I recently needed to identify duplicate Contact records in a Salesforce.com org that contained over 40K Contacts. The amount of duplicates were not horrible (~5% of their Contacts) considering the sales reps had not been trained to watch out for actions that would spawn duplicate records. However the situation was bound to get worse without…
In our never ending quest to reduce duplicate records in Salesforce, before you convert a Lead into a Contact, as a best practice, you will want to (1) check for other Lead records that may already exist for that person, and (2) check to see if the Contact already exists in Salesforce prior to converting…
Now that Platform licenses are available, I suspect that a lot of companies will “flip” Users from a full Enterprise license down to the Platform license – it just makes economic sense when you can do it. Be aware that when switching a User from a full Enterprise Edition (EE) License (Enterprise Sales Cloud or…
If you have ever seen me train new Users on how to work with Salesforce.com you’ll hear me say at least a half dozen times “Search before you create!” Inevitably your Users are going to create a duplicate Account or Contact in your Salesforce instance. Don’t panic. Salesforce has some easy-to-use wizards that can help…
What is Cloud 2? Marc Benioff publicly launched Cloud 2 in April of 2010 with much fanfare. But what the heck is it? The thrust of Benioff’s presentation was that in this age of Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter – the traditional enterprise data model is disconnected from the conversation with the customer. “Why isn’t all…
It’s the home stretch. You’ve been slogging down the playing field gathering requirements, configuring Salesforce.com, organizing data and importing records, creating reports and dashboards and the only thing between you and go-live is end user training. Guess what? The next ten yards are probably the most important to your project’s success. If your users don’t…
Ok, you don’t really “hijack” or “hack” into anything in Salesforce.com, but this is how you can take over a User account of someone that has left the company and their account is inactive. The below assumes that you have an extra license, or at least one you can borrow for a moment. So how…
Custom Report Links are a cool usability feature – it provides your Salesforce.com Users the ability to quickly retrieve report data based on the record they’re currently viewing. A custom report link is simply a custom link that launches a report rather than a query out to the web (like Google maps or Weather.com). Some…
It is not too uncommon to come across a situation where sales leadership wants to benchmark their performance versus a budget or plan. The trick is how to make a dashboard reflect sales performance against a predefined target? The solution I like to use is to create a “Budget” or “Plan” Opportunity Record Type, and…