Salesforce is a mighty CRM tool that’s revolutionized the cloud computing space. It streamlines all aspects of business sales by providing insight into the analytics and keeping users happier. As per the company’s official data, it serves over 150,000 customers globally. The total revenue is escalating over the years, reaching 17.1 billion US dollars in the 2020 fiscal year. And In the future, it’s only going to grow.
The complexity and functionality of the Salesforce platform are admirable and impressive. There are different ways to eliminate inefficiencies, improve performance, and automate processes. There’s so much you can accomplish and supervise with its highly customizable interface. While it’s easy to use, things can quickly escalate and go out of hand. That’s because there are so many modules, and data can pour in from anywhere. With more users with distinct sets of requirements, the platform will get complicated as well.
When that does happen, you can refer to these tips and tricks to improve your Salesforce lightning experience and ease your life.
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Utilize “Login As” Feature
When you’re serving your clients as a Salesforce Lightning Consultant, you must identify bottlenecks to ensure the highest ROI. As a consultant, you help develop UI components for business users who aren’t familiar with programming.
It is not an easy job, and sometimes, things can get blurry. What that means is that you might have a visualization in your head that’s somewhat different from what your user is seeing. To bridge this gap, you need to use the “Login As” feature that Salesforce provides.
With this attribute, you can log in to the system as the user instead of admin. So, you’d be able to see what the dashboard looks like for that user. It will allow you to identify and address issues that your end users may be experiencing. If you’re managing sales users, you’d want to ensure they have the real-time sales metrics on their dashboard. Similarly, for HR accounts, you may have payroll and headcount data at the top.
As this research study points out, realism and compatibility are the foremost factors determining the desired job-related outcomes. So, consultants should prioritize getting the same view as the users to help them be more productive.
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Migrate Data Using External IDs
In this digital era, it’s common for businesses to use more than one cloud software. In such scenarios, you might have to exchange data back and forth between Salesforce and other applications. And that’s where the issue of data migration comes in.
For example, you might have contacts on one of the applications. There will be specific accounts IDs or the reference from the source center linked to these contacts. When you migrate them into Salesforce (or the other way around), you might lose the original account-contact relationship.
As you migrate them, the new CRM will assign unique IDs, essentially replacing the existing IDs. To maintain this relationship, you need to add temporary fields with the old IDs corresponding to the contact. Once you’ve migrated, you can edit the new IDs and remove the transient fields you had created.
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Use Extensions
You don’t always have to be inside your Salesforce account to access the data. If you’re using Chrome, you can access it from the home page itself. Depending on how you use the internet, these extensions can save you a ton of time going back and forth between multiple apps.
There are many extensions that you can employ. The ones we’d like to recommend are:
- Salesforce ID Paster
- Salesforce Admin Check All
- Salesforce Navigator
If you find yourself keying data more than handing important stuff, then you should get the Salesforce ID paster from the Chrome extension library. It automatically records the Salesforce ID from external programs and pastes it to the clipboard.
The Admin Check All extension is another productivity tool that adds a “check-all” button to the Setup pages. With the Salesforce Navigator extension, you can quickly get to any Salesforce page by typing in the page name. These extensions can save you time when managing users as a consultant.
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Extending Data Validation
Many companies complain of data quality within the Salesforce environment. That’s primarily because many users across various departments use it for different purposes. To standardize the data, consultants must use validation rules to ensure the keyed-in data goes to the right place, at the right time.
There are many ways to create these validations. As a pro-tip, you shouldn’t enforce the validation rules on your existing data. Instead, you should sit down and fix all the historical data. So, unless you’re willing to do so, it’s better to keep the rules to the new, incoming information.
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Custom Permissions
Experienced consultants will tell you the importance of custom permissions in Salesforce. It’s important from the security and data access point of view. When you’re developing new applications or functionalities, you should always restrict access to non-concerning users. You do this by updating the custom permission.
Conclusion
Salesforce is vast, and you’ll find hundreds of tips from different users who’ve worked as a lighting consultant. As a learner and practitioner, we highly encourage you to take notes and incorporate them into your practice. With that said, these tips and tricks will come in handy the next time you log in to your Salesforce account.