Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Introducing Salesforce terminology
Logging in to the site
Getting to know all the home pages
Working with new records
Detailing the record page
Finding help and setup options
If an application isn’t easy to use, you won’t use it. Period. Salesforce succeeds not only because it offers a universe of integrated tools but also because users can pick it up within minutes. You navigate it much the same way you do other websites: by pointing and clicking over text links and buttons.
Still, you have so many ways to navigate Salesforce that it makes sense to lay down the obvious (and not-so-obvious) best practices for getting around the application.
In this chapter, you can find out how to log in to the Salesforce site and use the home page to manage your activities, create records, and jump to other tabs. We briefly review the major tabs and describe how to use the interior home pages, list pages, detail pages, and related lists. Finally, we cover where you can go for help.
Before we delve into the mechanics of navigating Salesforce, familiarize yourself with these basic terms:
We often use the terms record and detail page interchangeably. From a detail page, you can perform and track a variety of tasks related to the specific record. For example, if you have and are looking at an Account detail page for Cisco, you see fields about the company and lists of other records related to Cisco.
You need to log in to your account to access your company’s instance of Salesforce because every company’s Salesforce website is different, and salesforce.com goes to great lengths to protect your information.
The first time you log in to the Salesforce service, you receive an e-mail entitled Salesforce login confirmation. To set your password, follow these steps:
A page appears, prompting you to set a new password and security question.
Be sure to select a question and provide an answer that can verify your identity if you forget your password. Use this password from now on unless your administrator resets the password.
The home page of Salesforce appears.
You log in to Salesforce just as you would any other secure website.
To log in, open a browser and follow these steps:
The salesforce.com login page appears as shown in Figure 2-1.
Your username is typically your corporate e-mail address. Select the Remember User Name check box if you want your computer to remember it. After you click the Login button, your main home page appears.
Every time you log in to Salesforce, you begin at your home page. The look and feel of the elements on your home page are similar to other users’ home pages, but the tasks and events that appear in the body of the page are specific to you.
Use the home page to manage your calendar and tasks, jump to other areas by clicking tabs, or access recent records by using the sidebar. If your company has customized the home page, you might also see key charts or graphs from your company’s dashboards. (Dashboards are visual snapshots of key performance metrics based on your custom report data.)
At the top of every Salesforce page you will find the Global Search bar. You can find a majority of the information that you want by using Search. To search for information, follow these steps:
A Search Results page appears, as shown in Figure 2-2. Salesforce organizes the search results in lists according to the major types of records, including accounts, contacts, opportunities, and leads.
The detail page appears, allowing you to review the record and its related lists.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try adding the * wildcard before, after, or in the middle of your keywords to expand your search to words that start with, end with, or are similar to your keywords.
If you’re focusing on a page (such as a list of search results or a report) and want to open one of the results in a new window, instead of clicking the link, right-click that link and choose Open Link in New Window from the contextual menu that appears.
The calendar section of the home page defaults to a calendar of the current month and your scheduled events for the next seven days. Like other calendar tools, the calendar allows you to drill down. Your scheduled events are based on events that you assigned to yourself or that other users have assigned to you.
From this calendar section (shown in Figure 2-3), you can do the following:
On the home page, you see a section entitled My Tasks, which displays tasks that you created for yourself or that have been assigned to you.
A task is an activity that you need to do, and it can have a due date. Unlike an event, however, a task doesn’t have a specific time and duration. For example, if you want to remind yourself to send a proposal, you typically create a task instead of scheduling an event. (See Chapter 7 for additional tips on managing tasks.)
From the My Tasks section (as shown in Figure 2-4), you can do the following:
If your company has customized your home page, you might also see and select up to three key charts or tables from your dashboards. Dashboards display important information from reports in Salesforce that can provide key performance indicators on the health of your business. Each dashboard chart or table is a component. (See Chapter 18 for details on building dashboards that can measure and analyze your business.) As of this writing, dashboards are available in the Group, Professional, Enterprise, and Performance Editions.
If you see a chart or table on your home page, you can also perform these actions from the Dashboard section:
The sidebar is the column on the left that appears on just about every page of Salesforce except for dashboards and reports. On the home page, use the sidebar to quickly go back to pages you recently accessed, stay informed about important company messages, click links to useful websites, and create new records.
Use the compact Create New picklist on the sidebar to quickly create any new record.
The Recent Items section displays up to ten records that you most recently clicked. Use the list to quickly get back to records that you’ve been working on, even if you logged out and logged back in. The recent items show an icon and the name or number of the record. These items include mostly the records that are organized under a tab heading, such as Accounts, Contacts, and so on. To visit the detail record of a recent item, simply click a listed link.
