After an horrible winter snow, we feel heavily releived on the coming of spring. Spring always reminds us of brightness with sunlight , cleaning our houses and leaves turning green which gives us a visual treat. Similarly we want to do some cleanups in our salesforce org which will make our users jump with joy and crave to use salesforce more for their work. Here is a quick synopsis for you on where to start and what to do.

Help your users to trust Salesforce more.

Most  of the organizations have done a good job of entering all the data in salesforce. The only thing not happening is a data duplication process which is not consistent and does  not happen at regular intervals. This h results in large number of duplicates in leads , accounts and opportunities causing our users to fret and fume .

a.Ensure that you atleast do a dupe check using your dupe tool on your leads, contacts and accounts and see if you can remove some duplicates . Instead of looking at all data, start by  looking at the most recent records created or modified in the last year as an example.

b. Create duplication reports in your org which would highlight on data discrepancies to your users and have them act on it on a regular basis and reward them for  data quality.

The above activities would help your users to trust your data more and increase adoption.

Make their life easier

Are you taking care of the nagging screens which your users have complained on entering or updating the data in your salesforce org? If you have not done anything so far , now is the time to put some time on those visual force or standard screens and act on them.

a. You can start by  removing  unwanted validations on fields which would reduce the number of clicks.

b. Remove page layout sections  which your users never see or use . This would prevent the unwanted scrolling on  simple viewing or editing of data.

Reduce your time on maintenance

Lot of salesforce orgs get cluttered with roles and profiles which become unwieldy , hard to manage and takes too much time on future changes. Now is the time to look at the profiles, roles and record types and act on them.

a. If you have profiles with less than 5 users and never has been used in the last 2 years, you might as well delete them or merge them to a common profile and use permission sets.

b. Temporary promotions and partners in salesorganizations cause new roles and hierarchies to be created like salesmanager1, division head etc. These might have been created for a temporary need and so you might want to start deleting them.

c. Some times the lead and contact object gets a lot of record types which have been created due to business workflows and rules. You can remove some record types which are not used which would cut down testing time and remove the page layouts used by them.

So by simply revisiting profiles, roles and record types, a lot of time can be saved on future maintenance.

Empower the users

Most of the sales reps always struggle with creating reports in salesforce to show it to their bosses.

A. one hour training session on reports to these users and creating a sandbox for them to play with and helping them to move to production quickly would be a big win to influence these users to use salesforce more and reduce their pain.

B. Internal chatter groups, knowledge articles and content features should be explained to these users so that they can learn and share knowledge on deals and accounts which would help them in the long run to use more features of salesfore effectively.

So by just implementing one action on the top 4 sections which i have highlighted in spring would help you to win some users back to your org. This can be a spring clean up campaign and you can end with a spring 14 demo on new features to your users as well. Please feel free to email me at buyan@sforcemaximizer.org or please click like if you like my answer.