- Org is short for organization, and it refers to a specific instance of Salesforce.
- Sales Pipeline - an organized, visual way of tracking potential buyers as they progress through different stages in the purchasing process and buyer's journey.
- Lead Generation: Use marketing to discover new leads
- Prospecting: Use outreach to build relationships
- Qualification: Gather the information on your leads to determine if they will buy-in
- Contact: Talk to your prospects and sell your product
- Proposal: Gather the information in a single document and get it approved
- Negotiation and Close: Answer questions and get the contract signed
- Retention: Keep your customers happy with follow-ups and support
- Object Level Security defines who has permissions to general Salesforce objects in your organization (Example: Contacts or Accounts)
- Record Level Sharing defines who has permissions to individual records or rows (Example: A specific Contact or Account)
- Field Level Security defines who has permissions to individual fields within a record (Example: The Annual Revenue field within each Account)
- Profile is a group of permissions (similar to a Permission Set), but limited to one-per-user. A profile is a configuration of Object Level Securities and Field Level Securities.
- Permission Set is like a Profile, but a user can be added to multiple Permission Sets, and multiple users can be part of a single Permission Set.
- Permission Set Group is a group of permission sets. It bundles the permissions of multiple Permission Sets into a single group.
- Role specifies a hierarchal-level set of permissions. Roles exist in a hierarchy, so a role that is above another will be able to see all records that a lower role can see, but the lower role may not necessarily be able to see the records that the upper role can see.
- Organization-wide defaults (OWDs) is the default security permissions across an organization. Roles will typically grant access based on OWDs.
- Defaults for Object Sharing typically go by:
- Public Read/Write
- Sharing isn't present - all can have access to every row by default
- Private
- Can always see the records they own, but then sharing applies to what they can see for any other records within the system
- Criteria-Based Sharing means that record visibility is based on criteria (like a field value) instead of who owns the record.
- Rules define whether a record is shared with another user.
- Conditions pertaining to a given record decide who sees which records. If a certain condition applies, then a certain group of users receive access to those rows.
- Commonly used points include picklist values and record types because these naturally create broad categories of records. Record types and picklists can also change based on automation or events within the system, and these values can help transition records from one team to another or one organizational department to another.
- Not commonly used points include number values.
- Manual Sharing can be done by users who own a record, are above the owner in a role hierarchy, have full access on the object level (View All permission), or are a System Administrator who can conduct manual sharing. This is done through the user interface through the record page layout or detail.
- Restriction Rules filter data based on conditions. If Sharing grants access to records, restriction rules take access away.
¶ Apps and Objects
Apps and Objects make up the foundation of a Salesforce org.
- Apps in Salesforce are made up of objects, fields, and other functionality that support a business process.
- Objects are tables in the Salesforce database that store a particular kind of information.
- Standard Objects are part of Core Salesforce and can not be deleted
- Custom Objects are outside of default Salesforce data structures and can be created and deleted on the fly.
- Records are rows in object database tables. Records are the actual data associated with an object.
- Fields are columns in object database tables. Both standard and custom objects have fields.
¶ Standard Objects
- A Campaign could be a billboard, a digital ad on a social network, telemarketing, a TV commercial, etc. The goal of a campaign is to create awareness for your company. Salesforce keeps track of campaigns to help you better understand which campaigns are performing by tracking their ROI or Return On Investment.
- A campaign will generate a Lead, which is someone interested in your company or product, but you don't exactly know what, how, or whom. A lead will give you contact information about someone to get in touch with in hopes that they will become a customer. Leads will eventually convert into an Account, Contact, and possibly an Opportunity once they become "qualified", which means they are ready to buy and they know what to buy, but they can also be "disqualified" if they are not a good fit.
- An Account is generally a company or organization that you want to keep track of, but it can also represent an individual as well. The account will store information about the company/individual's annual revenue, number of employees, address, contact numbers, and more.
- An account will hopefully have at least one Contact, who is someone who works in the company or organization where you have created an account.
- In a B2C (Business-To-Customer) organization model, using a Person object may make more sense, as it merges the information you would need from an Account and a Contact. Note that this object type is only is some Salesforce editions, and a modified Account object can always be used instead.
- An Opportunity is a vital part of the Sales Pipeline. They track what you expect to sell, at what time, and to whom. Opportunities keep track of the stage a sale is in (from prospecting to closing a deal). An opportunity is an opportunity to make a sale.
- The pricing for an opportunity may be complex, so to help with that, you can generate a Quote. A quote is an estimated price for a product or service. Quotes are tied to the opportunity as well as the account, so you know what they relate to. Quotes can be synchronized to opportunities so that the quote will be adapted and sent to the client if something changes.
- A Product describes an item or a service you have to sell.
- A product could be sold at different price points depending on the customer or quantity, so a Pricebook can help keep track of that. Price books are tied to opportunities and the products listed in the price books may have different prices depending on which price book they are pulled from. They can also be used to provide different prices on a product affected by pricing tiers or discounts.
- A Contract maps the terms and conditions of a service or product and provides a way to officialize the acceptance of a quote and the date of activation. It contains information on what the person purchased, and is tied back to the opportunity.
- An Order is a confirmed placement of a sale by the customer. It will list the asset(s) that were sold, at what date, and to whom.
- An Asset is a specific instance of a product. It references the product, price book, order, and a unique identifier (like a serial number) to form a trackable entity. Assets are tied to a Person or an Account so that you can track who recieved each asset.
- A Case is a viatal part of the Service pipeline. It is an issue or service request raised by a customer. The Case holds details about the customer, the issue they are facing, communication, resolution steps, and the overall case status. Cases are tied to Contacts and Accounts as these are often linked to the person who submitted the case and if the case is related to a potential sale, it could be linked to an opportunity.
- An Activity is an interaction related to a case. It's an umbrella category for various communication methods used while working on a customer issue. Activity objects, like the ones listed below, are recorded in a chronological order within each case.
- Task: A specific action item or to-do list related to the case. It can be assigned to a specific service rep or team and can have deadlines or due dates.
- Call: Records a phone conversation between a service rep and a customer regarding the case. Details like call notes, call direction (inbound/outbound), and call participants can be logged.
- Event: Tracks a scheduled meeting, appointment, or web conference related to the cae. This could involve internal discussions with colleagues or external meetings with the customer.
- Email: Captures email communication between the service rep and the customer regarding the case. Emails sent from within Salesforce or linked through integreations with external email platforms are stored as activities.