Salesforce is a continually growing platform, and the users need to understand all new opportunities, which would further make their tasks easier and more effective. For example, it is important to know the functionality of Kanban view for exploring opportunities and also managing the contacts and accounts in the Lightning Experience.
Salesforce follows an action-first workspace philosophy, and the features are custom-designed to help the sales reps to work smarter and faster. It is easy to customize the coaching scripts for every step in sales processes and create trackers in fewer clicks to close the deals faster. Let’s dig down in a bit more detail.
Exploring Opportunity Workspace
In the latest version of Salesforce, Opportunities have gotten better. On visiting an opportunity record with Lightning Experience, one can see several new enhancements that will help the salespersons to reap the best results from the given opportunities.
Here’s an overview as to how users can tap benefits of opportunity workspace:
- You can create and update the meetings, tasks log calls, as well as send emails.
- You can view the critical information for any deal like the key players, key accounts, value of sales, close date, lead owner, and stage of sales, etc.
- Users can not only view but also update the opportunity stages, close date, and amount, etc.
- You may view members or add members to the opportunity team or remove the entire team. One can also include partner users to the team.
- You can view the timely and most relevant news about various live accounts to which the opportunity is related to.
Admins need not have to do anything special to get an opportunity workspace run for the users. On the other hand, as an admin, one should try and enhance the sales user workflow by customizing their sales path and activity timeline based on their needs. If the organization follows a team selling methodology, then it is possible to split opportunity revenue by exploring the opportunity splits in the Lightning Experience.
Path – Paths will help guide the sales users through every stage of the company’s sales process. Paths will also help the users to stay be more focused on the essential tasks to close the sales deals quickly.
Sales Path – You may enter Path Settings at the Setup by going to Quick Find box and choose the Path Settings option from the listing. As done by Flosum.com experts, it is easy to create a unique path for every record and leads, quotes, opportunities, as well as custom objects.
Best practices for Path
- You need to guide the success content like links to the videos and Chatter posts, policy reminders, tips, etc. which will help the salespeople to seal the deal.
- Keep the system performance optimized by creating user-friendly sales paths with a maximum of 20 stages.
- Consider labeling the sales paths for various industries and regions.
- On setting up the record types, set one patch each for each per record type. Say, for example, if the record type is New Business, then include fields which are prospecting related, but for the record type of Existing Customer, may include stage or field of renewals.
Activity Timeline
Using the Activity Timeline, sales representatives could always keep their fingers on the right pulse of the sales deals. The activity timeline will help track the meetings, calls, tasks, and also emails. Sales reps can see their activities as well as what is left for them to do for each opportunity account, lead, and contacts — considering the following things while working on Activity Timeline.
- Page layout configuration and the record types may affect the activity composer tabs.
- If you don’t see the tasks, calls, events, and email tabs in activity composer, then readjust the page layouts, user permissions, and record types. Check for Send an Email, New Event, log a Call, and the New Task Buttons and add them to Activity Composer.
- The activity timeline could be used to replace Open Activities and also the lists related to Activity History.
- Users can also choose between the activity timeline as well as activity listings, which are similar in the case of Salesforce Classic too. The users can easily switch between the options as and when they want.
- The users can also customize the order of fields at Activity Timeline, which will be displayed while expanding the activity for tasks, events, as well as logged calls. This customization can be done using the task and event layouts in a compact way.
Even if you remove fields from the compact layout, those will remain in the activity timeline as they contain some activity information. Say, for example, if you remove the due date for sale, including the date and time or the task status from the layout, the start date and time as well as the task checkbox, due date, and call log dates will still appear on the timeline. The description field and the comments field for tasks will always be there on the timeline, even though they are not available in the layout.
Other visible fields in the timeline reflect those which you include in the compact layout. On the other hand, the icons of the activity timeline are not customizable. Various icons for tasks, events, calls, mail, etc. shown on the timeline cannot be customized.
Kanban View
Kanban view is a customized visual representation of all Opportunities related to the deals of a sales rep, organized based on each stage in the pipeline. You can also get Kanban view by choosing Kanban from the Displays menu on list views.
With this, users can easily manage their opportunities at various stages through the pipeline and simply drag and drop opportunities from one field to another. The yellow triangle on each opportunity card may indicate the alerts like:
- overdue tasks
- no open activities or
- no activities in the last 30 days.
Users may click on this triangle to create events and tasks right from the opportunity card. The items available on the board may vary based on which list view is open.
Similarly, there are much more advanced featured added by Salesforce in its latest version, which we will be further discussing in this article series.