Team CG Slack Chat: Our Favorite Salesforce Features, Plugins, and Add-Ons Right Now
At Cloud Giants, we go a bit nerdy for the nuts and bolts of Salesforce. But who can blame us — with so many tools at our fingertips, Salesforce can be customized for just about any business’s needs. So when our team got to talking on Slack recently about our favorite features and add-ons, we immediately thought that conversation should be shared with you all.
Read the tidied up version of that chat below (with links and more details so you know just what the heck we’re talking about) and if your favorite Salesforce feature, plugin, or add-on isn’t listed here, let us know in the comments! We’re always curious about what other Salesforce users and admins are finding valuable in their work.
Favorite Salesforce Features, Plugins, or Add-Ons Slack Chat
Holly: Favorite Salesforce add-on or feature @here? I love Custom Help. It’s a great way to store organization-wide information as links in Salesforce. I recommend this to clients who have ongoing Salesforce releases or quick reference guides and want them easily accessible to folks working out of Salesforce. Internally, it’s great for keeping key documents like our 2019 Plan in our Custom Help.
AJ: Favoriting reports I frequently use 😃I can quickly switch to a report I need regardless of where I am on an organization’s page. I know @Shawna also relies on favorited reports to find reports for finance reconciliation.
Shawna: Agreed. Favorited reports make the process a lot quicker. I don’t have to dig for what I need, it’s right there for me.
Note: Favoriting records in Lightning Experience may be one of the most underutilized features we love at Cloud Giants! If you refer to different reports or pages and have to keep searching for them under different tabs, you’ll love this feature and it will save you so much time.
Simply click on the star icon while you are on the report you’d like to favorite and then it gets added to your drop-down list right next to the Favorites star. This definitely Keeps It Simple and helps drives user adoption because of its ease and simplicity.
Kil: I like how GridBuddy lets you view and mass edit multiple records in the same grid as the parent records. In return, it allows users to keep their data current, which helps overall analytics. Not to mention, it has easy grid customization that allows workflow actions to be implemented within the Grid set-up.
Note: We especially love that GridBuddy is free for non-profits for the first five users. This is a game changer for those with tight budgets.
Alex: Almost all of the clients we work with have a need to collect info from people and get that data reliably back into Salesforce. FormAssembly has a robust connector that lets you map information into Salesforce in a variety of ways. FormAssembly also integrates with other tools, like payment processors, so your forms can streamline many processes into one. 😃
Note: At Cloud Giants, we use FormAssembly in conjunction with Salesforce to track NPS results, collect inbound leads, and track applicants. It’s a key tool for us to interact with others. We even have a Salesforce Admin job description generator that relies on FormAssembly!
Josh: Kanban List Views are the best. It’s so easy to view the status of whatever you're looking at.
Amari: I like Kanban views too. The visual displays make it so easy for a user is to see all of their records at once. It’s so easy on the eyes.
Shelbi: Kanban view 🙌🏼 and Task Group Mode in TaskRay. Lets me see such a clean picture of my projects, their different stages of progress, and what’s left to complete them.
Note: TaskRay is a third party tool that also has a KanBan view with a ton of filtering and sorting options that we use to keep track of our tasks and projects across Cloud Giants. It has task timers, delegation options, and all kinds of other features that let you tackle projects collaboratively and maximize your team’s productivity.
Deanna: Ok funny to share on Slack, but I really love Chatter. It’s useful internally to communicate on TaskRay tasks and keep track of information about a task. It’s so helpful to be able to go back and review chatter to reorient yourself when you have multiple different projects ongoing. Using chatter on accounts and opportunities to work collaboratively is also super efficient and effective.
Grant: Salesforce offers an underutilized feature for currency and number fields: typing k after the number will make it thousand. 12k = 12,000. Also works for m and b!
Kelly: @Shawn and I were just saying we’re so glad Salesforce finally made it possible to pin the list view you want, rather than always landing on Recently Viewed. It’s pretty great. We’ve both saved a lot of time because of it already. It’s a new feature with the Spring 19 release.
Shawn: The ability to conditionally render lightning components configurationally! (Next I need to be able to conditionally render specific fields Salesforce!) 🙂
Sara: I love the “Celebrate Success!” app. One day I was wishing out loud for a celebration when I was marking an opportunity as Closed Won. A quick search later and this amazing app makes it way more fun. Now we share it with all of our customers as well! 🥳🎉
Kim: It’s really fun to hear when that goes off! I’m a big fan of customizing Global Actions to match a company’s business process (vs. sticking to the out of the box actions). Saves our customers a lot of time and confusion as they can quickly create commonly used records from anywhere within Salesforce. It doesn’t come with a confetti celebration, but maybe it should…
Stephen: Mine is the Declarative Lookup Rollup Summary — long name, incredibly powerful tool. Lets you roll up data from children objects using a Lookup relationship instead of a Master Detail relationship. We save countless dev hours using this click-based tool.
Note: Internally, we use this to track key process metrics like last Weekly Email Updates and time spent to date.
Chad: SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language). This SQL-like tool allows you to find and manipulate data from the backend. Of course it would be my fave. 😛
Honorable Mentions
Kim: Conga for beautiful document merge.
Stephen: FieldTrip for finding unused fields and cleaning up your org.
Holly: Mass Action Scheduler for scheduling actions from reports.
Grant: Flows are quite powerful. You can do almost everything you can do with code but using clicks instead.
Shawn: Trailhead! Gamified learning that allows you to grow your Salesforce skills.
Alex: Cirrus for tracking emails and scheduling meetings. You can send out your availability and let someone pick a time that works best for them.
Grant: Salesforce Inspector for viewing all data related to a record or all of a records relationships to other records. Also, a quick and easy place to run queries.
Curious about how any of these could help your business reach the next level? We’re only an email away and happy to help you navigate the nuts and bolts of your Salesforce org.