Passage Technology Blog

Dear PT, 

Managing data and data hygiene in Salesforce^® is a constant struggle at our company. Sometimes, incomplete data can be as damaging as bad data. With different people doing the data entry, it can be difficult to make sure the information is complete every time. For example, Opportunities may not have the key roles for the Contacts properly documented. Is there any easy way to identify and fix these data gaps?

Val I. Dayshon from Roll, AZ

Dear PT, 

When viewing an Account page in Salesforce^®, our company’s users would like to see a list view of the Opportunity Products associated with the Account’s various Opportunities. Is there an easy way to do this?

Attah Glence from Product Point, Nigeria

Dear PT, 

Comparisons can be an important factor in forecasting. At our company, we’d like to compare this partial year’s revenue Opportunity total for an Account to the same time period in the previous year. Are we going up, down, or flat? Salesforce^® doesn't do this out of the box. Can Rollup Helper help us?

Totul Todayt from Trend, Denmark

Dear PT, 

At our company, when users create a Salesforce^® Contact, a search is done to find if the related Account is already in our records. If they don’t find an Account, then one is created. This manual process sometimes results in duplicate Accounts being created, with identical information or differing information. Data quality suffers, relationship management is affected, and then time and resources are wasted fixing the problems. There has to be a better way.

Bette R. Dada-Highjeene from Dublin, OH

Dear PT, 

Like many Salesforce^® users, we have to manually assign Leads to their related Account. Of course, this opens up the potential for errors. It would be nice if we could automate this process and then notify the correct salesperson about the new Lead. Any thoughts on how we could easily do this?

Dom Main from Lincoln, NE

Dear PT, 

Salesforce^® functionality will let you view open Cases within your org. However, sometimes there are situations where it would be useful to view this information on a more granular level, for specific Contacts or Accounts. How could our company set up this at-a-glance list view, which also has filters for priority and status?

Dear PT, 

With every customer project, there are billable and non-billable hours required to complete the objectives. Of course, customers are very interested in proper accounting—it’s their money on the line. But for our company, the non-billable hours are a necessary cost to us for deploying resources and getting the job done. It is an important metric for measuring efficiency and billing properly, overall and in various departments. Can you help us make sure we are not unnecessarily losing money on these customer engagements?

Bud Jetting in Costa Mesa, CA

Dear PT, 

Buyer expectations are rapidly evolving. Now you can measure buyer intent in nearly real-time. However, at our company, our new Lead response time is often measured in days, not hours. Studies show that best practices require a response measured in minutes. Any ideas on how we can extend Salesforce^® capabilities to make this internal improvement?

Hawt Leede from Prospect Heights, IL

Dear PT, 

We need to better aggregate our data so various business functions can create insights. On a number of Objects, we need a way to easily rollup records scattered across numerous child, parent, and grand-parent hierarchies—for example, Accounts. However, our company has limited developer resources internally. So when we need a solution, we have to pay for outsourcing. This can be expensive, but often it is more expensive to not obtain that solution, in terms of productivity and competitiveness. Are there other options to coding?

Rhee Layshuns in Progress, PA

Dear PT, 

With Salesforce^® Contacts, you can view their Account information. But at our company, we like to classify leads as Leads, not as Contacts. But Leads don’t display Account information. How can we extend Salesforce to get this functionality?

Moe Enfo from Lead Mine, WI