28 Advanced Salesforce Tips for Admins

When you’re the administrator for your company’s Salesforce system, you know you have a lot to learn. That’s why Salesforce Admin tips are so important to guide you in your journey to continue building your skills to ever more advanced levels. Using these 28 advanced Salesforce Admin tips will help you take your skills to a new level.

Tactical Salesforce Admin Tips

Try these advanced uses of Salesforce capabilities:

1. The Power of One will allow you to easily get a record count that would otherwise be buried in the data. Just create a formula field for every object that contains the number “1” and you can display accurate record counts.
2. Use the Power of One and the free Rollup Helper app to count the number of contacts per account, then create account list views showing only records where the number of contacts is greater than zero.
3. Set up State and Country pick lists to improve accuracy.
4. Add lookup filters to help users with entering data.
5. Make good use of the description fields to help yourself and users.
6. Identify duplicates and implement solutions.
7. Backup weekly!
8. If responsibility for a record is shown in a field other than Owner, use a formula field to compare that field to the logged-in user and create customized “my records” list views.
9. Don’t make users wade through reports that contain irrelevant information. Instead, control page layouts and profile visibility to tailor reports to different users.
10. Save time and frustration by turning on field history tracking for important fields on key objects.
11. Turn on the quick access menu for fast access to customization features.
12. Create custom buttons to send popular emails to contacts or accounts.
13. Use a take ownership button on cases to streamline troubleshooting.
14. Control user access with a login-expiration-date field and a time-based workflow rule.

Strategic Salesforce Admin Tips

Fine tune the strategy you use to manage the implementation of Salesforce:

15. Use Ideas objects to gather user feedback, then create an enhancement plan and fix workarounds before bad habits are established.
16. Move any business processes that require approval into Salesforce to automate the approval cycle.
17. Quickly update multiple records using the Mass Edit and Update app off the AppExchange.
18. Run security health checks and take immediate action to fix vulnerabilities.
19. Use dashboards to drill down to other reports in order to show a different view of the dashboard data.
20. Develop custom field names to allow for the widest use of each one in multiple record types and business processes.
21. Create reasonable solutions to all user requests. Even when a request can’t or shouldn’t be implemented, work with users to identify a solution.
22. Maintain control over developing solutions. Ask users to describe their problem so that you can find the best solution. Users don’t have the overall knowledge to determine if “just adding a check box here” is going to give them the result they’re looking for without compromising some other part of the system.
23. Take advantage of exposure to the Salesforce community to develop your skills. For example, participate on the Salesforce Communities website, attend Dreamforce, get certified and join local user groups.
24. Maintain data integrity, reporting accuracy and workflow precision by knowing how and when to use record types.
25. Maintain your system’s stability by building new things in your sandbox. Sometimes even small changes can have significant negative consequences.
26. Study Salesforce releases ahead of time to decide if (and how) the changes impact your existing system or if you should plan to roll out new features. Keep your users up-to-date, too.
27. Create knowledgeable users by preparing training slides or videos that can be used to train new employees or provide a refresher for existing users.
28. Use and encourage others to use Chatter. It’s a great tool to let users collaborate and work together effectively regardless of where they’re located or their role in the business.

Use these Salesforce Admin tips to help yourself and create enthusiastic users.

Also published on Medium.