Chapter 7
In This Chapter
Looking into Salesforce activities
Making new activities
Managing activities
Changing activities
Activities in Salesforce are scheduled calendar events and tasks. In many ways, the events and tasks in Salesforce are just like the activities you use in Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps, or any other productivity application. You can schedule events on your calendar, invite people to meetings, book a conference room, and add tasks to your to-do lists so that you don’t forget to get things done.
However, Salesforce takes activities further: You can easily link events and tasks to other related records, such as accounts, contacts, and so on. You can view activities both in the context of a relevant item (for example, all activities that relate to an account) and as a stand-alone from your calendar and task lists in the comfort and convenience of your home page. And, if you’re a manager, Salesforce allows you to stay up to speed on your users and how they’re spending their time.
By managing activities in Salesforce, you can better coordinate with your team, quickly assess what’s going on in your accounts, and focus on the next steps to close deals or solve issues.
In this chapter, we first show you how to schedule events and create tasks. Then, we cover how to find and view activities, both from your home page and from specific record pages, such as accounts and opportunities.
You can use activities in Salesforce to track all the significant tasks and events involved in acquiring, selling, and servicing customers. Think about all the actions that you and your teams perform to accomplish your job — meetings, calls, e-mails, even the occasional physical letter — and imagine the value of all that information in one place at your fingertips. You can have such a place in Salesforce, and you can easily link your activities together in an organized fashion.
Salesforce features several types of activities that you can access from the Open Activities and Activity History related lists displayed on many of the major records, including accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and cases. In this chapter, we focus on events and tasks, but in the following list, we briefly explain all the various activity records you can track in Salesforce:
Before you can begin managing your time or activities in Salesforce, you need to know the easiest and most reliable way to add events and tasks.
When you want to schedule activities that have a particular place, time, and duration, use event records. By using event records, you and your sales teams can keep better track of your calendars.
You can create an event from your home page, its calendar views, or the Open Activity related list of a record. The best method to choose often depends on what you’re doing. If you’re carving out meetings on a specific day, add events from your Home tab calendar’s Day View. If you’re working on a customer deal, you might create the event from an opportunity record. The end result is the same.
To create an event from a relevant record (such as a contact or account record), follow these steps:
For example, if you want to schedule a meeting about an account, you search for the account name.
When you click Search, a Search Results page appears.
The record’s detail page appears.
A New Event page appears. If you created this event from a relevant record, the name of the person or the related record is prefilled for you.
Pay close attention to the required fields highlighted with a vertical red bar. Depending on your company’s customization, your event record might differ from the standard, but here are tips on some of the standard fields:
If you use the Related To fields on activities, you’ll rarely have problems finding an activity later. For example, if you sell through channel partners, you might associate a meeting with a partner contact, but you might relate the meeting to an end-customer account. When you save the event, it appears on the related lists of both records.
The page you started from reappears, and the event appears under the Open Activities related list for the associated records. The event also appears on the home page of the user assigned to the event.
Alternatively, click the Save & New Event or Save & New Task button if you want to immediately create another activity. A new activity record appears in Edit mode.
Similar to Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce triggers pop-up reminders about events at a set time before the event is scheduled to start. If you live your life daily in Salesforce and have the application constantly logged in on your machine, this feature will gently remind you via a pop-up window, to make sure that you don’t forget an important meeting with a customer.
If, on the other hand, you’re the type that lets pop-up reminders pile up on your computer screen, or if you log in to Salesforce infrequently (what sacrilege!), you can disable this feature. From your name in the upper-right corner of the Salesforce app, choose My Settings⇒Calendar & Reminders⇒Reminders and deselect the Trigger Alert When Reminder Comes Due check box, along with any of the other boxes that are selected by default. Remember to click Save after you finish.
Some sales reps refer to tasks as action items; others call them reminders or to-dos. Whatever your favorite term, use task records when you want to remind yourself or someone else of an activity that needs to get done.
You can create a task from the My Tasks section of your home page or from the Create New drop-down list on any page within Salesforce. We use both methods, depending on whether we’re planning out our weeks or strategizing about a particular account, contact, or other record.
