Salesforce 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet (Part 2)

At this stage, you already know about the Salesforce platform and its products. Now we will delve a little deeper into this world of Salesforce and see what we can do regarding what options it can offer us and some daily activities that can be done.

First things first. Data access and visibility in Salesforce.

To determine who sees what in your org, there are four layers of Access Control in Salesforce that administrators can manage:

Data access and visibility in Salesforce

Permissions, profiles and roles.

The permissions and profiles that can be assigned to a user depend directly on the license that that user has.

Permissions

A user can have multiple permissions, some examples of permissions are: permissions on objects, fields, users, application settings, activate contracts, see all forecasts, etc. Permissions respond to the tasks that a user can execute and the options that users can access.

Profiles

You can assign profiles to users based on the license they have. A profile is a group of characteristics and permissions that define:

  • What users can do within the organization.
  • User access to objects and data.

A profile can be assigned to multiple users, but a user can only have one profile at a time. Depending on the edition you have purchased, you can have standard and custom profiles.

Roles

Each organization has a hierarchy of roles. Through these hierarchies, you can control the levels of visibility that users have on the organization’s records. For example, users at the top of the hierarchy have access to all records of users who have lower-level roles.

Standard profiles

Every Salesforce org includes standard profiles that cannot be deleted and that you can assign to your users. In most editions you can also create, delete, or edit your own profiles.

Profile name Description
System Administrator All those who have this profile will be able to configure and make customizations in the organization. They can perform all kinds of functions that do not require an extra license. Example: an Administrator could not “manage campaigns” if he does not have the license: Marketing User license.
Standard Platform User These users can use installed apps from AppExchange or apps that have been developed in-house. Additionally, they can use the basic functionalities of the platform such as accounts, contacts, reports, dashboards, and custom tabs.
Standard Platform One App User Differs from the Standard Platform User in that they can only use a custom AppExchange application developed in your organization or installed from the AppExchange. The custom application is limited to five tabs.
Standard User These users can create and edit most of the main types of records, run reports, and view organization settings. They can also view, but cannot manage, campaigns and create, but not review, solutions.
Customer Community User These users can log in through the Experience Cloud. Each community’s settings and the site’s collaboration model determine their access to tabs, objects, and other features. This profile is associated with the “Customer Community” license.
Partner Community User The Partner Community User can log in through the Experience Cloud. Each community’s settings and the site’s collaboration model determine its access to tabs, objects, and other features. This profile is associated with the “Partner Community” license.
Customer Community Plus User These users can log in through the Experience Cloud. Each community’s settings and the site’s collaboration model determine their access to tabs, objects, and other features. Profile associated with the “Customer Community Plus” license (for customers who need advanced collaboration).
Partner User These users can log in through a partner portal or an Experience Cloud site. Such a user has the “Gold Partner” user license.
Marketing User In addition to the standard user capabilities, these users can manage campaigns, create letterheads, create HTML email templates, manage public documents, and add campaign members with the ability to update their statuses with the Data Import Wizard.
Solution Manager These users can review and post solutions. They also have access to the same functionalities as the standard user.
Contract Manager These users can create, edit, activate, and approve contracts. This profile can also delete contracts as long as they are not activated.
Chatter Moderator User These users can log in to Chatter and access all the standard Chatter people, profiles, groups, and files. This user can also:
  • – Enable and disable other Chatter Free users and moderators.
  • – Grant and revoke moderator privileges.
  • – Delete posts and comments that they can see.
  • – Edit own posts and comments.
Minimum Access – Salesforce These users are granted the least number of privileges on the Salesforce platform. This profile includes Access Activities, Chatter Internal User, Lightning Console User, and View Help Link permissions. It is possible to add more permissions to this profile (always following the best data security practices).
Read Only These users can view organization settings, run and export reports, and also view, but not edit, other records. For the Summer ’21 version of Salesforce orgs, this has become a customizable profile, allowing its name and associated permissions to be modified. Organizations created in Spring’21 do not have this profile; however, the Minimum Access profile can be assigned read permissions if necessary.

The Salesforce ABC’s

Review the most common key terms that you’ll encounter at the very beginning of your Salesforce experience.

LEARN MORE ➜

Navigating within Salesforce

Once inside Salesforce, you can intuitively discover many options. However, we will help you familiarize yourself with the tool.

Homepage

When you log in to Salesforce, you will find the Home page. What you will see will depend on the user interface (UI), edition, design, and customizations that exist for your user.

With the Lightning Experience UI on your home page, you might see the following:

  • Different dashboards, including quarterly sales performance and information of interest to sales users.
  • An Assistant that shows a list with recommendations of actions that you could take in your organization.
  • A summary of accounts, opportunities, or candidates that have recently signed up.
  • Your tasks for the day and upcoming events.

