Salesforce is one of the most well known and possibly widely used CRM technologies out there, and for a good reason. It is user friendly, cloud-based, and extremely flexible. The out of the box solution does great things, but for many, it just isn’t enough. Many of the companies we talk to like the potential that comes from the customizable nature of Salesforce. Unfortunately, many of these companies aren’t utilizing it to the full potential and are left with a disjointed, incomplete, and isolated CRM system.
That is, until they ask us for help.
Xcellerated Solutions has a large variety of different kinds of customizations we have built for Salesforce. A dominant strength of Salesforce is its ability to be customized and turned into something useful for you in the exact way that you need. The problem many run into is the actual execution of these customizations. That’s where we come in. We take your vision for Salesforce and turn it into a functional, automated, well-oiled machine. The other problem is where do you start? The following categories might spark some ideas with what you can do to take your systems further:
- Automation
- Integration
- Customized Screens
- Dashboards and Reporting
1. Automation
Within Salesforce, there are a bundle of really nice tools that can automate your procedures and take some of the manual busy work out of your day. Buttons, checkboxes, and updating fields can all be used as a trigger to set in motion any chain of events you want. For a more recent example we did for a client, we’ll use the idea of follow-up emails to customers.
After a new customer receives product, you could click a checkbox on their Account and hit save. That’s it on your part! No more effort from you. The magic happens based on the triggers we custom built that set in motion a schedule of emails to be automatically sent to this new customer on a basis of whenever you clicked the checkbox. These emails could ensure proper receiving of goods, customer satisfaction, reviews, or whatever else you might want to send. Again, this is all automatic, no more having to manually send out emails to follow up on things.
2. Integration
Let’s be honest, Salesforce likely isn’t your sole business system. You likely have an accounting/ERP system. It can be kind of frustrating to have to maintain two different systems, especially if you have redundant data in both. Even more frustrating is when human error comes into play and makes the records mismatched for a single entity that should line up. Fortunately, there are ways to make those systems talk to each other.
Whether you want Salesforce to fuel your order and customer data in your ERP system or you want Salesforce to be a nice interface for your master ERP data, we can make things coherent. A connected system that automatically updates back and forth to ensure data integrity and accuracy are crucial to keeping track of your growing business. Don’t go one more day with a disjointed data ecosystem.
3. Customized Screens
This feature’s availability is more widely known, but many people vastly underestimate the capabilities customized screens can provide. I’ll use the Accounts page as an example. On this page, you might want to add custom fields like showing a customer number from (INSERT YOUR ERP SYSTEM NAME HERE), or the multiple levels of categories you have had custom built in (INSERT YOUR ERP SYSTEM NAME HERE). While these are great to make sure your data is available everywhere you need to see it, these customizations can be tied into automation as well. You can use these custom fields/checkboxes/buttons to set in motion automation steps, or use them as dynamic variables that can be inserted to notification emails.
If Salesforce just isn’t giving you the data or functionality you need, consider customizing the solution. Flexibility is one of Salesforce’s strong suits, don’t be afraid to take advantage of the tools you already pay for.
4. Dashboards and Reports
Salesforce has all these great tools for housing your data and customizing how you store it, but what good are they if you can’t see that data properly? Custom reports and dashboards are two aspects of displaying your data that can be useful in different ways, depending on your needs.
Reports are a good way to display specific desired data in a column/grouping format that is custom made for you. Dashboards are a much more high level, visual representation of key metrics that are fueled by your reports. Dashboards can have multiple boxes that show different measures of success. For example, a new customer dashboard might show how many new customers you’ve had this month, a chart displaying distribution of new customers across states, how many of these new customers had follow up issues with the product, and how long those issues took to solve. This is a completely hypothetical dashboard, but gives you an idea of the flexibility and high level data you can view on a single screen.
Don’t Get Stuck
These features are phenomenal and are by no means a comprehensive list, but hopefully a spark in your imagination to find more possibilities. For you, don’t let your team’s customization abilities limit your vision for your Salesforce system. We have years of experience with many different clients of taking their vision and desired process and making them seamless, automatic, and void of human error. Don’t wait any longer to take Salesforce to the next level.