Launchpad Lesson 17 - Activities

Activities in Salesforce refer to the interactions that your sales teams engage in with their customers and prospects. They're one of the best ways to track both what's happened with your customers and prospects and, just as importantly, what's going to happen next.

A very nice feature of Salesforce activities is that they require very little to no modification by the administrator if you don't feel like it.

The four standard Salesforce activities work very well out of the box, although you may at some point want to consider utilizing an Outlook or Gmail integration solution. That's beyond the scope of this course, but we've included a link for more information in the lesson.

Let's have a deeper dive.

There are four activities that Salesforce tracks. They are labeled Log a Call, New Task, New Event, and Email.

We'll get into what each of these means in just a second. But first, let's look at where we're going to go when we capture our activities.

The way Salesforce works is that activities should be stored on multiple records.

When a salesperson is working on an opportunity, we recommend logging the activity against the opportunity first. Then the salesperson can relate that activity to the contact or multiple contacts if they like, and it will automatically get stored on the account record by default.

All of the activities, either ones to be completed or those that were completed, will be stored on these records under the Activities tab.

This means that any user looking at either an account, contact, or opportunity record will see the activities of the salesperson.

Let's go into Salesforce and see how this works.

Let's look at the Log a Call action first. Log a Call is a great action for your sales users to become familiar with.

Log a Call is used whenever a salesperson wants to record an interaction with a customer or prospect that has just happened. It's important to note that Log a Call does not have to mean a phone call. It could be any form of discussion that we just had that we feel is important enough to capture in Salesforce.

Although it's funny that Salesforce uses an old-style telephone handset as the icon for this activity.

Here's a demonstration.

Notice how I'm starting on the opportunity record.

The user needs to ensure that they're working from the Log a Call tab, and they'll see this line saying, "Recap your call." Once they click on it, they'll be presented with a subject line that is prepopulated with the word "Call."

This has always been one of my big pet peeves. Rather than accept the word "Call," show your users how to override it. Ignore these other ridiculous suggestions and replace it with a short, three- to five-word descriptive phrase that more clearly describes the nature of the interaction.

Examples could be Intro First Call, On-Site Discovery Call, or Conducted Product Demo.

This way, the nature of the call will be easily understood by anyone just looking at the Subject field. Trust me, your sales leaders will thank you for this.

The Comments field is for additional details that the user may want to capture. This is pretty self-explanatory, but this next one isn't.

Train your users to relate the call activity to the contact or contacts they're selling to. This ensures that this activity is now related to multiple records: the opportunity, the contact or contacts, and, by default, the account.

When we click Save, here's what happens.

The call record, with a nice, clear subject, falls into the Completed Activity section, categorized by month and year.

If you go to the contact record, it's also in the same place. And the same thing goes for the account record.

All four of your Salesforce activities will behave the same way.

Now, let's look at New Task.

A task is like a reminder to you or someone else to do something, most often used by the salesperson to move an opportunity forward.

By default, a task has a blank subject line and a date. Starting from the opportunity record under the Activities tab, the user will click New Task and complete the Subject field with a short, descriptive phrase.

Something like Follow Up an Inquiry, Send a New Quote, Monthly Check-In, or any forward-looking activity that we want to do to keep our sales process alive.

The user will then select a date to complete the task by, relate the task to the appropriate contact or contacts, and leave everything else as is.

When a new task is logged, it sits in the Upcoming and Overdue section of the record. We won't show it, but this task is also on the contact and account records, too.

When a task is overdue, the date will appear in red.

Once the task is completed, the user must check the box to mark it as such, and it will fall into the Past Activity section, sorted by the month and year that it happened.

This isn't the only place to complete tasks. However, Salesforce provides a list of all the user's tasks with a dedicated tab called, you guessed it, Tasks.

When you click on the Tasks tab, the user will see all of their recently viewed tasks. However, we recommend that the user change the display from Recently Viewed Tasks to Open Tasks and then pin it to the tab.

These lists are called list views, which we'll be covering in more detail in an upcoming lesson.

From this view, the user can easily scan all of their upcoming tasks, make edits, and mark them as complete once they've been done.

Remember, at the end of the lesson on Opportunity setup, I discussed how I preferred using activities over the Next Step field on the opportunity.

Well, this is why.

The New Task feature allows the user to set up a next step, track it with a date that will show as overdue if not completed in time, have a dedicated place to see all of their tasks, mark them as completed, and build a running log of completed tasks.

Next Step is simply a text field that doesn't include any of this functionality.

A New Event is just like a New Task in that it is something that is going to happen in the future, with one key distinction.

A New Task is marked just by a due date, whereas a New Event is marked by a date as well as a start time and an end time.

A Salesforce event is really the same thing as an Outlook calendar meeting, typically 30 or 60 minutes long.

The other key difference between a task and an event is that a task must be marked as complete by the user in order to drop down to the Past Activity section.

Whereas an event will automatically drop into the Past Activity section at the event's start time.

By the way, if you think it makes more sense to drop the event into Past Activities at the event's end time, join the club.

I always felt that dropping the event into Past Activities at the start time is a quirky way to handle this, but nevertheless, that's what Salesforce does.

The fourth and final activity that Salesforce tracks is Email.

Now, you may or may not see Email up here as one of the options. Having it here gives your users the ability to send emails right out of Salesforce.

Whether they'll do this or not is debatable. But if it's not here and you really want it, here's what you need to do.

From Setup, look for Deliverability and change this access level to All Email.

Now go back to the record and refresh the page.

There it is.

Now your users can create emails to send to contacts and store them against the three sales records: accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

Now, as we said at the start, your sales users are likely more comfortable with either Outlook or Gmail as their email and calendar tools, and getting them to use Salesforce's Email and New Event actions may be challenging.

In this case, an Outlook or Gmail integration solution is really preferred.

Next up, a lesson on communicating with Chatter.