Sales Cloud has awesome features for you to use in your org. Preparing for my Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant exam has made me reflect on these. As a result, I’ve highlighted favourite Lightning Sales Cloud features. Additionally, I will outline how these are setup and used in subsequent posts.
Path
Ever found yourself wanting to guide your team through a process? How about highlighting key fields? If so, Path is the tool for you!
Path allows you to highlight where your users are within a process, in relation to steps within a picklist field. For example, the ‘Stage’ field on the Opportunity or ‘Status’ on a Lead. For each step, you can:
- List 5 fields you want to highlight for a stage in a process
- Provide your team pointers on how to succeed, known as ‘Guidance for Success’; up to 1000 characters
- Where appropriate, display confetti on-screen to celebrate your team’s success!
Path can be used in many Sales Cloud Lightning objects, such as: Accounts, Contacts, Contracts, Campaigns, Opportunities, Leads, Orders, Quotes and Custom Objects. For a full list of supported objects, click here.
In conclusion, Path can help your Sales Cloud implementation by promoting team learning and best practices, ensuring consistency
List Views
List Views help with sorting and organising records; even permitting mass editing of records! Lightning supercharges their usefulness. My personal favourites from a sales context include:
- Kanban views: Allow your team ‘drag-and-drop’ records between different steps. You can also summarise data by grouping. In the example below, I am summarising the Opportunity ‘Amount’ by Opportunity Stages.
- Charts: Allow your users to get an ‘at-a-glance’ view of their Opportunities with Charts within List Views.
- Pin a List View: ‘pin’ a view to set this to your default.
- Clip/Wrap Text: Want to see all of the words within a text field? Use ‘Wrap text’ to display more, or ‘Clip’ text to keep content to a minimum
- Search and ‘Infinite scroll’: Scroll through all of your List View results. In addition, you can ‘search’ records within a List View
Account Hierarchy
Account Hierarchy is a key staple of Salesforce Classic. This allows you to define relationships between Account records. Say you wanted to track interactions with a large company with multiple offices. You would want to know how each office or branch relates to others. For this, the Hierarchy provides an easy to understand visual output for your team:
Account Hierarchy is of course, #BetterInLightning. Key benefits include:
- Display up to 2000 Accounts in the hierarchy relative to the ‘current’ Account being viewed (up from 500 in Classic!)
- In Lightning, you have control over what fields are displayed within the Account Hierarchy
Whilst Account Hierarchy is a simple feature, it is very helpful for gaining perspective on a client’s business.
Activity Timeline
Activity Timeline provides a consolidated view of Tasks, Events, Emails for a specific record. This allows you to easily see interactions, both in the past and upcoming or overdue items. Moreover, with various filters, you can easily drill-down onto the information which is important to you:
Pages & Lightning Apps
Last, but far from least, Sales Cloud Lightning provides a much more modern user experience. This topic is a whole blog-post in itself, so will not be covered much in this post. However, providing a user-friendly interface (e.g. Opportunity and Lead Workspaces), empowers sales users to work more efficiently. This allows them to do more and focus on the needs of the customer. This, coupled with Lightning Console apps and functionality such as macros, can turbocharge productivity.
Summary
This post provides a high-level summary of several key features which are helpful in Sales Cloud Lightning. This is far from an exhaustive list and the features listed are also relevant to other Salesforce Clouds. In following posts, I shall explore how these can be used in Lightning to help users get the best out of Lightning, in a sales setting.