With the help of your administrator, you can offer other tools and information from the sidebar on the home page to improve productivity and drive overall adoption. Review the following tips, see Chapter 21 on customizing Salesforce, and consult with your administrator if some of these features could help your organization:
Salesforce allows you to organize tabs into groups. These groups, also known as apps, help reduce screen clutter and give you quicker access to the tabs that you use the most. For example, a marketing manager might rarely use the Cases or Opportunities tabs but spend most of her time looking at Campaigns and Leads.
With the salesforce.com Force.com platform, your company can now create custom apps for more specific uses within CRM — or for anything else, for that matter. Sales reps can use an expense reporting app, and product managers can use a product release app to manage their product requirements. The mind-blowing part of all this is that apps can be comprised of standard tabs or custom ones that you create. Anyone in your company can benefit from sharing one set of data. And don’t worry if you’re not the most creative type. Salesforce.com has a bunch of prebuilt apps available (for free or for an additional charge), which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 21.
In the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page, you can find the Force.com App Menu (see Figure 2-5). The drop-down list allows you to switch between apps. You find some standard tab groupings, such as Sales and Call Center. Administrators can also add or create new apps to address what their specific users need to see. Don’t worry if you choose an app and see new tabs. You can always go back to the drop-down list, select your previous app, and have your familiar tabs return.
If the tabs in Salesforce look familiar, they should. When the founders of salesforce.com designed it, they patterned the site after popular websites such as Amazon.com, where you click a tab to jump to an area.
In this section, we describe the major tabs in Salesforce and show you how to use the tab home pages to quickly access, manage, or organize information.
Each tab within Salesforce represents a major module or data element in an interconnected database. That’s as technical as we get.
In the following list, we briefly describe each of the standard tabs (as shown in Figure 2-6). We devote a chapter to each of the tabs mentioned here:
When you click a tab, the tab’s interior home page appears. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears. The tab’s home page is where you can view, organize, track, and maintain all the records within that tab.
Do this right now: Click every tab visible to you.
The look and feel of the interior home pages never change, regardless of which tab you click (except for the Home, Reports, and Dashboards tabs). On the left, you have the sidebar with the Create New drop-down list, Recent Items, and (depending on your company and the tab) a Quick Create tool. In the body of the page, you have a View drop-down list, a Recent Items section related to whichever tab you’re on (for example, Recent Accounts), and sections for popular Reports and Tools (see Figure 2-7).
Strategy and execution are all about focus. With custom list views, you can see and use lists to better focus on your business. A list view is a segment of the tab’s records based on defined criteria. When you select a list view, a list of records appears based on your criteria.
On each tab, Salesforce provides a selection of popular default views to get you started. To try a list view (using Accounts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):
The Accounts home page appears (refer to Figure 2-7).
A list page appears that displays a set of columns representing certain standard account fields and a list of your account records. If no account records appear, you don’t own any in Salesforce.
If a user sorts by a column other than name, the letter search looks for values in that column starting with the selected letter. For example, if sorting by State, selecting C filters for accounts with states starting with C rather than account names starting with C.
If you have a particular way that you like to look at records, you can build a custom list view. If you have the right permissions, you can share this view with other groups or your entire organization. (Or maybe you should just keep your views to yourself.)
To create a custom list view (using Contacts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):
The Contacts home page appears.
A Create New View page appears.
For example, if you want to create a list of your contacts that are senior executives, use a title like My Senior Execs.
In this example, select the My Contacts radio button.
For this running example, assume that your marketing manager created campaigns. You might want to tie a campaign to filter your List View after identifying which contacts you want the view to search.
Tying a campaign to your List View filters your results to those contacts related to a specific marketing campaign. You must have the proper permissions in the Professional, Enterprise, and Performance Editions for this capability.
A basic criteria query is made up of three elements:
Although Salesforce’s preset views take common fields, such as Phone and Email, you can select any of up to 15 fields to display on your custom view page.
Administrators and certain users have this permission. Your decision is made simple if the step doesn’t appear. Otherwise, select one of the three options. (Basically, the three radio buttons translate to all, none, or selective.) If you choose the third option, use the drop-down list to select a group and then click the arrows to move that group into the Shared To column.
A new list view appears based on your custom criteria. If you don’t get all the results that you anticipate, double-check and refine the filter criteria. For example, if your list should include directors but doesn’t, click the Edit link and update the view.
