cover.eps

Title page image

Teach Yourself VISUALLY™ Salesforce®

Foreword

At Salesforce I have the responsibility — and the pleasure — to work with all our amazing partners who are driving innovation and customer success around the world. Partnering with Salesforce, our Applications Partners can build apps faster with the Salesforce1 Platform and market them on the AppExchange — the number one enterprise applications marketplace. Our Consulting Partners have likewise built thriving practices focused on transforming their customers’ businesses, leveraging the world’s leading Customer Success Platform.

Salesforce allows users to track customer information and interactions all in one place. Companies can create 1:1 journeys, building relationships from click to close with continuous campaign optimization across every channel. Chatter allows users to find assistance and share ideas. Service teams can rise to the expectations of today’s customers who demand 24/7 support and guidance. Salesforce Communities breathes new life into customer portals with Chatter, Knowledge, Ideas, and more. Salesforce Analytics Cloud lets business users analyze data, get answers instantly, and share with their teams. The Salesforce1 Platform has the tools and services to build custom apps that deepen customer relationships and help employees do more, faster. Finally, with the Salesforce1 Mobile App, everyone in the organization can run his business from his phone.

And we are constantly investing in technologies that enable our customers and partners to move from idea to innovation as quickly as possible, and we welcome innovation from across our ecosystem of partners and customers. The first edition of this title is highly praised for its thoroughness as well as its ease of use. It deftly bridges the gap between manual texts and in-person instruction.

With the second edition, Justin and Kristine have developed an exceptional approach to visually explaining the power of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. If you are interested in learning more about Salesforce with an easy-to-use and comprehensive guide, then I encourage you to add this great book to your arsenal.

— Dan Streetman, Sr. Vice President,
Worldwide Alliances & Channels, Salesforce

CHAPTER 1

Introducing Salesforce

Choose an Edition of Salesforce

To provide you with the best return on your investment, Salesforce offers five editions. Price points and features are outlined at www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp.

When you contact a salesforce.com account executive, he or she will ask questions to help you choose the edition that best suits your needs. You can upgrade to an edition with more features at any time by sending an electronic order to salesforce.com. Activation takes approximately a day. Note that you cannot downgrade editions.

Contact Manager Edition

image

Contact Manager offers basic contact, task, and event management for up to five users. This edition includes integration with Outlook and mobile access. Note that Gmail is supported only through a third-party add-on.

Group Edition

image

Group Edition includes all the features Contact Manager does, plus a web-to-lead management form, reports, opportunity lists, dashboards for tracking performance, and the option to install one of the applications from the AppExchange, salesforce.com ’s add-on marketplace.

Professional Edition

image

Professional Edition offers all the features Group Edition does, plus the ability to send mass emails, manage marketing campaigns and products, create customizable personalized dashboards, add custom tabs and objects to Salesforce, and manage cases for customer service tracking. This edition includes up to five AppExchange applications and is ideal for most small businesses because it offers comprehensive analytics and custom reports.

Enterprise Edition

image

Enterprise Edition is salesforce.com ’s flagship product. It includes all the features Professional Edition does, plus approval processes; field-level security; workflow rules; a sandbox for testing changes in a developer environment; additional AppExchange packages; record types, which provide the flexibility of using object records for more than one purpose; customized page layouts; and an API (Application Programming Interface) for integration with outside systems. You can manage virtually any business process with Enterprise Edition, because it allows you to create custom applications in addition to the standard sales and customer-service features available out of the box.

Unlimited Edition

image

Unlimited Edition includes all the features Enterprise Edition does, plus a Premier Success+ Plan; 24/7 technical support; unlimited online training; multiple sandboxes, including a full copy option; increased data storage from 1GB to 24.3GB; increased API limits; and mobile support. Administration services are also available to help you make customizations, which include using more tabs and creating custom objects.

Choose Your Support Plan

Salesforce offers three different support packages for its various products. The Standard Success Plan comes with a self-service portal and knowledge base, online case submissions, and access to the online community. The Premier Success Plan provides 24/7 support, online or phone case submissions, and access to a trained technician who can assist you with making customizations. The Premier+ Success Plan offers all the features listed previously as well as a dedicated system administrator who responds to questions or customization requests within an hour for critical issues.

