My Favorite Lesser-Known Salesforce Features

There are so many features in Salesforce, it’s easy to miss some of the simplest (and most effective) tools provided out of the box. Whether you only have Sales Cloud or every add-on imaginable, the following features can assist in making Salesforce the most effective platform for your users.

Favorites

You probably noticed the little star in the top right corner of your screen every day and completely ignore it. I did too for the longest time, but one day I tapped the star, and realized, my Salesforce workflow can be so much easier. Essentially, it’s a bookmark button for absolutely anything in Salesforce. You’re working on a specific Opportunity, favorite it. You always use a specific List View, favorite it. This overlooked feature can you help keep you accountable, so you don’t forget what’s most important to your workday.

In-Line Editing Reports

Being able to edit reports in line is a GAME CHANGER. Yes, you can already do this with List Views, but being able to create a custom report and edit rows of data (line by line or in BULK) gives you the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the customization of Salesforce. All you need to do is go to Report and Dashboard settings in Setup and check Enable Inline Editing in Reports, and your life will become one million times easier.

Setup Audit Trail

As an admin or consultant, it is so easy to build features in a sandbox and then forget what you built when you need to deploy them to a live environment. Or you work with a team, flows start erroring, validation rules start misfiring, and you have no idea what was changed. By going to Setup and then Setup Audit Trail, you can easily download actions that have happened within the last 6 months and investigate what happened. Yes, you might have to comb through many changes, but it’s a great way to understand the ever-changing story of a Salesforce org.

Dynamic Lightning Pages

This might be an obvious one, but dynamic lightning pages is an incredibly powerful tool to enhance the user experience. This allows you to place filters on almost any component on a Lightning Page so that only specific users can see it, or the component only appears depending on the field values on the record. All you need to do is go to Lightning Pages or go to a record, click the cog wheel, and choose Edit Page. Then when you hover over a component, you can place a Filter.

There are so many use cases here that can help enhance the Salesforce experience, but there are a few that are specifically helpful with my clients:

To enhance onboarding, place a Rich Text component with detailed instructions for new users can increase adoption and efficiency for new users.

To provide guidance, customize a related record and filter it to appear during specific stages on a record can enforce users to follow a specific process, a la’ lightning screen flow but even more simple.

To mitigate mistakes, at the end of a process, hide specific actions, related lists, or other components, so that processes can have an official end and no mistakes can be made.

There are hundreds of useful features in Salesforce, but just mastering a few and incorporating them into your daily workflow can increase adoption, efficiency, and basic ease-of-use.

Photo by cottonbro studio