It’s not an exaggeration to say that the backbone of Salesforce’s success is the extensive set of features it provides to users. They touch every corner of a business’s CRM, data, and development needs through an array of products. Familiarizing yourself with at least the core features offered across the platform is necessary for anyone aiming for a future as a Salesforce admin. Coming from our last tutorial on Salesforce service offerings, there’s no better time than now to introduce you to ten indispensable Salesforce features.
Contact management
Contact management is at the heart of all the features Salesforce offers to users. It’s the first phase a Salesforce admin would have to cross when building a 360o view of customers. You can use it to store every bit of information about a customer that passes through the business, such as their purchase histories, support inquiries, feedback messages, and marketing campaign engagements.
Salesforce allows you to share the contact list across the company through cloud offerings like Sales and Marketing Cloud. It gets rid of redundant contact recording processes and paves the way for smoother communication among different departments.
Opportunity management
Opportunity management is one of the key features of the Sales Cloud. It enables you to view a timeline of significant customer activities. With that knowledge, you can easily identify your competition and the ongoing status of your deals and accordingly plan your next steps.
Another aspect of Salesforce’s opportunity management capabilities is monitoring real-time product information. In addition to retrieving product quantities, quotes, and standard prices, it gives you the luxury of automatically generating quotes and directly emailing them to customers with only a few clicks.
Lead management
Another key feature offered by the Sales Cloud is lead management. It provides access to up-to-date lead information on a single activity timeline. It simplifies the process of drawing insights from interactions with leads to drive a concerted effort to increase your conversion rates. When it comes to streamlining customer interactions, the platform has special support for automatically scoring and routing leads to the right people in your team.
Additionally, you can track your marketing campaigns across all channels, including email and social media, to understand what’s working and what’s not for making better decisions in the future.
Einstein AI
Salesforce Einstein gives artificial intelligence capabilities to many Salesforce products. Through predictive analysis, pattern recognition, natural language processing, and many other AI techniques, Einstein help you make smarter decisions with the data you own.
For example, marketing teams can develop personalized experiences for targeted users, sales teams can discover hidden opportunities, and service teams can proactively resolve cases through the AI features integrated into Salesforce products.
Lightning app builder
Lightning app builder, as the name suggests, lets you build mobile apps or Salesforce Lightning pages with point-and-click components. You can rebrand pages, update available options, change page layouts, or rearrange navigation in a matter of a few clicks with the assistance of this feature.
Whether you have experience with the technical side of app development or not, the Lightning interface makes it incredibly easy for anyone to use its components to modify an app without any hassle. While the app builder comes with a set of standard components, it allows the use of custom-built or third-party components (obtained from AppExchange) when you want to further extend the functionality.
Reports and dashboards
Salesforce reports and dashboards provide tools to generate charts and reports for analyzing your data. Creating an entire dashboard or comprehensive report is as simple as defining drag-and-drop fields, groupings, filters, or charts as you want to add.
Salesforce reports are often the go-to choice of admins for forecasting and analyzing business processes. Included with its toolset are highly customizable filters that let you choose which records to display in a report. You can filter out customer or other related information by conditions like region, age groups, or latest activities to better understand particular behavioral patterns.
Access control
Controlling who can access various information stored on Salesforce is essential for building a secure and trusted CRM system. To ensure the implementation of such security measures, Salesforce equips admins with three invaluable access control mechanisms. They are Profiles, Roles, and Permission Sets.
- Profiles: Define what different users can do. Using this feature, you can control who can create, read, edit, and delete information.
- Roles: Define what different users can see. You can set the visibility of confidential, critical data to private while making sharable data public with it.
- Permission Sets: Grant specific permissions to users with more flexibility than Profiles or Roles.
Knowing how to combine the functionalities of these three security features, you can give your system maximum protection against privacy breaches, data leaks, and misuses.
Email integration
Salesforce provides several email integration options to synchronize your data with Gmail/Outlook services. With Lightning for Outlook and Gmail tools, you can automatically relate emails to contacts, opportunities, events, or other relevant objects. These tools also support email tracking and scheduling during marketing campaigns and beyond to ensure you have access to a complete view of each customer when interacting with them. What’s more interesting is how email integration tools allow you to save templates and quickly populate and reuse them for specific use cases as you need.
Document management
Salesforce document management system supports creating files of different types, sharing them with team members, and collaboratively editing them. It can also track the document version history and comments from team members to ensure a better-shared experience. The system synchronizes document changes in real-time and sends notifications when other members upload new versions. Finding a stored file is as simple as using Salesforce’s Global Search Tool with relevant filters such as group, library, time, etc.
Data Loader
Salesforce Data Loader is a tool used to import or export bulks of data. You can insert, update, or delete a large number of Salesforce records (up to 5 million) at once using this tool. In situations you want to create records for data imported from an external database or export your Salesforce data to a third-party system, Data Loader can be invaluable for admins and developers to carry out these actions without hassle. Depending on your preference, you can either use Data Loader’s intuitive user interface or command line for your work.
What’s next?
The latest installment of our Salesforce tutorial series on key Salesforce features concludes with that. In the next part of the tutorial series, we expect to introduce you to different Salesforce editions available to users and give you an understanding of how to choose the best edition that fits your needs.
If our Salesforce tutorial series ignited your need to become a Salesforce professional, follow up on our Salesforce training program to learn the ins and outs of Salesforce products and the certification process.