Using Account Settings

You use an account record to collect all the critical information about the companies with which you interact. If you go to the Setup menu, you’ll find some options under accounts that don’t appear under other objects. One of those subheadings is Account Settings.

You can use Account Settings to indicate two default behaviors for your organization. The first toggles the organization’s View Hierarchy link and the second enables Account Insights.

Showing the View Hierarchy link

In Salesforce, you can create account parent/child relationships to distinguish between departments, subsidiaries, or locations of the same overarching entity you do business with. For example, your APAC sales team can be selling to Goldman Brothers Headquarters in Hong Kong, while your central region sales director attends meetings at the Goldman Brothers office in downtown Chicago. (See Chapter 8 for in-depth information on account parent/child relationships in Salesforce.) The children all roll up to the parent (usually, HQ), and the tiers can be easily viewed in the form of an account hierarchy, as shown in Figure 18-1.

To make this tiered hierarchy visible directly from the account record, you have to enable this setting under Account Settings. To do this, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Account Settings and click the Show View Hierarchy link. Now, when you click into an account, you see a link that says View Hierarchy to the right of Account Name, as shown in Figure 18-2.

This step is important to save time when navigating between large volumes of subsidiaries or locations for a single customer. It allows users to view hierarchies visually, making the tiered structure less theoretical.

You can’t enable this link for a subset of users. When you turn it on, anyone with access to that account can see and click the link.

Enabling Account Insights

Account Insights uses third-party technologies (such as Twitter and news articles) to gather real and recent insights and news information about the account in question. It helps users and salespeople stay up to date on relevant accounts and industries they work with on a daily basis. For example, Account Insights can help a rep know that now is not the best time to reach out to his point of contact at Larry’s Laundry, if news articles show that Larry’s Laundry is currently under investigation for money laundering.

To enable account insights, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Account Settings, select the Enable Account Insights check box, and click Save. Figure 18-3 shows what Account Insights looks like on the account detail page if you have Lightning enabled for your organization. See Chapter 20 for more information on the Lightning interface.

You can only view Account Insights in Salesforce1 or if your organization is Lightning enabled.

Building Account Teams

If you work at a large company, you probably know that it takes a team of people to win complex deals and maintain large accounts. The Account Owner field may identify the primary person in charge, but often you need to know whom to go to for a specific purpose, or maybe the account owner is just out sick or on vacation. Account Teams lets you list all the individuals at your company who work with an account and detail their specific role.

To enable Account Teams for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Account Teams.

   The Account Team Setup page appears.

2. Click Enable Account Teams and then select the Account Teams Enabled check box, as shown in Figure 18-4; then click Save.

   The Page Layout Selection page appears, allowing you to select all the Account page layouts to which you want to add the Account Teams related list. If you have account types (and layouts) that never require team collaboration, don’t add the related list to these.

3. (Optional) Select the account page layouts to which you want to add the Account Teams related list and click Save.

   The Account Team Setup page appears, where you can choose to define team roles for your organization.

Now that Account Teams are enabled for your organization, to give credit to your team and make sure that others know whom to call, go to an account record and follow these steps:

1. Scroll down to the Account Team related list or click the Account Team hover link at the top of the page.

   If you don’t see the Account Team related list, have your administrator activate the feature in Setup.

2. Click the Add button to add up to five team members.

   The New Account Team Members page appears, as shown in Figure 18-5.

3. Use the Team Member lookups to select fellow users of Salesforce who work on this account.

   You can always go back and add more later.

4. (Optional) Specify the sharing access you want to give for this account, its opportunities, and its cases.
5. Select the appropriate role in the Team Role drop-down list.

6. Click Save.

   You’re returned to the account record’s detail page with your Account Team listed.

You can always define or modify the roles available in the Team Role drop-down list by choosing Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Account Teams, and clicking the Team Roles link. You can add new roles, rename existing ones, or just change the order in which they appear in the list.

These Team Roles also define how they appear on Opportunity teams.

Identifying contact roles on opportunities

Adding contact roles to your opportunities is pretty easy (see Chapter 10). In case you don’t remember, contact roles are really a way to specify the role the contact plays on this opportunity or in your business process. In this way, the individual or team that is selling on a given opportunity can better understand the players involved and whom to reach out to. If a business user asks for a new contact role or wants to customize the existing contact roles available on your opportunities, read on.

To customize contact roles on opportunities, follow these steps:

1. Choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Opportunities ⇒ Contact Roles on Opportunities.

   The opportunity contact roles picklist values appear, as shown in Figure 18-6.

2. Click the Edit link to the left of the role you want to edit.

   The edit page appears for the contact role picklist value you selected.

3. Rename the role in the Opportunity Contact Role field, or select the available check box to make this role the default value.
4. Click Save when you’re done.

Now that you’ve edited the default contact roles for a given opportunity, you’re ready to let your sales users select them. To learn how to add them to your opportunities, see Chapter 10.

Tracking different sales processes

The final sales-related setting that we cover is what Salesforce calls sales processes. In Salesforce, a sales process determines which opportunity stages are selectable for a given record type. (See Chapter 17 for more information about record types.)

You can create multiple sales processes if your organization has different types of deals that follow different paths to close. In other words, if selling one product line requires more effort, qualification, and stages than another, simpler product, you can use multiple sales processes to accommodate both.

To create a sales process in Salesforce, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Opportunities ⇒ Sales Processes, as shown in Figure 18-7.

1. Click the New button.

   The New Sales Process page appears.

2. Type a name for your sales process and a description to make it easier to identify later; then click Save.

   The Sales Process Opportunity Stages page appears, as shown in Figure 18-8.

3. Select the Opportunity Stage values for the process by using the add and remove arrows; when you’re done, click Save.

   That’s it! You’ve created your first sales process and added the appropriate stages to it.

To use each of your processes, you’ll have to associate them to your opportunity record types. When you create or edit an opportunity record type, you’ll see a picklist value called Sales Process, where you can select the corresponding process for that opportunity type.

Assigning leads

Nobody wants a database full of leads if they’re not assigned to the right people. When you have incoming leads, you have to make sure they’re assigned appropriately. To do this, you can set up some assignment rules to automate lead routing, as we show you in Chapter 7. Reassigning leads is easy — we show you how to reassign record ownership in Chapter 17. Use these out-of-the-box Salesforce tools to increase your marketing power and efficiency.

Choosing a default lead owner

Salesforce requires that you choose a default lead owner, so that new leads that come into your system don’t fall through the cracks (assuming they don’t meet any of your lead assignment rule criteria). The lead owner can be a lead queue, an appointed data steward in your organization, or your system admin, depending on the size of your company and whether you have a governance structure implemented within it.

To select a default lead owner, click Setup and follow these steps:

1. Choose Customize ⇒ Leads ⇒ Lead Settings.

   The Lead Settings page appears, as shown in Figure 18-9.

2. Click the Edit button.

   The Edit Lead Settings page appears, with the Lead Queue Settings section at the top.

3. From the drop-down menu, choose whether you want the type of owner to be a User or Queue, and then click the lookup icon and select the user or queue.
4. (Optional) Select the Notify Default Lead Owner check box to send a notification email to the owner inbox when the lead is assigned.
5. Click Save when you’re done.

Great! Now you’ve assigned a default lead owner, so your leads will be auto-assigned to this user or queue when they can’t be routed based on other rules and criteria you’ve established.

Confirming lead conversion settings

Lead conversion is an important process in Salesforce, and we talk a lot about it in Chapter 7. There are three default lead conversion settings you can set up for your organization.

First, choose Setup ⇒  Customize ⇒ Leads ⇒ Lead Settings. You see the second section, Lead Conversion Settings, with three options, as shown in Figure 18-9:

• Require Validation for Converted Leads: Use this option to enforce validation rules when converting leads.
• Preserve Lead Status: This option comes into play if your organization uses record types on the Lead object. If this check box is selected, the Lead Status doesn’t automatically change to the new owner’s default value during conversion. Use this option if you want to keep the lead status as-is during conversion no matter what.
• Enable Conversions on the Salesforce1 App: Use this option if you want to give users the ability to convert their leads through the Salesforce1 mobile app.

