View Available Personnel in a Geographical Area

Problem:

As an inbound call center rep, I need to quickly and easily find available resources within the geographical location of the customer.

Solution:

Use Lookup Helper to relate your custom geographical record to your custom personnel object, then use Rollup Helper to display the 1st available representative.  This use case is highly adaptable, but for documentation Zip Code and Field Rep are the Custom Objects being used.

This use case assumes that there is a checkbox on the Field Rep record for “Available” and a text field for the Zip Code “Assigned To”.

First, create a custom lookup field on Field Rep that looks up to Zip Code, then create a Lookup Helper Setting to populate Zip Code:

1. Select Child Object:  Field Rep

2. Select / Create Lookup Field to be Used

   1. Maintain Existing Lookup Relationship

   2. Zip Code

3. Select Lookup Helper Setting Type

   1. Lookup Helper Setting Type: Field matches Name/Id

   2. Select field on Field Rep to match the name/Id of a Zip Code record: Assigned To

4. Save and Run the Lookup Helper setting and enable real time on Field Rep.

Next, create a text field on Zip Code:  Available Rep

Create a rollup with Rollup Helper displaying the name of the first available rep:

1. Select Destination Object:  Zip Code

2. Select Target Field:  Available Rep

3. Select Source Field

   1. Which object would you like to use as the source:      

      1. Child Object: Field Rep

      2. Select Relationship: Zip Code - Field_Rep__c.Zip_Code__c

   2. Which field on Field Rep should we use as a source:

      1. Field Rep Name

      2. Select Type: Text

Create a new filter:  First Available

1. Enter Filter Name:  

   1. First Available

   2. Limit to 1 record

2. Specify Sort Order (You can use whatever field makes the most sense for your process.)

   1. Record ID

   2. Ascending

3. Specify Filter Criteria

   1. Deleted = False (Default)

   2. Available = True

Save and Run the rollup.

This use case can be extended by rolling up the results from Zip Code to Account. For further assistance with this use case, schedule a one-on-one demo.

How are you identifying specific people in a geographic region at your company?  Please share in the comment section below.

Tracking Open Cases by Priority on Accounts and Contacts

The problem:

As a Customer Service Representative or Support Agent, I want to be able to quickly see a prioritized list of open Cases on an Account or Contact.

Solution:  

First, create a couple of formula fields and lookup fields on Case and then create 2 Lookup Helper Settings.

Fields:

1. Create two formula fields (text) on Case
   1. Account if Open:  IF( IsClosed = False,  Account.Name , Null)
   2. Contact if Open:  IF(IsClosed = False, Contact.FirstName + " " + Contact.LastName , Null)
2. Create two Lookup Relationship fields on Case
   1. Account
   2. Contact

Lookup Helper Settings:

1. Lookup for Account
   1. Select Child Object:  Case
   2. Maintain Existing Relationship:  Account
   3. Lookup Helper Setting Type:  Relate Cases when the value in a field matches the name/id of the Account
   4. Select field on Case to match the name/id of an Account record:  Account if Open
   5. Create a Setting Name, optional but recommended
   6. Save and Run Setting
2. Lookup for Contact
   1. Select Child Object:  Case
   2. Maintain Existing Relationship:  Contact
   3. Lookup Helper Setting Type:  Relate Cases when the value in a field matches the name/id of the Contact
   4. Select field on Case to match the name/id of a Contact record:  Contact if Open
   5. Create a Setting Name, optional but recommended
   6. Save and Run Setting

Top Five Ways to Use Lookup Helper and Rollup Helper Together

1. Rollup organization-wide metrics - Create a single object with a single record for your organization. Then, setup Lookup Helper to link each source record to it, so as to get a global SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, COUNT across all records tied to that organization-wide record.
2. Categorize / group your records (e.g. opportunities) into regions for regional VP / senior leadership to have instant visibility to regional rollups/forecasts. Just rollup your source field (e.g. closed won opportunity amount) into each region to get started.
3. Group your records into time periods buckets to more easily build dashboards or rollups per time period (Quarterly). Roll up values such as closed won opportunity amounts by quarter. Imagine the possibilities with this functionality; it's like having a report or dashboard follow you around in Salesforce relevant to the record you are viewing. We hope this feature in itself becomes your mini-analytics cloud.
4. Park your accounts, contacts, and opportunities under a zip code, district, or other geographic/territorial entity. Display the count of accounts, contacts, or the sum of total closed won sales amount for each zip code to track forecasts/potentials and actuals/history in each zip code.
5. Lookup Helper maintains and keeps your relationships up to date so you will never have records related to incorrect parents and your users can work efficiently.

