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Customize Salesforce Essentials
Salesforce Essentials provides standard and customizable tools to suit your unique business needs. Need to see a to-do list when you start your day? Don’t have a full-time staff member to run your help center? Have unique metrics you’re holding your support staff to? We’ve got brainstorming questions and best practices around customizing Essentials to meet your needs.
Customize the Home Screen
When you first open Salesforce, to get a birds eye view into the health of your business, you can choose the insights to showcase on your homescreen.
Make a Few Decisions
- What is the first thing I want to see when I open Salesforce?
- What information helps me keep my finger on the pulse of my company? Reports, tasks and events are among the most popular.
- Have I completed all the steps under Hi there, Trailblazer? If so, remove it from the Home Screen to make room for other information.
Customize Your List Views
Filter your records to help you work more efficiently. Create custom list views so you can segment your data to focus on the right customers and business deals.
Make a Few Decisions
- What information do I need to an up to date list of often?
- How do I segment my records? For example: Which leads do I prioritize? What opportunities have the most value?
- If I want to segment customers by custom data, what custom fields should I add to records to filter by?
- What list view do I want to see when I open accounts, leads, or opportunities?
Best Practices
- Don’t delete the default view of all records. This way, you have them if you need them.
- Pin the list view of records you want to see when you first open the page to make it the default.
- Use list views to send list emails to customers in bulk.
Customize your Reports and Dashboards
Data is key to measuring your success. Create reports and dashboards that help you keep an eye on key initiatives and outcomes.
Make a Few Decisions
- What insights do I want into my business?
- Where do I spend money and is that the best use of my funds?
- How effective are my sales and support people? Do I hit my quotas?
- Are my customers happy?
- What fields should I add to my records to enhance my reports?
Best Practices
- Attend the Salesforce Essentials workshop on creating reports and dashboards.
- Consider tying compensation to Salesforce reports, so employees are more motivated to work in the app and to complete records.
Customize your Help Center
You can support your customers with a self-service Help Center. Reduce your support ticket queue by answering customer questions using public-facing knowledge articles.
Make a Few Decisions
- What are my customers’ frequently asked questions?
- How can I categorize content so customers can find it quickly?
Best Practices
- Host an internal knowledge base as well as a customer-facing one to display in your help center.
- Choose an article editor and set up a review process. You can document reviews in your internal knowledge base.
- Start with a single category of articles, like frequently asked questions, and scale as you go. You can always add extra categories.
- Mine the content you already have, such as webinars, slide decks, and one-pagers. Turn that content into articles.
Customize your Opportunity Stages
Closing a deal or earning revenue takes a series of business milestones to achieve. Steps might include a discovery session to determine the customer’s needs, a presentation on how your product or service can benefit the customer, delivery of the business contract, and contract negotiations. Create custom opportunity stages to tailor the pipeline to your unique use case.
Make a Few Decisions
- What is my sales process from start to finish?
- What are the business milestones I want to monitor?
Best Practices to Consider
- A stage is a business milestone. A task is a step you take to achieve the milestone. For example, a stage is when you make a discovery call to find out a customer’s needs. A task for that stage is to schedule the call.
- Use path guidance to add up to 1,000 characters of instruction on how to successfully achieve an opportunity stage.
