Whether things right now are slower than usual or busier than ever before, being able to provide quick wins and improvements for your Salesforce users can be huge morale and productivity boosters for your organization. This post will offer three ways to clean up your Salesforce instance and manage your data more efficiently.
The idea for this initiative began on a team call where my manager mentioned a New York Times series about how to use your time at home to clean your house, with a checklist of things to do for each room. We thought, “Hey, let’s do the same for admins!” From that idea came a three-part webinar series, called ‘Making the Most,’ which I’ve distilled down to three actionable tips below.
1. Documenting your Organization:
Before starting any work to improve your Salesforce instance, it’s important to have everything documented. You need to know what’s there and how it works before you can improve upon it. Do all your fields have descriptions and help texts? If so, do the descriptions include whether or not they are used in any automation? Do you know what automations you have set up, and how they work?
This downloadable spreadsheet template covers everything you need to take a digital inventory before you get started. As my colleague, Matt, said during the webinar, “There is no such thing as too much documentation.”
2. Automation:
One of the biggest challenges older Salesforce organizations face is a ton of workflow rules that are either outdated or in conflict with each other. One way to clean this up and streamline everything is by moving workflows into a process using our point-and-click tool, Process Builder.
Process Builder allows you to combine multiple workflows tied to one object into one singular process. It not only simplifies things, but it also allows you to build out much more complex criteria for when a process should fire. If you’ve followed the documentation advice above, your review should go much faster. If you want to learn more about how to get started, check out this Trailhead on the topic.
3. Data Maintenance:
A common hindrance to running programming or fundraising out of Salesforce is duplicate contact and account records. This problem results in a person’s history with you spread over multiple contacts so you never get the full picture of their interactions with you.
A quick and easy way to prevent duplicates is to set up matching and duplicate rules. With those rules, you can set what criteria a record has to meet to be a duplicate—for example, same name or email—as well as what Salesforce should do when a duplicate is found. Should it be allowed to be created? Should the user just be alerted to the duplicate? There is a great Trailhead on this very topic that’ll get you started.
If you already have a bunch of duplicates, there are numerous tools in AppExchange that will help with the data cleanup. Before doing any major data manipulation, always be sure to create backups and test the tools in a sandbox.
For more tips and checklists, join the “Making the Most” Power of Us group that we set up after the webinar series. It includes all the checklists, resources, and decks we used for the original webinar.
For the full article click the link below.
source: https://www.salesforce.org/blog/three-ways-to-maximize-admin-time/
