-time home buyers with down payment assistance and first mortgage programs to give them more favorable lending terms, which helps families get into their first home.
What this translates to is a lot of things to track in their org. “One of our biggest challenges is that we have a lot of different divisions with a lot of different, overlapping needs,” Matt says. “We needed a database that allowed us to silo some information off, as well as have some integrations and overlap.” Process Builder plays a key role in facilitating and automating the flow of records throughout the organization. Matt was also able to identify redundant data entry and build processes and flows that populate key information wherever it needs to be.
The magic of structure.
Finally, we go back to a conversation we had earlier this year with Anusha Surepeddi, whose team delivered the top three IdeaExchange idea of all time: subfolders for reports and dashboards, which came out with the Summer ‘18 Release. Anusha had a lot of great things to say about dashboards and report last run date, which can help drive productivity throughout your org.
“You have to evaluate your folder structures,” Anusha says, “do you want to organize by role? By region? You can do both, but keep it clean. Each folder structure should have a meaning.” Another big thing is to not be afraid to delete legacy data. Sort by report last run date and go crazy.
With dashboards, you can use dashboard linking to drill through your dashboards and paint a picture with them without making them too cluttered. “If you’re in a meeting, it’s a nice way to tell a story with how these two things connect,” Anusha says.
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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we chat with Carlos Umana, Principle Business System Analyst at BMC Software, to kick off the Behind the Customer Stories series for the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce. We’ll learn how he champions productivity in his large organization, and how he picked up admin skills from a developer background. Join […]
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