Top Use Case: Display Opportunity Products On The Account Page

With Lookup Helper you can automatically relate opportunity products to the account the opportunity belongs to. To Achieve this you may follow these simple steps:

1. Create new Lookup Helper setting.
2. Select Opportunity Product as child object.
3. Select the 'Create New Lookup Relationship' option --> select Account for parent object --> name the new lookup field.
4. Select the 'Relate Opportunity Product when the value in a field matched the name/id of the Account' Lookup Helper setting type.
5. Select the opportunity lookup field (indicate by the '>' sign).
6. Select the account lookup field.
7. Save and run the Lookup Helper setting.

Top Use Case: Assign Child Record To Owner Of Parent Record

If you have a need to automatically assign child records to the owner of the parent record, look no further for a solution! With Lookup Helper you are able to set a custom or standard user lookup field for a record automatically by referencing information available on a parent record.

Steps to create Lookup Helper Setting:

1. Select the child object you would like to assign to a user automatically.
2. Select the user lookup field you would like to automatically populate.
3. Select the 'Relate child object when the value in a field matches the name/id of the user' Lookup Helper setting type.
4. Select the parent lookup field (containing the '>' at the end of the field label) that contains the owner you would like to assign to the child.
5. After selecting the parent lookup field select the user lookup field on the parent object.
6. Save the setting.

Top Use Case: Create Lead Source Campaigns

Lookup Helper can automatically create lead source campaigns, and relate your leads directly to the correct lead source campaign. With this relationship in place you can see a related list of all of the leads that have come into your system for any given lead source, you may also use our Rollup Helper application to aggregate important lead information to the lead source campaign record.

Steps Required:

1. Navigate to the Lookup Helper Menu and press the 'Create Lookup Helper Setting' button.
2. Select Lead as the child object.
3. Select the create new lookup relationship option and create the new Campaign lookup field.
4. Choose the 'Relate Lead when the value in a field matches the name/id of the Campaign' Lookup Helper setting type.
5. Select the Lead Source field.
6. Click the 'Create category if it doesn't already exist' check box.
7. Populate any field values into the new Campaign that may be created (optional).
8. Save the setting.

Top Use Case: Display Related List Of Grandchild Records On The Parent Record

Have you ever wanted to see a list of related grandchild records when viewing a parent record in Salesforce? A simple example of this would be to display a related list of Cases or Opportunities created for all child Accounts at the parent Account level.

Creating this relationship manually may be very difficult because the parent Account name may be unknown at the time of Case or Opportunity creation. What ends up happening is your users spend unnecessary time trying to figure out if there is a parent account, and if so which account it is.

Save this wasted time and let Lookup Helper set these relationships automatically so your users no longer have to!

Top Use Case: Eliminate Your Marketing Automation Tool

Why spend tens of thousands of dollars on a Salesforce marketing automation tool when Lookup Helper, in addition to a few other applications (like Rollup Helper and MailChimp), can do the same thing for a quarter of the price?

With Lookup Helper, you will be able to directly link your Leads/Contacts to a Campaign. You may then use Rollup Helper to aggregate valuable information to the Campaign record, and MailChimp to send Campaign specific emails to those Leads/Contacts.

Top Use Case: User Performance Metric Records

Are you tired of creating a ton of reports and dashboards in Salesforce to retrieve information about user performance, or unable to obtain some of the information through reports?

With Lookup Helper, you can easily create user performance category records, and find all the information you are looking for in one place! Lookup Helper lets you decide what type of granularity your user performance records need to be at (all time, this year, this quarter, this month, etc). All that is required is a simple formula field that specifies what category the record will fall under.

In the example below I will display a formula field used to categorize closed/won Opportunities by user and the year it was closed (the same thing can be done for tasks, products sold, etc).

Example of formula field required:

IF( TEXT(StageName) == 'Closed Won', Owner.FirstName & " " & Owner.LastName & " - " & TEXT(YEAR(CloseDate)), null)

Top Use Case: View Account Information On A Lead

Did you know that when you use Salesforce out of the box, there is no way to view Account information on the Lead page? Think about that for one more minute...if you are using Salesforce to sell business to business, you are mostly likely dealing with persons who work at accounts/businesses/clients. These persons are tracked as Leads or Contacts in Salesforce. Doesn't it make sense to easily see the Account information related to the person whom you are qualifying, calling, or emailing? 

