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IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing Salesforce terminology

Logging in to the site

Getting to know about home pages

Understanding the Lightning Experience

If an application isn’t easy to use, you won’t use it. Period. Salesforce succeeds not only because it offers a universe of integrated tools but also because users can pick it up within minutes. You navigate Salesforce much the same way you do other websites: by clicking text links and buttons.

Still, you have so many ways to navigate Salesforce that it makes sense to lay down the obvious (and not-so-obvious) best practices for getting around the application.

Even if you’re familiar with Salesforce, you may want to scan this chapter because we cover terms that we use repeatedly throughout this book.

In this chapter, you can find out how to log in to Salesforce and use the home page to manage your activities, create records, and jump to other tabs. We briefly review the major functional areas and describe how to use the internal home pages. Finally, we introduce you to the optional Lightning Experience that ushers in a dramatically different look and feel for end-users.

Getting Familiar with Basic Salesforce Terms

Before we delve into the mechanics of navigating Salesforce, familiarize yourself with these basic terms:

❯❯ Salesforce: The secure website that your users log in to that contains your customer information. Salesforce.com, Inc., offers a family of products used by hundreds of thousands of customers, but each company’s secure website is separate from the other websites and may look different in order to suit that company’s unique needs. When we use the terms Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud, those are parts of Salesforce specifically meant for use by sales and marketing or by a support organization.

❯❯ Home tab: The main page that appears when you log in to Salesforce or click the Home tab.

❯❯ Tabs: Clickable words appear in a row across the top of any Salesforce page. When selected, a word is highlighted and looks like a tab. Each tab represents a major module in which your company needs to know some information. By clicking a tab, you go to a tab-specific home page. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears.

❯❯ Tab home pages: These are the pages where you go to find, organize, and manage specific information related to a particular tab. For example, to access your opportunity records, you could go to the Opportunities home page.

❯❯ Object: Often used interchangeably with the name of a tab. Generally used by administrators when talking about creating custom apps. For example, you may tell a user to “click the Account tab,” or you may hear your system administrator refer to the “Account object.”

❯❯ Apps: Tabs that have been grouped together and given a name, providing you with the convenience of seeing only those tabs most relevant to you.

❯❯ Record: A record is a page in Salesforce made up of a bunch of fields that hold information to describe a specific object. For example, a contact record typically contains fields pertinent to a person, including name, title, phone number, and email address. A record is displayed on a detail page.

❯❯ Detail page: A web page that shows both the saved record and a set of related lists pertinent to the record.

❯❯ Chatter feed: If you have Chatter enabled (see Chapter 6), you’ll see the center column of your logged-in Salesforce experience with a chronological list of updates made by you or other co-workers. This feed is a critical way for Salesforce users within your organization to communicate with each other.

❯❯ Search bar: In the upper-left portion of your Salesforce page, a search field resides as another way you can quickly find companies or contacts. Search results returned can be customized to return only a certain type of record.

We often use the terms record and detail page interchangeably. From a detail page, you can perform and track a variety of tasks related to the specific record. For example, if you have and are looking at an Account detail page for Cisco, you see fields about the company and lists of other records related to Cisco.

❯❯ Related lists: Lists that comprise other records linked to the record that you’re looking at. For example, the Account detail page for Acme may display related lists of contacts, opportunities, activities, and so on associated with that company.

❯❯ Sidebar: Located at the left margin of a Salesforce page, the sidebar displays messages and alerts, custom links, recent items, and a drop-down list that you can use to create new records.

Accessing Salesforce

You need to log in to your account to access your company’s instance of Salesforce because every company’s Salesforce website is different, and Salesforce.com goes to great lengths to protect your company’s information.

Setting up a password

The first time you log in to the Salesforce service, you’ll do so from an email you receive containing your Salesforce login information. To set your password, follow these steps:

1. Open the email and click the link provided.

A page appears, prompting you to set a new password and security question.

2. Complete the fields.

Be sure to select a question and provide an answer that can verify your identity if you forget your password. Use this password from now on unless your administrator resets the password.

3. When you’re done, click Save.

The Salesforce home page appears.

Logging in

You log in to Salesforce just as you would any other secure website.

To log in, open a browser and follow these steps:

1. In your browser’s address bar, type https://login.salesforce.com and then press Enter.

The Salesforce.com login page, shown in Figure 3-1, appears.

To save yourself steps when logging in, bookmark the login page in your favorite web browser.

2. Enter your username and password, and then click the Log In button.

Your username is typically your corporate email address. Click the Remember Me check box if you want your computer to remember it. After you click Log In, you may be asked to register your mobile phone. This is an additional, optional security step. After this step, your main home page appears.

