7 Essential Salesforce Hacks For Beginners

Salesforce CRM is an incredibly powerful tool for sales and customer relations. Through Salesforce you can manage customer details and sales prospects as well as generating analytics that will optimize your strategies and ensure your business is getting ahead. Salesforce is a cloud computing service so its services are accessible from anywhere, at all times. Salesforce can have a huge impact on productivity and can be an essential tool for sales.

Through Salesforce you can check in on all aspects of your business sales strategies, and it’s incredibly customizable. However, with so many features, new users can find themselves getting lost in its interface. For the Salesforce newbie, we’ve compiled seven tricks, tips, and hacks to get you up to speed.

Don't forget to check out: How to Improve Your Customer Service with Salesforce Workflow Automation

1) Take The Tour

The first thing you want to do when getting started with Salesforce is to take the tour. Salesforce has an enormous degree of customization and there are so many tools integrated into it that at first, the interface can be overwhelming to new users. Fortunately, Salesforce has a tour function that can guide you through it, so you’ll learn how to handle your pipeline, manage sales, and customize every process.

2) Quick Search

Figuring out how to find the customizations and options that are specific to your business needs can leave you browsing countless tabs and options on Salesforce. To avoid getting lost in this maze of customization and get set up with ease, use the Quick Search bar that you’ll find in the left-hand corner of the page. If you know the admin settings and figurations, you’re after, Quick Search leads you straight to them.

3) Alerts And Notifications

With Salesforce you have the power to streamline communication with your team to make sure everybody stays in the loop at all times. “Taking advantage of tracking alerts and notifications means you can optimize how your team responds to changes in your processes,” says Maria Cooper, tech writer at PhDKingdom and Originwritings. “You can set it up so that whenever a new contact is added or it’s time to follow up a lead everybody on the team gets notified.” Find this option in the Setup screen under Email Alerts.

4) Save Time With Automation

It’s essential that you track your leads, revenue, and opportunities for sales so that you know what the big picture looks like. Salesforce can generate reports on these topics and deliver them in a timeframe that suits you, whether you’re checking in weekly or monthly. First, find Run Report to generate an initial assessment and then use the Schedule Future Runs feature to determine who you want to receive the reports and when.

5) Chrome Extensions 

If you’re using Chrome as your browser of choice then you have even more ways to customize Salesforce to turn it into an effective sales tool. Chrome extensions give you more control so they’re well worth exploring. The Salesforce Lightning extension, as an example, will allow you to integrate your Salesforce activity with your Gmail so you can view everything from within your email client.

6) Integrate Apps

Salesforce’s modular design is one of its best features and you can use it in so many ways. Integrating apps into the standard Salesforce interface helps you keep everything in sight, and Salesforce can become the hub for all your sales processes. Apps from MailChimp can help you manage your email list whilst Data.com has an extension that will manage your analytics. Getting these apps integrated into Salesforce is an essential trick that turns it into the ultimate CRM.

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7) Customize Your Logout Page

Margaret Williams, a business blogger at Britstudent and NextCoursework reports that “Setting the landing page for when users log out of the Salesforce interface is yet another feature of the customizable landscape of this CRM. You can send users straight to the intranet for your company or your business's commercial website, making sure that your business operations are streamlined.” You can paste the URL you want to direct people to in the Logout Page Settings, found under Setup and Session Settings.

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool once you’ve figured out how to use it. By leveraging add-ons and Chrome extensions it can do even more to boost your productivity and optimize your sales strategies. Get familiar with our Salesforce hacks and you’ll be a Salesforce force in no time. 

Michael Dehoyos is a content marketer and editor at Write My Thesis. He gained an MBA from the University of Washington and develops marketing strategy concepts for new businesses.