Five Salesforce features that enable offsite collaboration

Salesforce is an industry-leading CRM tool with a two-decade track record of helping businesses manage customer relationships and facilitate sales.

With its robust functionality and wide appeal, the platform contains a wealth of features, many of which are underutilized by businesses who deploy the platform.

ForceIQ, a Salesforce experience company, works with hundreds of Salesforce customers, only 15% of whom  they believe really maximizes the full set of features that Salesforce has to offer.

To address this usage gap, ForceIQ developed a comprehensive guide featuring over a dozen ways that companies can leverage their Salesforce account by taking a deeper dive into some of the lesser known features of the platform.

In this post, we’ll highlight several features addressed in the eBook which are specifically tailored to off site sales collaboration for distributed teams.

You can download the guide, 14 Ways to Get More Out of Your Salesforce Account, from here.

Content produced in partnership with ForceIQ.

Workflow automation in Salesforce saves time

Source: ForceIQ

With so many people working from home these days due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to save time and improve efficiency is important, particularly when you consider that working parents and caregivers must now figure out how to get their work done while also caring for their families.

Luckily, Salesforce has built in automation features that can help reduce repetitive administrative tasks and activities which take up valuable (and limited) time.

Functionalities including workflow rules, visual flows, and lighting process builders give sales reps more time to sell. Each of these features are covered in ForceIQ’s eBook and are worth spending time setting up (you must spend time to save time).

Connectivity and custom dashboards in Salesforce

Salesforce has two powerful connectivity tools built in which can help your sales and marketing teams streamline their workflow and save time.

The first, Sales Cloud, enables users to connect a variety of tools and data into a single, streamlined dashboard that can be accessed via one login (as opposed to switching between multiple tools).

The single-dashboard feature enables the aggregation of data in one central place, providing at-a-glance insights from multiple sources that is not only a huge time saver, but helps users to analyze and act on their data much more quickly.

Another helpful connectivity feature inherent in Salesforce is AppExchange—a secure API function that facilitates integration with a variety of business apps.

Per Salesforce, “The AppExchange is a complete marketplace offering cloud-computing applications and consulting services.”

Sample of apps available in the AppExchange marketplace

The eBook goes into more detail about how each feature works including how to get started using them.

User management and permissions

For Salesforce administrators managing distributed teams, the user management and permissions features are critical to ensuring that team members have access to what they need so the day-to-day business of managing the sales pipeline can continue.

This is even more true now, during a time when so many of us are working from home.

Advanced user management features in Salesforce include Permission Set Groups which enable administrators to apply distinct sets of permissions to a specific group of employees (or multiple groups).

This feature also helps expedite any changes or updates which are applied to your established groups (e.g., rather than making the updates on an individual basis).

Salesforce also enables administrators to grant access or permissions to individuals via the View and Manage Users feature.

Internal communication via Salesforce

Consistent ongoing communication is an integral component to any sales and marketing effort, but during a time when everyone is working remotely, it’s nothing short of imperative.

To this end, Salesforce comes with a tool called Chatter, which is a type of built-in social network that allows users to share insights, files, and data across the entire organization.

Chatter is free to use and is an excellent way to drive productivity and foster collaboration for distributed teams.

Example of the Chatter interface

Customer communication

Maintaining customer relationships is an obvious and important component to keeping your business running smoothly (now, more than ever).

CRM is what Salesforce was built for and, to this end, there are many powerful features that can help businesses manage consumer facing and outreach from afar.

Two underutilized features highlighted in ForceIQ’s eBook include OneSpan Sign (previously “eSignLive”) a function that makes it a breeze for customers to send and sign documents without needing to rely on technical staff or IT expertise.

The tool is available in the AppExchange marketplace as an easy add-in.

Another little-known feature, the Customer Experience Integration Solution, is designed to help users improve customer communication across multiple touchpoints.

This feature combines three Salesforce functions—Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Einstein features to help users build consistent customer experiences that are intelligent and sustainable.

Salesforce Email Studio interface

Additional tools on Salesforce to explore

In addition to the five features listed above, ForceIQ’s eBook covers eight more underutilized features, for a total of fourteen tools which are all designed to improve communication, facilitate workflow, and keep your team organized.

From enhanced security, to data validation to learning & development, exploring and deploying these advanced features can help facilitate offsite collaboration and enable productivity.

ForceIQ’s eBook contains a total of fourteen strategies that businesses can leverage to get the most from their instance of Salesforce. You can download the free eBook from here.