FIGURE 3-1: 1 Logging in to Salesforce.

For security purposes, Salesforce notices when you’re trying to log in to the website from a different computer or a different browser than the one you first used. If this happens, make sure that you have access to your email or mobile phone (remember when Salesforce asked you to register your mobile phone number?) because Salesforce emails or text messages you a confirmation code to confirm that you are who you say you are.

Navigating the Home Page

Every time you log in to Salesforce, you begin at your home page. The look and feel of the elements on your home page are similar to other users’ home pages, but the tasks and events that appear in the body of the page are specific to you.

Use the home page to manage your calendar and tasks, stay informed of the latest Chatter conversations, jump to other areas by clicking tabs, or access recent items by using the sidebar. If your company has customized the home page, you may also see key charts or graphs from your company’s dashboards (visual snapshots of key performance metrics based on your custom report data).

Finding records with Search

At the top of every Salesforce page, you’ll find the Global Search bar. You can find a majority of the information that you want by using Search. To search for information, follow these steps:

1. At the top of Salesforce, enter keywords into the Search field and then click the Search button.

A Search Results page appears, as shown in Figure 3-2. Salesforce organizes the search results in lists according to the major types of records, including accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities.

2. Scroll down the page. If you find a record that you want to look at, click a link in the Name column for the row that represents that record.

The detail page appears, allowing you to review the record and its related lists.

3. If you see too many results, you can limit them to items you own or search for an exact phrase by clicking Options to the right of the Search Again button on the Search Results page. You can also select a single type of record from the list in the sidebar.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try adding the asterisk (*) wildcard before, after, or in the middle of your keywords to expand your search to words that start with, end with, or are similar to your keywords.

If you’re focusing on a page (such as a list of search results or a report) and want to open one of the results in a new browser tab, instead of clicking the link, right-click that link and choose Open Link in New Tab from the contextual menu that appears.

FIGURE 3-2: Looking at a Search Results page.

Managing your calendar

The calendar section of the home page defaults to a calendar of the current month and your scheduled events for the next seven days. Like other calendar tools, the calendar allows you to drill down. Your scheduled events are based on events that you assigned to yourself or that other users have assigned to you.

From this calendar section (shown in Figure 3-3), you can do the following:

❯❯ Schedule a new activity. Click the New Event button, and a New Event page appears in Edit mode. (See Chapter 5 to see how to complete a new event record.)

❯❯ View an event record. If you see a listed event, click the link. A page appears with details on the activity.

❯❯ Drill into your schedule. Click a date on the calendar to drill into your schedule for a specific day. The Day View page appears.

❯❯ Schedule a group activity. Click the Multi User View icon (which looks like two little people). A page appears for the selected day that displays the availability of multiple users. From there, click the New Event button and follow the same instructions for scheduling a new event, as described in detail in Chapter 5.

FIGURE 3-3: Looking over your calendar options.

Tracking your tasks

On the home page, you see a section entitled My Tasks, which displays tasks that you created for yourself or that have been assigned to you.

A task is an activity that you need to do, and it can have a due date. Unlike an event, however, a task doesn’t have a specific time and duration. For example, if you want to remind yourself to send a proposal, you typically create a task instead of scheduling an event. (See Chapter 5 for additional tips on managing tasks.)

From the My Tasks section (shown in Figure 3-4), you can do the following:

❯❯ Add a new task. Click the New button, and a New Task page appears in Edit mode.

❯❯ Change task view. Use the drop-down list at the top right of the My Tasks section to select from a list of common task views. For example, select Overdue to see your open tasks that are past their respective due dates.

❯❯ Review a task. Click a link in the Subject column to review a task. A task record appears with details.

❯❯ Go to associated records. Click links in the Name column, the Related To column, or the Account column.

❯❯ Complete the task and enter any details before saving. Click the X link in the Complete column. You can also use this link to update a task, but if you haven’t completed the task, remember to adjust the Status field before you save it.

❯❯ See more tasks. If you have several tasks in your list, the View More link appears at the bottom of the My Tasks section on the home page. Click it to see more tasks on the list. The Day View appears, and the My Tasks section appears in the right column.

FIGURE 3-4: Reviewing the My Tasks section on the home page.

Using dashboard snapshots from the home page

If your company has customized your home page, you may also see and select up to three key charts or tables from your dashboards. Dashboards display important information from reports in Salesforce that can provide key performance indicators on the health of your business. Each dashboard chart or table is composed of at least one component. (See Chapter 24 for details on building dashboards that can measure and analyze your business.) As of this writing, dashboards are available in the Group, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions.