If you are just using Contacts and are simply auto-converting all your Leads in Salesforce, having visibility to Account information isn't a problem as the Contacts are already pre-connected to the Accounts upon Lead conversion or Contact creation. But if you still use Leads to qualify and disqualify your Leads, you still have a major gap in functionality to fill and that is the ability to display Account information/fields/insights on your Lead pages.

By simply using formula fields with Lookup Helper, you can achieve this Account visibility on the Lead page.

The solution is really simple to setup in Salesforce.

To set this up follow these steps:

1.  Create a custom lookup relationship to Account on the Lead object.
2. Create a lookup helper setting.
3. Select Lead as the child object.
4. Select the 'Maintain Lookup Relationship' option, and select the lookup field you created.
5. Select the 'Relate Lead when the value in the field matches the name/id of the Account' setting type.
6. Select the 'Company' field as the category field.
7. Save the setting.
8. For each field to display from the account page, implement formula field (to display account related info) from the linked account. Here are some examples of fields you might include:
   1. Account Numbers
   2. Account Industry
   3. Account State
   4. Account Type
   5. Account Record Type

You might be wondering how well does this process integrate with Lead conversion. For Leads having matching Company values which have already been converted or created as Accounts in Salesforce, Lookup Helper will find an exact match and link your Lead to the Account which Salesforce will ultimately convert into. If you are dealing with a Lead whose Company value doesn't exist as an Account in Salesforce, Lookup Helper will create the Account record for you automatically using the field mapping of your choice.

TIP #1: As with any Salesforce org, you will want to make sure that you cleanup and prevent duplicate account names in your database before implementing this solution.

TIP #2: You can follow the same directions above for anything else important to your business to display on the Lead page, such as industry or geographical area (region, state, etc).

Now that you have your Leads connected to your Account object in Salesforce, what other information is important to your org? In the Passage Technology org, I can see us implementing the following rollups using our Rollup Helper product to get information aggregated up to the Account or Industry level and then reference these field values via formula fields on the Lead page.

For example, on our lead page we might have:

Account Information Section

• Customer Type/Status (Customer/Prospect)
• # of Cases Open
• Number of Contacts
• Closed Won Opportunities At This Account
• Account Product/Service Renewal Date

Industry Information

• Products available to sell for this Industry
• Link to featured success story in this Industry
• Number of customers in this Industry
• Industry-specific win-rate

Think you have a use case for Lookup Helper? Please comment below!

Top Use Case: Set Queue Custom Object on Any Standard Object

One of the big limitations in Salesforce is the inability to set queues on Standard Objects other than Case or Lead. To overcome this limitation, one of things you will need to do is to create a custom queue object to link each object to. To do, this you will need to use Lookup Helper to set the queue for each record.

Top Use Case: Easily access aggregated rollups/metrics without complex reporting

With Lookup Helper, one of the top use cases is the ability to categorize your records by the following dimensions:

• Region
• State
• Zip Code
• Country
• Time Period
• Territory
• Product
• Account
• Lead Source

When we say categorize, we mean to group your transactional data into often-used grouping for ease of analysis. This unlocks much improved usability for your managers and individual contributors as they can now easily see an aggregated picture of things right from a Salesforce record. Once you establish categorizations such as those listed above (e.g. for example, you have setup Lookup Helper to automatically populate a Region custom lookup field on the Opportunity object), you can then use Rollup Helper to create rollups up to the parent object.

For example, drilling further into the use case of categorizing opportunities source / child records by region. You can then calculate the following with Rollup Helper without creating any more reports:

1. How many opportunities have been won in this region?
2. How many opportunities have been lost in this region?
3. How many total opportunities are there in this region?
4. What is the win rate in this region and how does it compare to other regions?
5. What is the total value of won opportunities in this region?
6. What is the average deal size of opportunities won in this region?

The beauty of all these rollup fields and metrics is that you can easily put them onto the Region page so that people can easily navigate to the Region record and see all these metrics without having to go hunt and find the report(s) that provide this information. Users can easily just click from a child record into the parent "categorization" record to get a higher level, aggregate view of data in Salesforce.