Our Favorite Things about Salesforce

I have the awesome privilege of being a co-leader of the Salesforce Nonprofit User Group in Bellingham, WA. At our December meeting, we hosted a round-table discussion to talk about some of our "Favorite Things" about Salesforce. Each person took a turn sharing a feature they love, a lesson learned, an "Aha!" moment they experienced, or an "I wish I knew this sooner" tip, trick, or skill. And we had so much good discussion come out of it!

To maintain a safe space for nonprofit folks to share openly, our meetings are not recorded. But there were so many things that might be of benefit to you, too. So here's the list that I crowd-sourced at that meeting, and some others that my colleagues shared as well:

1. DASHBOARDS!
2. Making sure they're useful for your users (replacing the ineffective and slow ways they're slogging through their reporting now).
3. Leading with them when onboarding new users - because once they see the power of what they can get out of it, they get excited about Salesforce and understand the value in using it.
4. Adding Dashboard Filters to make slicing and dicing the data quick and easy for your users.
5. Adding Dashboards to your users' Home Tab that gives them the day-to-day snapshots they need, and helps them know where to focus their energy next.
6. Using Component Visibility to customize the home tab for different users.
7. Dynamic Forms & Components on Lightning Pages - customizing your user experience to better meet your users' needs, putting fields and components right where they need them.
8. While building Reports/List Views: Open an example record of what you hope will appear in it, and then build your report/list view while referencing that record so that you can easily see the fields you want to include, filter on, etc.
9. Create/Modify Custom Report Types and ensure the fields you want available to your users for reporting are curated for your organization's needs.
10. Customize the Salesforce Calendar to visualize when things are happening in your organization (great for campaigns, deliverables, programs, seasons, events, etc.).
11. Salesforce for Gmail (or Outlook) - I did an earlier blog post on this one, check it out.
12. Customize the Help Menu - Put your documentation there. And then keep it updated! This can be such a great point of reference for any of your Salesforce users, as well as future developers or admins to better understand how your system works.
13. Salesforce Inspector browser plugin - For System Administrators, this is incredibly helpful for troubleshooting and quickly viewing all values on a record without having to run reports or change page layouts.
14. Xappex G-Connector - a 3rd party tool that allows you to pull reports directly into Google Sheets, and also be able to upsert small changes back into Salesforce right from your spreadsheet. This can be especially useful when you have someone who's not a Salesforce user (like a board member) that you want input from. They have connectors for Google Sheets and Excel. Be sure to ask about their nonprofit discounts.
15. Join a local user group! Are you part of a Trailblazer Community Group in your area? You should be. We highly recommend it for connecting with other local organizations using Salesforce, sharing best practices, and learning new skills together. Use this link to find a Trailblazer Community Group meeting near you.

What are some of your favorite things?

Let us know if you'd like to learn more about how Percolator can help you implement any of these ideas, or any of the other great features Salesforce can offer.