A Quick Overview of Salesforce
Hey! I’m spending 30 days building a series of tutorial videos and blog posts demonstrating how to use strategic tech tools that benefit startups. This is my tutorial on Salesforce. If you’re interested in learning more about my project, you can view the full project here.
If you’ve ever worked in customer management or sales, you’ve probably heard of or used Salesforce.
Salesforce is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool that keeps track of your leads, opportunities, accounts, and contracts.
When you’re working for a large business you’re dealing with hundreds of people a day. It’s difficult to remember just their names, let alone intricate details about them and their relationship with the company.
However, providing personalization is a crucial part of any CRM role. You have to treat each customer like they’re your only customer. Making notes on each person in google sheets or notes is possible, but the notes quickly become cluttered, and at that point, there’s no point in having them because they’re not easily accessible.
Salesforce acts as a second brain that allows you to keep information on everyone you meet right at your fingertips.
It keeps everything in specific folders and pages so that you can expand them and view all the details when you need them.
In this blog, I will be giving a quick overview of how to use Salesforce. I also created this short video walking through the process. You can check it out here!
At the top of the Salesforce app is this taskbar. I’ll be walking through the value and purpose of each page on the taskbar, starting with the home page.
#1 Home Page
The homepage is basically an accumulation of your most-used tools and pages. You can customize this to your needs by clicking the settings button in the upper-right corner.
This provides easy access to your frequently viewed pages without having to search for anything. Also having the tasks on the homepage is a good reminder of what you need to accomplish that day.
Salesforce makes it easy to customize so you can always have relevant information right when you open the app.
#2 Leads
The next page is the leads page. (A lead is a person who expresses some interest in your products or services.)
I gathered a list of about 70 leads using Hunter.io. If you’d like to learn how to use Hunter.io, check out this tutorial blog post I wrote on it.
When you click “import” in the upper right corner of the page you can easily enter an entire CSV file from Hunter.io without having to enter each lead manually.
However, if you’d like to enter them manually, you also have that option by clicking “new”.
#3 Accounts
The account record is where you can track all the activities between your team and the organization or company that you’re selling to.
Each lead, contact, and opportunity is connected to an account.
#4 Contacts
The Contacts page is where you can view or message any of the people you’ve previously contacted. Just like the other pages, in contacts, you can access information on each person by just clicking on their name.
#5 Opportunities
An opportunity is a sale that you’re currently working on. Once a prospect is willing to discuss a pricing scope and delivery dates, you can then convert that lead into an opportunity
This is where Salesforce comes into play. Once you convert that lead, Salesforce automatically creates a corresponding account, contact, and opportunity record.
In the picture below, I’ve clicked on one of the opportunities so you can see what it looks like all expanded. It shows the progress made and the next step to take.
#6 Cases
Cases is where you can address and respond to all the questions and concerns from customers and prospects. This is a very handy tool for someone in a customer management role.
You can keep track of all the questions and help requests in cases. Just like opportunities and contacts, cases are also associated with an account.
#7 Tasks
The tasks page is like a note-taking feature. However, having the tasks feature inside salesforce allows each specific task to correspond with a sales or project you’re working on.
You can view your tasks on the Home page for easy access to what you need to do that day.
#8 Calender
The Calendar page is a lot like tasks except it focuses more on week to week rather than day to day. Having these two features is important because the Calendar allows you to plan broader, more long term tasks. And the Tasks allows you to focus on more articulate day to day things.
#9 Reports
Similar to Tasks and Calendar, the Reports page correlates with the Dashboard page. However, the Reports page is more of a specific report area for you and your team to see each other’s progress.
#10 Dashboard
The last page on the taskbar is the Dashboard.
The Dashboard page is where you can see all the accumulated results for whatever project you’re working on in one place. Unlike your homepage, dashboard allows you to focus on each specific sale and gives much more analytics.
One thing to keep in mind is that the taskbar is entirely customizable. So if any page doesn’t pertain to you or necessarily help you, you can remove it by clicking the pencil on the far right side of the taskbar.
You can also add pages and rearrange them, the pages provided are just a good starting point.
This is just the very basics of Salesforce but it’s a good starting point. Overall, Salesforce is an incredibly useful tool to learn. It allows you to cut busy work, stay on top of your deals, follow up with prospects faster, impress your customers with personalized service, and make sure that nothing ever falls through the cracks.
You can also get more out of your marketing dollars and target better prospects when you know how well different kinds of leads convert into opportunities. You’ve already learned the basics so get started with Salesforce now!
For additional information, make sure to check out the video I created!
