So over the past 5 years of administrating and developing in Salesforce.com, I’ve used various tools, some better than others. Here is a short list of some of my favorite tools and apps that I use on a daily basis.
There isn’t a work day (or night) that I do not open this program. Need to mass update an object from a file, make a large number of record edits, bounce a list off your Salesforce.com records? This tool does all this and so much more. This is the tool that if I had to keep just one tool this would be it. It’s a must have.
One of the biggest down sides to this tool is that its a Windows only application. This has lead me down the path of finding a tool of equal power that will work on Macs or Linux also. I’ve recently started a trial of Taralex’s Enabler for Excel. It looks promising. I’ll update after my evaluation has concluded.
If you have a Salesforce.com org that has been around for any length of time, you likely have created fields that are not being used. Field Trips helps identify those fields in an easy tool that looks at field type, installed package, and utilization percentage.
Need an easy way to decide which leads to work first? Score the lead off the data you have in Salesforce.com and come up with a scoring system to let your sales representatives know which leads need attention first. We’ve most moved away from this app as our e-marketing tool (Eloqua) now does all the scoring and all our leads enter Eloqua first. But if you do not have an e-marketing tool that can do this or if your leads go into Salesforce.com first, then this is an easy tool to deploy, and makes your sales team happy to know which leads are more likely to convert.
Another must have tool. This tool is super cheap, but very powerful. This allows you to generate forms that can push data into any object. So if you do not want all forms to come in as leads, this is a great tool to use. Simple to use and integration, which makes it so awesome!
I’ve used this with workflow rules to create reminders on collecting lead follow ups with partners, Marketing Development Fund submissions and approvals, to surveys for customer satisfactions.
If your sales team doesnt work on territories, you need an easy was to route leads. This simple tool uses queues and triggers to route leads to your sales reps. You have two places to enable a user to be eligible for round robin, on the user record and in the queue. Why two places? As an admin you want to control could can be assigned round robin, but you do not want to be in charge of daily adding and removing someone from the queue, that is the manager’s job.
There are several other e-sign tools out there, but EchoSign is one of the oldest that is integrated with Salesforce.com. The price per user is very reasonable, and they are constantly improving the product. If you are not using a e-sign tool for your contract process, it’s a must. We reduced average contract signatures from over a week to within hours. Having the knowledge if someone has looked at the contract and who needs to sign it next is also worth its weight in gold.
More apps to come, but these are some of my favorites.
Sd
Pundit BI 