Back to Basics: What most Salesforce.com consultants don’t want you to know
October 6, 2009
A large portion of my time at OpenView Labs is spent consulting our portfolio companies in sales best practices and implementation best practices in Salesforce.com. However, after a recent conversation with one of the sales managers from one of our portfolio companies I realized that I may be spending too much time consulting our companies on implementation and best practice and not enough time on how to actually use salesforce.com. To use an old adage I have been giving them the fish instead of teaching them how to fish for themselves.
Here are four very basic tips that can help anyone with any range of experience using saleforce.com find answers to their salesforce.com questions: 1. Use the help menu
I know it seems obvious, but I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t think it needed to be repeated. One thing salesforce.com has done extremely well is develop a comprehensive knowledge base with solutions not only to the most frequently asked questions, but also to more obscure questions and user issues that you wouldn’t find in a typical company’s help menu. The help menu also contains tons of useful documents, guides, and frameworks with process and implementation best practices. 2. Use the help button on salesforce pages
Literally every page in salesforce.com has a link near the top right hand corner of the screen that links directly to the help page for that specific page. Also, at the bottom of every help page there is a list of helpful links related to the topic.3. Bookmark www.successforce.com This little gem of a URL links to the home page of the salesforce.com community. This site is home to a vibrant community of salesforce.com users many of whom share the same likes and dislikes and experience similar successes and failures. Search for answers to your questions within the community and see what comes back. The site also contains links to pre-recorded trainings, and implementation workbooks that can improve your chances of executing a successful roll out large or small. This site is an invaluable resource to admins, as well as sales and sales ops executives. 4. Google… Finally, when all else fails, turn to the one source of truth… Google. I think most people probably don’t even try this, but when they do I think they will be pleasantly surprised at the results they find. Type your salesforce.com question into Google. If there is no answer out there, at the very least you might find someone else who had the same problem.