Capturing campaign influence

Campaigns and campaign influence are two cornerstones of marketing. Any marketing department sees the value in capturing the return on investment (ROI) of their campaigns and tying revenue back to their efforts. You can choose to associate influential campaigns to opportunities automatically or manually.

To enable the automatic campaign association to opportunities, follow these steps:

1. Choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Campaigns ⇒ Campaign Influence.

   The Campaign Influence page appears, as shown in Figure 18-10.

2. Under Enable or Disable Automatic Association, click Enabled.

   Now, if a campaign is related to a contact role on an opportunity and the opportunity hasn’t closed, the campaign will automatically be associated with that opportunity. For example, select Disabled if you prefer to manage and associate influential campaigns manually on a one-off basis using the Campaign Influence related list.

3. (Optional) Enter a Campaign Influence Time Frame.

   This allows you to designate the maximum number of days between the date when the campaign was first associated and the date the opportunity was created. For example, if you enter 20 days as the time frame, and one of your contacts becomes a member of a campaign on August 1, the campaign will be considered influential to any opportunity associated with that contact by August 20.

4. (Optional) Create association rules to add additional criteria that campaigns must meet in order to be automatically associated with an opportunity.

Understanding Support Settings for your cases

Support Settings are fairly comprehensive in Salesforce, and we don’t go into every one. However, we do cover the most commonly used settings, and for the rest, you can consult other resources, like Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies, by Jon Paz and TJ Kelley (Wiley), to get the help you need.

To get to the Support Settings, shown in Figure 18-11, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Cases ⇒ Support Settings. Here are some common settings:

• Default Case Owner: A required field that defaults to an owner for cases when case assignment rules fail to locate one.

• Automated Case User: A required field that is listed as the actor in the Case History related list for automated case changes, such as when escalation or assignment rules fire.

  It’s usually best to have the Automate Case User be a Service Cloud admin or super user.

• Show Closed Statuses in Case Status Field: Select this option if you’d rather not have users fill out information on a separate closed case page layout and you’d prefer to let them just close out a case quickly through the status picklist.
• Enable Case Feed Actions and Feed Items: Select this option to change your cases to the upgraded case user interface. You’ll have to also give users access to the Case Feed.

For more in-depth information about these options and others, see Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies.

Defining escalation rules

Escalation rules are criteria and rules you define when you want cases to be automatically escalated. For example, let’s say you have three different tiers of support: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. You can create different escalation rules to say that if a case with Gold support isn’t resolved within 24 hours, it will be escalated to a support manager.

To create an escalation rule, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Cases ⇒ Escalation Rules, and follow these steps:

1. Click the New button to create a new escalation rule, enter a name for it, and click Save.

   Don’t select the Active check box until you’re done with the escalation rule and you deactivate any currently active rules.

2. Click the new escalation rule you created, and then click the New button in the Rule Entry list.

   The Rule Entry Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 18-12.

3. Enter the sort order in which Salesforce will run this particular rule entry.

   This comes into play when you have multiple rules. Salesforce evaluates each entry in the order you designate and stops looking when it finds a criteria match.

4. Select criteria for the rule entry.

   In Figure 18-12, the rule entry indicates three criteria that, if met, will automatically escalate the case. If the case is (a) high priority, (b) a problem (as opposed to an inquiry or feature request type of case), and (c) owned by Tier 1 (or the highest tier of support), the case will be escalated.

5. Select the business hours criteria for the rule.

   You can choose to use the organization’s business hours, use the case-specific business hours, or ignore them altogether. Business hours help support teams so that you time-based criteria run only during your business hours.

6. Select how escalation times are set, and click Save.

Now you’ve created your first escalation rule! Go into a case, set the criteria you’ve chosen, and test it out. But first, don’t forget to go back and activate the escalation rule.

We’ve shown you some of the inside tips on object-specific settings in the Setup menu for Sales, Marketing, and Service. Now you have a basic foundation and understanding of where certain settings are toggled for which objects. We encourage you to go in and get your hands dirty. Explore for yourself!