Inactive Site / For Archive Use Only

Greetings! This site was originally created back in 2013 in support of a Dreamforce breakout session that I presented at. I presented the general concepts at the session, and directed attendees to the site for complete instructions on how to implement the tips.

Based on changes to the Salesforce platform, some of these tips may no longer work, or may not work in the Lightning experience. But some of them still DO work, so I will leave the site up until the internet Gods (or trolls) advise me to take it down!

Dynamic Reports, Part 1: The Challenge, The Solution….

Let’s face it, if you are reading this blog, then you are a Salesforce geek, at least to some extent.  While I’ve got responsibility at work for a wide range of sales operations functions (sales compensation, sales process, budgeting, etc.), I will admit I still geek out on Salesforce.  I love the platform, and I often challenge myself to come up with creative solutions to business problems.

To quote some TV commercial, the concept presented here, – Dynamic Reports – is my “A-ha!” moment!   Once this idea came to me, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

Dynamic Reports, Part 2: The High Level Concepts

For those of you who are quick studies, I’ll lay out the general concepts here in bullet form, and we’ll dive into the details in subsequent posts.

Dynamic Reports (DR) is a Salesforce.com custom object, designed specifically to allow users to quickly launch commonly used reports, passing variables like User Name or Account Name to the reports.

Dynamic Reports, Part 3: Fields and Records

OK, here’s where we really get into the details.

FIELDS

The Fields in your Dynamic Reports (DR) object are basically three different types:

• Variables that will be passed to reports,
• Variables that are used to filter List Views,
• Hyperlinks to reports.

Dynamic Reports, Part 4: The Reports

Chances are, you’ve already created most of the reports that you’ll use as the baseline for your Dynamic Reports – in fact, you’ve probably created several versions of them for different users or teams.

You can use clone of these reports to make your first Dynamic Report.

As you build your reports, put all the other fixed variables in your report filters, except the one(s) you’re going to pass from the Dynamic Report List View.  For example, if you want a sales pipeline report for the next 12 months for your sales reps, put the close Date, Opportunity Stage and other criteria in your report.

Dynamic Reports Part 5: List Views & Security

Alright, we’re down to the home stretch, and it’s probably the easiest part!

List Views

Remember, List Views are the User Interface for Dynamic Reports.  You should direct your users to the Dynamic Reports tab (which you’ll have to set up BTW), and grant them access to the List Views that are pertinent to their job or role.

There’s really three parts to setting up the list views, that should be simple for any Salesforce admin.

The 5 Minute Time-Based Workflow (or 15 Minute, or 30 Minute…)

Salesforce workflows come in 2 flavors – real time and time-based workflows.  Time-based workflows are evaluated at the time interval you set – some number of hours or days after another date or time field on the record. But you can’t set any time increment less than an hour… or can you?

But I’m an impatient guy.  Sometimes, I don’t want a workflow to fire right now, but I can’t wait an hour.  There may be some business processes that need to be completed in 5 minutes, or half an hour.

For example – our Sales Reps may make several changes to an Opportunity over the course of 15 minutes, but I don’t want to send workflow update emails after every change.  But it is important that the Sales Manager is notified as soon as possible.  So I’d like to send a workflow email 20 minutes after the last change.

Drop the USD and Pennies from Your Currency Fields

Even though my company has offices and does business internationally, we have always managed our Salesforce Opportunities in US Dollars only.  Therefore, we did not turn on multi-currency.

But about a year ago, we installed a Salesforce add-on that required multi-currency be enabled.  And when it was turned on, it also enabled a slew of unplanned problems.

• Now, any currency field displayed with USD in front of the value, making reports wider, and kind of “junking up” the display.
• More importantly, any report that you exported to Excel or a printable view had “USD” on it.  If you wanted to do further calculations on the data, you had to do a Find / Replace in Excel to get rid of the USD.

Combine Account Name & Opportunity Name – and Open Details in a New Tab

As I’ve sat through many Opportunity Review meetings with Sales Managers and Sales Reps, they generally go like this…

• The Sales Manager opens up a Salesforce.com report, full of Opportunities.
• He scrolls down to an Opportunity that he’d like to drill into.
• He clicks on the Opportunity Name – whoops, no, he clicked on the Account Name by mistake.  Click the back button.
• Now he clicks on the Opportunity Name.  They discuss the Opportunity, maybe make some updates.  Save the record.
• Click the back button about 3 or 4 times to get back to the report.
• Repeat for the next Opportunity, then the next, then the next….

I thought to myself, there’s got to be a better way.  How can we make this process more efficient?

So, with a little creative hacking, I figured out a way to keep the report open in the background, and pop open the Opportunity record in a new browser tab.  That way, the Sales Rep and Manager can work on the Opportunity, save their changes, close the Opportunity, and the original report is still right there.

Use “My Region” Field to Create Dynamic Reports that Show Pertinent Results for Each User

This blog post has some pre-requisite required reading – if you haven’t already, go read this post, then come back here.

Our Sales organization is divided into geographic regions (East US, West US, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific).  Each region is then divided into districts (for example, East is divided into Northeast, MidAtlantic and Southeast).

Our role hierarchy roughly follows this structure, but through Sharing Rules, we allow our Region and District Sales Managers to see everything their boss can see, in order to support our collaborative selling model.

As you could guess, this results in our Sales Managers seeing a lot of Account, Opportunity and other records that they are not responsible for, but may need to access occasionally.

In order to create views and reports that limit the records in the Regions and Districts pertinent to these managers, we developed an approach similar to the “I am the SE” approach on the previous post.