Understanding the Home Page

The home page gives you quick access to the most useful Salesforce features. You can use the links on this page to access your calendar, create records for prospects and contacts, and define sales tasks. You can also access the Salesforce Chatter feed to post news and files. This page includes a Recycle Bin feature that stores deleted files temporarily, but you can undelete them if you need to.

The ten most recently viewed items also appear on the sidebar for convenient access. Additionally, you can perform global searches at the top of the home page.

image

A Create New Record

Creates new records for prospects and contacts.

B Show Feed

Displays your Chatter feed — the internal news feed and collaboration tool.

C New Event

Creates a new entry in your Salesforce calendar.

D Create New Task

Creates a new sales task.

E Multi-User Display

Changes the calendar from a single-user view to a multi-user view.

F Week View

Displays one week of calendar events.

Calendar

image

You use the calendar to create and manage a list of events. You can view the time/date of each event, list a subject, and click links to associated records. You can also view events in a more familiar graphical format. Click Single-User View to see only your events. Click Multi-User View to show your co-workers’ calendars. You can also view events for the current day (Agenda), week, or month.

My Tasks

image

The Task area displays your to-do list. To organize tasks, click the Date, Subject, and Name column headers. You can also associate one additional record with each task and display it under the Related To column. Click the check boxes in the Complete column to mark tasks as done when you complete them.

Recent Items

image

Recent Items shows a list of the last ten records you viewed. Items can include accounts, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, documents, ideas, questions, leads, opportunities, quotes, orders, solutions, and users. The list may show fewer than ten items if you delete any of the items that appear here.

Recycle Bin

image

The Recycle Bin keeps deleted records for 15 days before it deletes them permanently. Most Salesforce instances have a limit of 25,000 records. If your organization exceeds this limit, Salesforce begins removing the oldest records from the Recycle Bin after they have been marked as deleted for at least two hours.

Customize the Home Page

You can customize the Salesforce home page to show items that are useful in your organization and hide items that are not. The changes are visible to all users.

You can access the customization features under Home in the App Setup menu. Select your items from a list of wide and narrow components, and then save your selection. Salesforce automatically updates the layout of the home page whenever you modify it.

Customize the Home Page

image

003.eps Click Setup to show the configuration area.

image

003.eps Click the Customize image to display additional options.

003.eps Click the Home image to view options related to the home page.

003.eps Click Home Page Layouts.

003.eps Click Edit.

image

003.eps Click items to remove them from the home page (image changes to image).

003.eps Click items to add them to the home page (image changes to image).

003.eps Click Next.

image

003.eps Select an item in either column.

003.eps Click the Down arrow (image) to move the item down the list, or click the Up arrow (image) to move the item higher in the list.

003.eps Click Save.

Salesforce customizes the home page.

003.eps Click the Home tab to see your changes.

Create a New User

You must create users before your team can use Salesforce. Each user needs to have an available license. If you run out of licenses, you must deactivate a user before you can create a new one. To view which licenses are available, click the Company Profile tab in Salesforce or contact your salesforce.com account executive. When you create a user, you assign the user a role, which defines his job function; and a profile, which specifies whether he is a standard user or an administrator who can customize, set up, or extend Salesforce.

Create a New User

image

003.eps Click Setup to show the configuration area.

image

003.eps Click the Manage Users image.

003.eps Click Users to display user management options.

003.eps Click New User.

image

003.eps Fill in all the text fields marked in red.

003.eps Click the Profile image and click Standard User.

Note: You can select other profiles for other types of users, such as administrators.

003.eps Click the Marketing User check box (image changes to image) to give the user access to your organization’s marketing tools.

003.eps Click the Offline User check box (image changes to image) to give the user offline access.

Note: Salesforce supports offline access through a file synchronization briefcase feature, discussed in the second Tip.

image

003.eps Click the Knowledge User check box (image changes to image) to let the user make changes to Knowledge Base articles.

003.eps Click the Mobile User check box (image changes to image) to let the user access Salesforce from a mobile device.

003.eps Click Save.

Salesforce sends an email to the new user with the user’s username, login link, and temporary password.