On a tab’s home page, just below the views, you see a Recent Items section. (The name of the item will match whatever type of record you’re on. For example, Recent Accounts is the section name if you’re on the Accounts tab.) This section comes with three or four relevant columns that you can modify. You can see as few as 10 items and as many as 25 items at a time by clicking the link at the bottom of the table.
To test the Recent Items section (by using Leads as the example), go to the Leads home page and follow these steps (which you can apply to all tabs):
The table reappears with changes based on what you select.
The detail page appears, displaying the record and related lists.
A New Lead page appears in Edit mode, ready and waiting. (See Chapter 9 to read more about the fields in the Lead record.)
In the lower-left corner of a tab’s home page, Salesforce displays a small selection of commonly used reports associated with that tab. You can click a link to go directly to the report or click the Go to Reports link, which takes you to the Reports home page.
In the lower-right corner of a tab’s home page, Salesforce provides a set of unique tools associated with a particular tab. Depending on which tab you’re viewing, use these tools to help you manage and maintain records within that tab. For example, on the Accounts home page, in the Tools section, you can click the Merge Accounts link to merge duplicate accounts. See the related chapters later in this book for details on using specific tools.
By using the Create New drop-down list on the sidebar of any page in Salesforce, you can easily add new records into Salesforce. You might find yourself in the position of having deleted important files; don’t worry, though, because Salesforce gives you a way to put them back in their rightful spots before anyone notices that they’re missing.
To create a record (by using Contacts as the example), follow these steps (which can be applied to all Create New Items on the picklist):
A New Contact page appears in Edit mode.
Even while you’re in Edit mode, the Create New picklist is available.
The Contact detail page appears, and here you can begin tracking information.
Occasionally, you delete a record and regret it. Don’t panic — the Salesforce Recycle Bin gives you 15 days to restore recently deleted records, including any associated records (such as activities deleted in the process) and your credibility.
To restore a deleted record, follow these steps:
The Recycle Bin page appears. If you’re an administrator, use the View picklist to view and restore records deleted within the last 15 days by other users.
You can click the Select All link to select all the records on the page.
The Recycle Bin page reappears, and a link to your restored record appears in the sidebar below Recent Items.
After you create a record, the record appears on its own detail page (see Figure 2-10). You can use the detail page to update the record fields or manage and track activities and common operations on the related lists displayed below the record. In this section, we show you how to navigate the detail page. The other chapters in this book give you specific details about managing particular related lists.
At the top of any record’s detail page is a row of several links. Each link corresponds to a list of other records related to the current one. The label for each link consists of the name of that type of record as well as the number that are related. So when you’re looking at an Account detail page, instead of scrolling down the page to see whether any contacts exist, you can see how many exist right at the top. But wait, it gets better: You can click the link and immediately jump down to the bottom of the detail page to where that Related List is normally found. And if you want to be even more efficient, instead of clicking the link, just hover your mouse over it. Salesforce will show you a preview of the related list that even includes buttons to create new records and clickable links to existing ones.
At the top of any record’s detail page, you can use several links and buttons to perform different actions. Go to any detail page and try these out:
To cut down on the number of steps you have to take when you update records in Salesforce, you can edit fields directly in detail pages.
Follow these steps to edit a field directly in that web page, without having to go to another page. Salesforce calls this inline editing.
Figure 2-11 shows the e-mail address of a contact within a company being updated.
An icon appears to the right of a field, telling you whether you can edit that field:
If you happen to delete information in a field that requires something in it, don’t worry. Salesforce has a couple stop-gap measures to prevent you from messing things up. An Undo arrow icon appears before you save the record, and Salesforce is smart enough to remind you about required fields before letting you save your changes.
Related lists: Say it three times so you don’t forget the term. By designing the page with related lists, Salesforce enables you to gain 360-degree customer visibility and ensure that more detailed information is only a click away. For example, if you open an Account detail page for one of your major customers and scroll down below the record fields, you can see multiple contacts, activities, opportunities, cases, notes, attachments, and so on listed as links from organized related lists. And if you don’t see these links, you have work to do.
On any detail page, you can hover your mouse over a lookup field to get a pop-up preview of that other record’s contents. Figure 2-12 shows a preview of the account record by hovering over a contact’s company name.
A lookup field is any field that actually links to another record. A lookup field’s content is underlined to show that it acts as a link to another record. (Just don’t confuse lookup fields with the set of related lists that appears below the main body of a record’s detail page.)
In the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page, to the left of the Force.com app menu, you find a set of links that can help you get more out of Salesforce: