1. Activity Management
Activity management, which I think is one of the most critical parts of salesforce, is also one of the hardest parts, because you’re basically asking your salespeople, your support people, and those using salesforce to track their tasks and their calls. and activities against records in Salesforce, which is quite a big ask. But the results that you can get from the data are incredible. I worked with one customer, and we identified that if they made six phone calls to two customers, that resulted in a 97% chance of winning the deal on a particular group of products they sold. And with that information, they could feed it back into the sales team and do analysis on those sales opportunities to understand if the salesperson has done the most work to get that sale. So it was really interesting, but let’s dive into activity management to see how it all works within Salesforce.
So here I am on the accounts side. Actually, activities now span almost all objects. So if I have a look at this account object, you’ll see there are basically two sections. We have open activities here, and then we have activity history here. Now the open activities are basically any activities that need to be worked on. So we’ve got new tasks and new events, which are the two main types of activities. Now, you can see here that I’ve already logged a call, and you can see that this is a customer that I need to call by May 9, 2017, which I think I’m a little bit behind on now. But if I dive into this activity, yeah, my due date is in the past, so I’m in a little bit of trouble, but I can basically now call those customers so I can edit that record and basically say yes, they called and they were not interested.
And I can basically update the status of this task to complete it. Now, this is a task I created when an opportunity was created. So I can now save that and close it off. But you can see it’s related to that account and also the opportunity. So if I now go back to the account and scroll down, you can see that that activity has now moved from the “Open Activities” section and moved into my “Activity History.” And if I click on the opportunity that this activity relates to, I can scroll down, and as well, this activity is on the opportunity and again is in the activity history because this is now a completed activity. Now, you do have other buttons on the activity list, so I can log a call and I can send an email because, essentially, those are activities that have been completed in the past at the moment that record gets created. But if there are any new activities, such as new tasks or events, that I want for this particular record, I can go ahead and create a new task right away.
So I have priority; I can relate it to all manner of different objects. So these are all the kinds of standard objects that support tasks, as well as my custom objects as well. If I enabled that when I was setting up the object in the first place, I’ve also got contacts or leads that I can assign the tasks to, and I can set a status as well. So if somebody else, for example, has delayed or even deferred, I can then set a recurrence. So I can basically say that this is a task that happens every weekday on Mondays, and it will begin on May 15 and end, say, at the end of August. And I can set a reminder for this occurrence every week so that I don’t miss this task.
So I can save and create a new task, and then save or create a new event. So this is a task. So I’m going to create a new event this time. So I click “new event,” and this is very similar. The only difference is that we basically have a start and end time for our events, unlike the tasks, where there’s a specific date that I need to do them. Now, the difference with this is that I can add invitees to my event, so I can give it the subject of “contact customer.” I can then start inviting people. So I’m going to search for myself. There I am, and I’m going to add me to the invitees.
So you can see at the bottom here that we’ve got the list of invitees. So I am a user and also have a contact record as well. If I search for more people, I can basically just put in Jane Johnston from Burlington Gardens, and there we go, I’ve added her as well. However, as you can see here Highlighted invitees will not receive an invitation because they do not have a valid email address. So if I do save and send this, it’s not going to go to Jane Johnston, but it will go to me as a contact record and me as a user. You’ll also see there’s a timeline here, and this is also really good if you’re using the Outlook app to sync your calendar to Salesforce or if anybody has created events for you in Salesforce for these particular users or contacts. You can actually see this information in here to see if they’re busy or not, which is really handy. And then obviously just setting a time or if it’s an all-day event, the related record that I want to assign this event to defaults to the record I was on, which is the Opportunity Record. I’m going to give it a description and just say talk about products, and I’m going to click save and send. Update.
So if I scroll down now, you can see that’s an open activity; it’s assigned to me; it’s not a task, but also an activity for multiple people, because if I hover over there, it says it’s a multipurpose event. So that’s the opportunity we look for in the accounts. It’s basically on every single record you listen to. Again, we still get this logic. Send an email. A new task and an event If we also go to the home page, this is where you can kind of see the tasks that are assigned to you at the moment and also see your calendar. And again, if you’re editing the home page layout, you can include this or not, as the case may be. Also check out this drop-down list because it allows you to see what tasks are assigned to you. And I usually keep them on for today and tomorrow. So I can see all the tasks I’m working on that I need to do today, as well as any that are currently overdue.
And you can see that I’ve been bad and that I’ve got three different tasks that I haven’t worked on. But I have this call at 4:00 with Jane Johnson about this opportunity that I’ve just created. Okay, so we’ve taken a look at what activity management looks like on the front end. Let’s look at what this means in the Salesforce setup. So if I search for activity, you will see it here. We get this activities menu here, and you can see it’s a little bit different from the normal Salesforce setup. As you can see, I have task and event fields, but I also have activity custom fields. I’ve got layouts like duplicates as well. So it does look a little bit odd. And that’s because activities are essentially the same thing. And tasks and events are essentially contained within that object. It’s a little bit weird. So it basically means that if I click the task fields, the only fields that are there are essentially the standard fields. And I can’t add any custom fields to this. I can change things like the pick list values and some of the kinds of tool tips and descriptions, but that’s about it.
It’s the same restrictions you have on most standard fields in Salesforce, and it’s the same for the event fields as well. Again, I’m restricted in what I can do, and I can’t create any custom fields from here. But if you scroll a bit further down, you’ll see “activity” custom fields. Now, if you click here, this is where you can create custom fields. We can only add up to 100 custom fields at the moment, but if I click “new,” it’s like creating a normal custom field. So I can participate in the VIP activity. Click next. Again, this is very similar to creating a normal field. However, you can see here that you have the event and task layout. So essentially, this activities object has events and tasks that are kind of all on the same object. So I then have to pick where I want to show that VIP activity on the event: when I create an event, when I create a task, or both, so I’m going to leave it on both.
So that’s the only real anomaly in terms of activities. It’s kind of because tasks and events look like they’re separate on the UI because there are separate buttons for them, but actually they’re all on the same object. And you kind of have to add custom fields using this activity’s custom fields separately. But you do have separate layouts for event layouts as well as task layouts, so that does make things a little bit odd. So for account management, you just need to understand what its features are. So account management is made up of tasks and events, and those tasks and events can be assigned to different users in your salesforce.org, but you can also send those tasks and events, link them to contacts, or other standard objects in your salesforce.org. So opportunities, account contacts, and things like that, as well as your custom objects So that’s about it. If you have any questions about activity management, please post them in the questions section. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