If you work with Lightning Experience, you can create custom home pages for different profiles using the Lightning App Builder tool.

When you log in to Salesforce Classic, you will have:

  • Recently viewed items.
  • Your Chatter feed.
  • The Calendar of Events.
  • The Recycling Bin.
  • Recommendations and notifications.

Tabs

In addition to the Home tab, we have other tabs through which we can reach the home pages of “objects” such as Accounts, Opportunities, Campaigns, etc.

Application menu (App menu)

This menu can be found in the upper right corner of any Salesforce page. This drop-down menu is used to access the list of Applications available for your profile and navigate between them. In Lightning Experience, even if a user only has one app assigned to their profile, this menu will be displayed with the App Launcher. In Salesforce Classic, this menu is not displayed when users have only one application assigned to their profile.

App Menu in Salesforce Lightining

Recycle Bin

In Salesforce Classic, this option is available at the bottom of the left sidebar for all your edits. In Lightning Experience, it is available in almost all editions. To access it or add it to your navigation bar, you will have to do it through the App Launcher.

This will contain items that have been deleted less than 15 days ago. Salesforce admins can see all the data that has been deleted in the entire org. Records in the Recycle Bin do not count toward your organization’s storage usage, but they do, however, have a limit. Your Recycle Bin can have a number of records equivalent to 25 times the storage capacity in Mb of your organization. For example, if the capacity assigned to your organization is 2,000 MB, you can have 50 thousand records in the Recycle Bin .

Calendar tab

You can use Calendar to control your schedule in Salesforce. With the different calendar views (month, day, week), you can easily move through different periods. Additionally , you can share your calendar of events, view the calendars of others , etc.

Task

You can use the Tasks section to keep up with all the items on your to-do list. You also have the Kanban view to monitor the progress of your work.

Customize the navigation bar

This option allows you to arrange the tabs on your home page to your liking.

Customize the navigation bar

Search

You will find the search bar at the top of the page. It allows you to optimize the search based on the keywords. You can also filter by contact, accounts, or opportunities and find what you are looking for faster from a global search . The search box appears in each section of your organization and, in each case, the search will be restricted to it.

Recent Items panel

You can use Recent Items to access recently viewed tabs or objects.

Notifications

Very useful for keeping up with important communications from your Salesforce project team or managers.

Notifications in Salesforce

View Profile and Settings

To the right and left of the Notifications, respectively, you can modify your personal information. If you are an administrator, you can use these options for the configuration and customization of the organization.

Help

Here you would enter a keyword and Salesforce will guide you through content that will help you clarify any doubts you may have. Salesforce Help may prompt questions that it will use to better determine how you intend to use the application. In addition, it offers a tour of the main functions that you can perform within the application.

Salesforce 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet

So you’ve googled Salesforce to find out what it’s all about and might have realized it has a LOT to offer. Where do you even start? Well, we created this cheat sheet to guide you through it all.

LEARN MORE ➜

Daily Activities Within Your Organization in Salesforce

Create records from object “home pages”

You can quickly create accounts, leads, tasks, notes, contacts, leads, and opportunities from the home page of each object. While some items (like account) have special guidelines and considerations that you should be aware of, the process of creating a record is similar for all.

Just click the button to the right of the record type object name you want to create, click New, and provide the requested information. Example:

New Account in Salesforce

You should Save the changes when you finish entering the values for your new record. If you navigate away from the page before clicking Save, you will lose your changes.

Establish parent-child relationships between objects of the account type

First, create both records; parent and child . You edit the child account and use the Lookup icon next to the “Parent account” field to associate the account with a parent. By doing this , you will get a view of the corporate structure of the organization. Finally, click on “Save” and the two will be merged.

Log a call

Information about phone calls associated with a particular object, for example a call associated with an account, can be recorded. This call would be part of the Activity log for this particular object. On the registration details page, we find the Activity tab, within which we find 3 more tabs including “Log a call”.

Schedule the event send mail

On the record details pages in the Activity tab on the right panel, we can find 3 other tabs, one of them being the New Event tab. When we create a “new event”, you can select the Email option in the Subject.

Send mail directly

You can send an email to any registered contact; you would only need to click on the email address and then the email manager that we have configured on our computer will start.

Export a report

You can select a report and click on the Export to Excel button. Then follow the steps.

Transfer a record

Assuming you have transfer permissions, you can go to the details page of the records, select the desired record and go to the “Change owner” option. Then you would choose a new owner among the users of the organization, and that’s it. You have the option to notify the new owner of this change via email.

This is it for now! We hope this guide helps you understand how to get started with Salesforce and if you still need help, feel free to contact us by sending an email to hello@theskyplanner.com. Our experienced team will be happy to assist you throughout your Salesforce journey.

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