Cloudy’s Top Ten: About Salesforce.com User Groups
"None of us is as smart as all of us" - Ken Blanchard 10 - Salesforce.com helps organize User Groups all over the world. Search for a meeting near you. 9 - If there is no User Group near you, Salesforce.com will help you start one by providing resources and training to help you get started. Check out this ButtonClick Admin post and podcast for great additional information about leading a Salesforce.com User Group. 8 - User Groups are an excellent free way to develop your Salesforce.com knowledge and skills in an engaging, structured, and social environment. 7 - ...
Cloudy’s Favorite Apps: Rollup Helper
Last week, Cloudy demonstrated how to set up a simple Roll-up Summary field in your Salesforce.com org. If you are already using Roll-up Summary fields, you know how useful they are for understanding your data and creating meaningful reports. But if you are a fan of Roll-ups, then you are probably frustrated by their limitations as well! Roll-up Summary fields can only be created on Master objects in Master-Detail relationships, and there are tight limits on the numbers and configurations of Master-Detail relationships in an org. If you have run into these limits, you have probably wished that Roll-Up ...
Cloudy’s Chalkboard: Create Roll-up Summaries
Roll-up Summary fields are a way to view accumulated data from Detail records on a Master Record in Salesforce. The Roll-up can calculate sums, counts, minimums or maximums. A Rollup Summary on an Account (Organization) record could calculate the total of all related Opportunities (or Donations). It could also show the maximum or largest sale on each account. Your salespeople would have a quick gauge of how much a customer has bought and might be willing to buy, and you can run reports showing your best customers. A Roll-Up Summary field can be created on any Master record in a ...
Salesforce for Nonprofits – The sky is the limit!
Last week Cloudy explained a little bit about the Salesforce.com Foundation and how it supports Nonprofit and Higher Education organizations by providing ten free Salesforce.com user licenses. What could your organization do with those ten free licenses? Build deeper relationships with your partners, donors, clients, and volunteers. Salesforce allows you to see all your related information and interactions in one place, including donation history, emails sent, phone calls logged, events attended, relationships and affiliations recorded, and any custom information you collect. This 360 degree view of your relationships is invaluable as your team works to partner with donors and ...
The Power of the Cloud: Within Reach for Nonprofits!
If you work at a nonprofit organization, you know all about doing more with less. When the economy is down, you don’t have the luxury of scaling back for a while, because that is when your mission in your community becomes most critical! Salesforce.com is the industry leader in cloud based enterprise information and relationship management systems, known as CRMs. It is used by more than 100,000 businesses worldwide to drive many types of business processes. You might be wondering what a nonprofit organization needs with a tool that sounds like it is all about “sales”. The truth is ...
Cloudy’s Chalkboard: Creating Dashboards
Salesforce reports are a powerful tool for understanding your data, but when you have many reports, levels of complexity, and large amounts of data, it can be a lot to take in. Charts and Dashboards are the best way to create snapshot views of your data. Good dashboards give executives the answers to the questions they care about most, give managers a handy tool to drive meetings, and give users an organized view of the things they need to prioritize. If you have never created a dashboard, here is a step by step tutorial to get you started. Step 1: ...
Clean ALL the Data!!! Part II
When it comes to defeating dirty data in Salesforce.com, the best offense is a good defense: start by giving your records, layouts, and fields a major tune-up. Eliminate all the unneeded fields cluttering your records. When possible, use pick lists instead of free-entry fields to reduce the impact of typos. Establish naming conventions and standards for record-completeness and make sure your users understand them. Go over your page layouts and check the tab-order on your records to ensure that the settings are optimized for efficient data-entry. Make the most important fields “required” on the page layout to ensure complete data ...
Cloudy’s Chalkboard: Grouped Bar Charts
Salesforce.com charts and dashboards create useful snapshot views of your data. Bar charts are popular because you can easily add valuable detail to a basic bar chart by using groupings. Look at Cloudy's examples below and then follow the step-by-step instructions to create a grouped bar chart for your report or dashboard: Step 1: Create your report. You need to include at least 3 fields: -Record Name or ID (ie. Activity ID) -Group Category 1 (ie. Activity Type) -Group Category 2 (ie. Assigned to) Check your filters: -Set the date filters to the time frame you are interested in. ...
Cloudy’s Favorite Apps: FlipTop Social Profiles
If you are using Salesforce to track your contacts and leads, you already know what a great tool it is for getting a detailed view of the the people, records, and relationships that are important to you. When you are preparing to call or meet one of your clients or potential customers, one look at their record in Salesforce provides the information you need to have a more personal and up-to-date interaction. The only thing that is missing is an easy way to view the public social media presence of your contact. Sure, Salesforce provides the social media links at ...
In Depth with Cloudy: Paul Selway – Founder of Redpath Consulting Group
Paul, what exactly IS Salesforce.com? Salesforce.com is like a "Swiss Army Knife in the Cloud". It has Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Collaboration Cloud, Data Cloud, and Service Cloud apps that provide a very good starting point for Customer Relationship Management or Call Centers. It also has a database piece that can be used on it's own and a force.com platform piece that can be used to customize existing apps or create new ones. What feature of Salesforce.com do you use every day? Mobile Chatter. I just love the way that you can follow People, Groups, Accounts, Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities. ...
