Although most businesses already reap incredible benefits from using Salesforce, but there are various tricks and techniques that are not known by many when it comes to how to use Salesforce effectively. These Salesforce tips can be used to achieve various functionalities and also lessen the amount of effort required to accomplish tasks. What’s more, they can be used to remove the several milestones sales teams face when managing data and databases. Here are 5 tricks that you will find relevant and benefiting to your sales and leads management activities. Some of them may be old tricks that most people have not known to exist but are very useful when dealing with Salesforce.
5 Salesforce Tricks You Need to Know
1. Secret tab trick
When creating custom objects, you have the option to create a custom tab which allows you to views that help you manage all object records. However, you can still effectively manage records in an object without going through the hustle of creating a custom tab. To do this, simply go to the URL bar and add the character prefix of that object after the “.com/” section of the URL.
Remember the prefix is the first three characters found in all record IDs within an object. Doing this will lead you straight to a swift navigation secret tab and you do not need to create one.
2. Auto-Number Switch
Many people assume that auto-number fields can only contain numbers automatically generated by the field and that nothing much can be done to change these values. However, this is just a widespread myth and you can easily jam up anything you want and edit values in the auto-number accordingly.
The simplest way to get around this is through changing the “Field Type” of the given field from auto number to text and vice versa. Changing to text allows you to edit and modify the number and you can change them back to auto so that new records are assigned a new random number. This can be very helpful especially during migration as it can be used to retain file numbers of the previous records.
3. Ghost-bursting mass email activity
Sending mass emails to leads and contacts is a common business activity accomplished with salesforce. Usually when you do this and opt to store an activity for each sent mail, then check out activity history of one recipient after the mailing is complete, the subject will be seen as “Mass Email:” The colon often means something is missing there and the secret is that the system stores email templates to reflect the activity assigned. You should therefore describe all your email templates before sending mass emails. This is one of the salesforce mass email tricks used to resolve the spookiness of storing activities for mass emails.
4. Changing user email without confirmation
Changing user records email address often sends an automatic confirmation message to the new value and requires the user to confirm the changes by clicking the confirmation link within the message. Most people thought there is no way getting around this as the confirmation mail is sent regardless of how updates were made (manual, via API…). However, you can simply check the “Generate new password and notify user immediately” box from the top to bottom.
This immediately commits the email and sends details of new password and changes without any confirmation. This can be really helpful when dealing with sandboxes. For instance, if the user has forgotten the password used when their sandbox was last refreshed, and request a reset, you can simply generate a new password without advising them to confirm the changes in their mail.
5. ID growth
This is part of the long list of old tricks used and most businesses do not really need it. Nonetheless, it can be of great advantage to some systems and management requirements. Salesforce always assigns new records with a unique 18 character ID although some may only have 15.
This happens when you use case-sensitive characters because Salesforce will recognize 15 upper case characters as unique enough to hold the record ID. The real trick is that you can still generate the 18 character ID and go back to 15 characters whenever desired. Having 15 characters is as simple as dropping the last three characters while having 18 will require a specific apex snippet that generates 3 additional characters to the ID. The ID formula growth snippet converts all 15 character IDs to 18 and can be found here (https://www.snipplr.com/view/39952/salesforce-convert-15char-to-18char-ids-in-apes/)
Conclusion
There are several other Salesforce tricks you can use to make your work easier when working with this system. Most cumbersome tasks and activities that involve many levels of added coding have an alternative way of getting around them. It is therefore important to know some of the simple tricks that can help you reduce the hustle and improve salesforce efficiency. The abovementioned Salesforce tricks are some of the few you probably need to practice often.