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Time Estimate

Get More Done with Essentials

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Decide how to use Chatter for your business.
  • Summarize how to store a file in the File object.
  • See the benefit of using a task list in the Tasks object.
  • Know the types of questions you can answer with reports and dashboards.

Connect with Chatter

In both large and small businesses, collaboration is as important as cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich. Without it, things don’t come together.

In all of our products, Chatter is how we communicate with one another. In Essentials, you find Chatter as its own object, but it’s also built into Accounts, Leads, and Opportunities. This makes it easy for your team to collaborate about your customers and your deals.

The most important part of Chatter is the feed, the go-to spot for discussing records and what’s happening in your company. The main things you do on the feed are:

Post Home screen.

  • Create posts: Talk about your business, your interests, and important updates with your team.
  • Create polls: Collect opinions and answers to your most important questions with polls.
  • Ask questions: With bold formatting and an open text box for long answers, asking a question is a way to appeal to people most likely to have the right answer. You can post just the question, or you can add details to it for clarification.

And just like on social media, you can @mention a colleague by putting the @ symbol directly in front of your colleague’s name. This is a great way to call their attention to what you’re posting, polling, or asking a question about. Chatter sends them a notification whenever they're @mentioned.

Note

You can bold, italicize, strikethrough, or use bullets to call attention to your post.

Tracey selects Ivanna Bookay’s contact record, and in the Chatter feed, she @mentions Jay to let him know Ivanna updated her order. That way when Jay makes his follow-up call, he has the most up-to-date information in line with Ivanna’s information.

For now, that concludes our brief tour of Chatter, let’s move on to files.

@Mentioning Jay Violet with bubble prepopulated.

Find Your Files

Have you ever put an important note about a customer on your desk, only to lose it? Or maybe you’ve accidentally spilled your morning coffee on a stack of orders you needed to place? It’s the worst.

Well, you never have to worry about that again thanks to Files. Files allows you to safely store and access all of the files your business needs. The File home screen lets you quickly access files that have been recently edited and shared with you.

File Home Screen.

With just a few clicks, you can quickly and easily attach that PDF or price quote to an opportunity, Chatter post, or email.

Learn More About Your Business with List Views

When Tracey is thinking about what to order for the next month, she definitely wants to be able to see every upcoming deal to plan for the next month. Before Essentials, Jay spent a few hours looking over all of their receipts and orders for the month. Much happier speaking with the shop's customers, Jay wasn’t the biggest fan of creating these spreadsheets. With list views, these less-than-ideal tasks became a thing of a past. By selecting an object like Accounts and then clicking the list-view button, Jay can sort and slice their data without manually having to enter a thing. Score!

List View Selected.

Tackle Your To-Do List with Tasks

Are you someone who makes to-do lists to keep you on track? What if you were able to assign tasks to others who need to get stuff too? Welcome to the Task object. We saw this in action in a previous unit, so we know why Tracey loves tasks. She can assign tasks to herself or Jay when she’s on the move and get a reminder just when she needs it.

And when Dreamscape is working on larger events, like Ivanna’s wedding, she can create tasks with deadlines to make sure she and Jay have everything they need for each part of the day. We talk about the ins and outs of creating tasks in the Sales Essentials Features module, but first, let’s talk about how Dreamscapes task list can keep you and your team on target. With a continuous stream of your work items and their due dates presented in an easy-to-scan format, Tasks is going to become your new best friend for getting things done.

Track Your Business with Reports and Dashboards

If you’ve ever created a list of your top-selling products or top-grossing accounts, you’ve created a report. Reports can be as simple as a list of records, or as complex as a matrix of summarized data. For example, Tracey wants to know which accounts brought in the most business this year, so she creates a report to answer that question.

Opportunities home screen.

You’ve got questions, and with Essentials, you’ve got answers.

Every Friday, Tracey wants to check how her team did for the week. She looks at what sold well and what they can improve on. Rather than having to generate multiple reports with those numbers over and over again, she creates a Sales Progress dashboard. The dashboard includes a visual display of their sales, their arrangement orders, and how much each individual member of the team has sold. We dive deeper into the how-tos of dashboards and reports in the Sales Essentials Features module, but for now, here’s what a typical dashboard looks like.

Home screen for dashboards.

Nothing inspires Tracey like seeing customers with smiles on their faces and flowers in their hands. With Essentials, Tracey and her team wrangle orders for daffodils and daisies faster than ever before.

Next, tune in to the Sales Essentials Features module, where we continue to follow Dreamscape as they go deeper into the ins and outs of using each one of Essentials features.

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