To create a task from the relevant record, follow these steps:
For example, if you want to set a task to review a proposal that relates to an opportunity, search for the opportunity name. After you click Search, a Search Results page appears.
The record’s detail page appears.
Either way, the result is the same. A New Task page appears.
When creating tasks, go to the record that the task is most directly related to before adding the task. By taking this path, you ensure that your task is easy to find because it’s automatically associated with the correct record and its account. For example, if you’re creating a task to follow up on an e-mail to a contact, you most likely add the task from the contact record.
Like the event record, your fields may vary, but here are some tips on adding a task:
You can’t guarantee that every user will log in to Salesforce daily, so e-mail notifications are an effective way to make sure that tasks are delivered to the right people in a timely fashion.
The page that you started from reappears, and the task displays under the Open Activities related list for the associated records. The task also appears in the My Tasks section of the home page of the user who’s assigned to the task.
Make sure that you set your My Tasks view on the home page so that your tasks are included in the filter. The view defaults to Overdue, which can confuse some people when they don’t see a recently created task in that area.
Sometimes, you perform a task and just want to log the activity after the fact. For example, a contact calls you on the phone, or you get stopped in the coffee room by your boss to talk about a customer issue. In these situations, instead of creating a task and then completing it, use the Log a Call feature.
When you click the Log a Call button, you’re simply creating a task record that has a Completed Activity Status. To log a call, go to the record that the call relates to (an account or lead record, for example) and follow these steps:
The Log a Call page appears, displaying fields for a completed task at the top of the page and fields for a follow-up activity at the bottom of the page.
The Status field is preset to Completed, as shown in Figure 7-4.
Although certain fields are labeled as required, the follow-up task is optional.
The detail page that you started from reappears. The call record appears under the Activity History related list. If you set up a new follow-up task, that record appears under the Open Activities related list.
Rather than using the Notes feature in Salesforce to track details of your interactions with customers and prospects, we recommend using Log a Call to record this type of information. Tasks allow for easier reporting, timestamping, editing, and viewing capabilities. You can even track interactions with multiple people at once using the Shared Activities feature. If you don’t see this feature when creating a Task, ask your Salesforce Administrator to turn it on.
You can view your activities from the home page and from a specific record’s Open Activities or Activity History related list. If you’re planning your calendar, use the home page. If you’re working from a particular account, contact, or other item, you can get better context on pertinent activities from the related lists on the record.
After you create (or are assigned to) activities, you probably want to view them so that you can prioritize and complete them.
If you’re planning around a specific record, such as a contact or opportunity, you can view linked activities from the Open Activities and Activity History related lists located on a detail page.
The two related lists work hand in hand. An event record automatically moves from the Open Activities related list to the Activity History related list when the scheduled date and time pass. A task record remains on the Open Activities related list until its Status is changed to Completed; then, the record appears on the Activity History related list.
To view activities from a detail page, follow these steps:
The detail page of the record appears. The saved record appears at the top, and related lists are at the bottom of the page.
If you already created related activities, activity links appear in the lists.
The activity record appears.
Things happen: Meetings get canceled, and small tasks suddenly become big priorities. With Salesforce, you can perform many of the actions that a normal time-management tool would allow you to do, including delegating activities to other users, rescheduling, editing information, deleting records, and so on.
You can do the following basic functions by clicking buttons at the top of an activity record:
Sometimes, you may create activities and assign them to others (intentionally, not because you’re trying to shirk your duties). Sales Development reps often do this as they set up meetings for their account executives. Salesforce lets you easily reassign tasks and events, and notify users of assignments.
To assign an activity, open the activity record and follow these steps:
A pop-up window appears, displaying a list of your Salesforce users.
After you make a selection, the pop-up window disappears, and your selection appears in the Assigned To field.
The activity record reappears, and the Assigned To field has been modified.
When you’re done with a task, you want to gladly get it off the list of things to do. You can mark a task as complete from your home page or from the Open Activities related list in which the task link is displayed.
To complete a task, follow these steps:
Both links create the same result: The task appears in Edit mode, and the Status field changes to Completed. (Your company might have its own terminology for the Completed status.)
Some reps update the Comments field if they have relevant new information. The detail page reappears, and the completed task now appears under the Activity History related list.