If you see a chart or table on your home page, you can also perform these actions from the Dashboard section:

❯❯ Click a chart or table to drill into the detail. A report page appears with the data that supports the graphic.

❯❯ Choose a different dashboard. Click the Customize Page button at the upper right of the section. The Customize Your Home Page page appears; here, you can select from available dashboards if you have the proper administrator permissions. Your home page displays a snapshot of only the three components along the top of any dashboard.

❯❯ Refresh the dashboard snapshot. Click the Refresh button at the top of the section. In the left of the section, a date and timestamp appear showing when your dashboard was last refreshed.

Accessing information with the sidebar

The sidebar is the column on the left that appears on just about every page of Salesforce except for dashboards and reports. On the home page, use the sidebar to quickly go back to pages you recently accessed, stay informed about important company messages, click links to useful websites, and create new records.

Creating new records

Use the compact Create New picklist on the sidebar to quickly create any new record.

Revisiting recent items

The Recent Items section displays up to ten records that you most recently clicked. Use the list to quickly get back to records that you’ve been working on, even if you logged out and logged back in. The recent items show an icon and the name or number of the record. These items include mostly the records that are organized under a tab heading, such as Accounts, Contacts, and so on. To visit the detail record of a recent item, simply click a listed link.

Getting more out of your home page sidebar

With the help of your administrator, you can offer other tools and information from the sidebar on the home page to improve productivity and drive overall adoption. Review the following tips, see Chapter 17 on customizing Salesforce, and consult with your administrator if Custom Components could help your organization:

❯❯ Display company messages. Your administrator can add a section to the home page that displays text to keep users informed of important announcements. For example, if you’re in sales management, you may want to use the home page to alert reps to end-of-quarter goals or bonus incentives.

❯❯ Emphasize important custom links. If you rely on other websites to carry out part of your work, your administrator can help you post them for all your users or just ones that fit certain profiles. For example, if you have a company intranet, your company can add a custom component that is a link to that internal website, and insert it on the Salesforce home page.

If you’d rather not have the sidebar take up some of your browser window’s horizontal real estate, Salesforce allows you to hide and expand the sidebar when you want. Your administrator can set up this option by choosing Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize ⇒ User Interface and clicking the Enable Collapsible Sidebar check box.

Navigating the Apps

Salesforce allows you to organize tabs into groups. These groups, also known as apps, help reduce screen clutter and give you quicker access to the tabs that you use the most. For example, a marketing manager may rarely use the Cases or Opportunities tabs but spend most of her time looking at Campaigns and Leads.

With the Salesforce.com Force.com platform, your company can now create custom apps for more specific uses within customer relationship management (CRM) – or for anything else, for that matter. Sales reps can use an expense reporting app, and product managers can use a product release app to manage their product requirements. The mind-blowing part of all of this is that apps can be composed of standard tabs or custom ones that you create. Anyone in your company can benefit from sharing one set of data. And don’t worry if you’re not the most creative type. Salesforce.com has a bunch of prebuilt apps available (for free or for an additional charge), which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 19.

Discovering the app menu

In the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page, you can find the app menu (see Figure 3-5). The drop-down list allows you to switch between apps. You find some standard tab groupings, such as Sales and Call Center. Administrators can also add or create new apps to address what their specific users need to see. Don’t worry if you choose an app and see new tabs. You can always go back to the drop-down list, select your previous app, and have your familiar tabs return.

FIGURE 3-5: Choosing apps by using the Force.com app menu.

Uncovering the App Launcher

From the app menu, selecting the App Launcher option takes you to the App Launcher page where all your apps are now displayed as clickable tiles, as shown in Figure 3-6. Clicking a tile is the same as selecting that app in the app menu, as described in the immediately prior section. Depending on what other systems your company has integrated with Salesforce, you may also see installed app icons for other applications used at your company, like Gmail or Concur.

FIGURE 3-6: Viewing apps in the App Launcher.

Finding out about the tabs

In this section, we describe the major tabs in Salesforce and show you how to use the tab home pages to quickly access, manage, or organize information.

Each tab within Salesforce represents a major module or data element in an interconnected database. That’s as technical as we get.

In the following list, we briefly describe each of the standard tabs (as shown in Figure 3-7). We devote a chapter to each of the tabs mentioned here:

❯❯ Chatter (see Chapter 6): Manage all aspects of your collaboration efforts here. From the Chatter home page, you can view all updates to your feed, as well as search for people and groups to follow. If you don’t see this tab, you may not have Chatter enabled in your organization.

❯❯ Campaigns (see Chapter 15): Specific marketing efforts that you manage to drive leads, build a brand, or stimulate demand.

❯❯ Leads (see Chapter 7): Suspects (people and companies with whom you want to do business). But don’t start grilling your lead about where she was on the morning of July 23, because the only clue you’ll gather is the sound of a dial tone.

❯❯ Accounts (see Chapter 8): Companies with whom you currently do or previously did business. You can track all types of accounts, including customers, prospects, former customers, partners, and competitors.

❯❯ Contacts (see Chapter 9): Individuals associated with your accounts.

❯❯ Opportunities (see Chapter 10): The deals that you pursue to track transactions or drive revenue for your company. Your open opportunities constitute your pipeline, and opportunities can contribute to your forecast.

❯❯ Products (see Chapter 11): Your company’s products and services, associated with the prices for which you offer them. You can aggregate different products and their prices to your opportunities.

❯❯ Cases (see Chapter 13): Customer inquiries that your support teams work on to manage and resolve.

❯❯ Content (see Chapter 18): The sales and marketing collateral and documents that you use as part of your selling or service processes.

❯❯ Reports (see Chapter 23): Data analyses for you and your entire organization. Salesforce provides a variety of best practices reports, and you can build custom reports on the fly to better measure your business.

❯❯ Dashboards (see Chapter 24): Graphs, charts, and tables based on your custom reports. You can use dashboards to visually measure and analyze key elements of your business.

FIGURE 3-7: Navigating through the tabs.

Discovering a tab home page

When you click a tab, the tab’s interior home page appears. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears. The tab’s home page is where you can view, organize, track, and maintain all the records within that tab.

Do this right now: Click every tab visible to you.

The look and feel of the interior home pages never change, regardless of which tab you click (except for the Home, Reports, and Dashboards tabs). On the left, you have the sidebar with the Create New drop-down list, Recent Items, and (depending on your company and the tab) a Quick Create tool. In the body of the page, you have a View drop-down list, a Recent Items section related to whichever tab you’re on (for example, Recent Accounts), and sections for popular Reports and Tools (see Figure 3-8).

FIGURE 3-8: Deconstructing the tab home page.

Using the View drop-down list

Strategy and execution are all about focus. With custom list views, you can see and use lists to better focus on your business. A list view is a segment of the tab’s records based on defined criteria. When you select a list view, a list of records appears based on your criteria.

On each tab, Salesforce provides a selection of popular default views to get you started. To try a list view (using Accounts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):

1. Click the Accounts tab.

The Accounts home page appears (refer to Figure 3-8).

2. Select My Accounts from the View drop-down list.

A list page appears that displays a set of columns representing certain standard account fields and a list of your account records. If no account records appear, you don’t own any in Salesforce.

3. From the list page, you can perform a variety of functions:

• Re-sort the list. Click a column header. For example, if you click the Account Name header, the list sorts alphabetically, as shown in Figure 3-9.

• View records beginning with a certain letter. Click that letter link above the list to view those records.

If a user sorts by a column other than name, the letter search looks for values in that column starting with the selected letter. For example, if sorting by State, selecting C filters for accounts with states starting with C rather than account names starting with C.

• Display fewer or more records on the page. Use the Display Records per Page picklist on the bottom left of the page to show more or less records. Additionally, the Next Page link takes you to the next set of records.

• View a specific record. Click the link for that record in the Account Name column. The Account detail page appears, displaying the record and its related lists.

• Update a specific record. Click the Edit link at the beginning of its row. The account record appears in Edit mode.

• Delete a record. Click the Del link near the beginning of that record’s row. A pop-up window appears, prompting you to click OK to accept the deletion. If you click OK, the list page reappears, minus the account that you just wiped out. Don’t worry – in Chapter 5, in the “Resurrecting records from the Recycle Bin” section, we show you how to bring recently deleted records back to life.

• Follow this record. If you have Chatter enabled, you’ll see a green circle with a white plus sign (+) in it to the right of the Del link. Clicking this plus sign changes the green circle to a blue checkmark that signifies that you are now following that record. Any updates, modifications, or discussions made on that record will show up in your Chatter feed so you can stay informed.

FIGURE 3-9: Re-sorting a list.

Building a custom list view

If you have a particular way that you like to look at records, you can build a custom list view. If you have the right permissions, you can share this view with other groups or your entire organization. (Or maybe you should just keep your views to yourself.)

To create a custom list view (using Contacts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):

1. Click the Contacts tab.

The Contacts home page appears.

2. To the right of the View drop-down list, click the Create New View link.

A Create New View page appears.

3. Name the view by typing a title in the View Name field.

For example, if you want to create a list of your contacts that are senior executives, use a title like My Senior Execs.

4. Select whether you want to search All Contacts or just My Contacts by selecting one of the two radio buttons.

In this example, select the My Contacts radio button.

5. Type the campaign name into the Campaign Name field.

For this running example, assume that your marketing manager created campaigns. You may want to tie a campaign to filter your List View after identifying which contacts you want the view to search.

Tying a campaign to your List View filters your results to those contacts related to a specific marketing campaign. You must have the proper permissions in the Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions for this capability.

6. (Optional) Below the Filter by Additional Fields heading, enter search criteria.

A basic criteria query is made up of three elements:

• Field: The leftmost box is a drop-down list of all the fields on the contact record. In this example, choose Title.

• Operator: The middle box is a drop-down list of operators for your search. That sounds complicated, but it’s easier than you think. For this example, select the Contains option.

• Value: In the rightmost box, type the value that you want in the search. In this example, you might type vp, vice president, ceo, cio, or cto.

7. Select the columns that you want to have displayed by selecting a value from the drop-down lists in some or all of the fields provided.

Although Salesforce’s preset views have common fields, such as Phone and Email, you can select any of up to 15 fields to display on your custom view page.

8. Decide whether you want others to see your custom view.

Administrators and certain users have this permission. Your decision is made simple if the step doesn’t appear. Otherwise, select one of the three options. (Basically, the three radio buttons translate to none, all, or selective.) If you choose the third option, use the drop-down list to select a group and then click the arrows to move that group into the Shared To column.

9. Click Save.

A new list view appears based on your custom criteria. If you don’t get all the results that you anticipate, double-check and refine the filter criteria. For example, if your list should include directors but doesn’t, click the Edit link and update the view.

As long as you save your custom list view, you can use it later from the Views menu. To reduce list view clutter, be considerate and lean toward saving list views that are visible only to yourself. Otherwise, you risk flooding your public list view with several similar-but-slightly-different views that aren’t culled over time.

Reviewing the Recent Items section

On a tab’s home page, just below the views, you see a Recent Items section. (The name of the item will match whatever type of record you’re on. For example, Recent Accounts is the section name if you’re on the Accounts tab.) This section comes with three or four relevant columns that you can modify. You can see as few as 10 items and as many as 25 items at a time by clicking the link at the bottom of the table.

To test the Recent Items section (by using Leads as the example), go to the Leads home page and follow these steps (which you can apply to all tabs):

1. In the Recent Leads section, select an option from the drop-down list at the upper-right corner of the table.

The table reappears with changes based on what you select.

2. Click a link in the table to go to a record.

The detail page appears, displaying the record and related lists.

3. At any time, click the New button in the upper middle of the table to create a new lead record.

A New Lead page appears in Edit mode, ready and waiting. (See Chapter 7 to read more about the fields in the Lead record.)

Reviewing common reports

In the lower-left corner of a tab’s home page, Salesforce displays a small selection of commonly used reports associated with that tab. You can click a link to go directly to the report or click the Go to Reports link, which takes you to the Reports home page.

Tooling through the Tools section

In the lower portion of a tab’s home page, Salesforce provides a set of unique tools associated with a particular tab. Depending on which tab you’re viewing, use these tools to help you manage and maintain records within that tab. For example, on the Accounts home page, in the Tools section, you can click the Merge Accounts link to merge duplicate accounts. See the related chapters later in this book for details on using specific tools.

Explaining the Lightning Experience

Late in 2015, Salesforce.com debuted a revamped user experience in Salesforce, called Lightning Experience. It was based on extensive user research and provides a look and feel that better prepares new users for an experience that’s effective across multiple access methods. Salesforce users are no longer just using a computer and web browser to access their company’s version of Salesforce. An increasingly mobile sales force now needs to get its work done while updating Salesforce from a smartphone or tablet, too.

In this section, we discuss how the Lightning Experience affects information in this book, and some fundamental updates in its new interface.

Approaching the Lightning Experience in this book

Thankfully, with the Lightning Experience, Salesforce.com realized that its existing customer base of hundreds of thousands of users needed to feel warm and fuzzy about the new user interface (UI) before choosing to adopt it. Salesforce users will remain on the UI referred to as Salesforce Classic, and have ample ways to test out whether the Lightning Experience is right for their organization before enabling it across the organization.