Launchpad Lesson 19 - List Views

Hey, so before we get into this lesson, I just want to say a couple of things.

You’re probably watching these lessons one at a time, stopping them, going into Salesforce, and setting up your system.

Now, in our experience, you’re either in one of two camps. You’re either A, following along, getting it all, loving it, trying out new things beyond what I’m even showing, and really digging it, or B, you’re getting really frustrated. You’re tired. You’ve been at this for days, if not weeks, and you’re really starting to question why you got Salesforce in the first place.

Well, for this second group, let me share this.

Listen, I totally get it. This is completely understandable. I know because I was there myself.

You’ve got to understand that Salesforce is a massive piece of very, very sophisticated and sometimes complicated technology.

Remember when you bought your first-ever iPhone? You’d never used one before, but you hit the main button and then, bang, you pretty much had it figured out in about five minutes.

Well, this ain’t that.

Understand this, though: If you’ve been able to keep up to this point and you’re able to finish the rest of the lessons, you’ll be in a position where you are so much further ahead than so many people already using Salesforce.

You will be bringing a tremendous amount of value to the business you work at.

And your users, while they may not thank you outright, will really be the beneficiaries of a very well-designed system.

So keep it up. We don’t have much further to go. In fact, the next set of lessons is going to really drive excitement among your sales teams.

Salesforce reports are where users really start to see the power of why you’re using this tool in the first place.

So, congratulations for getting this far. Keep it up.

Now, let’s look at the next lesson.

Salesforce list views are wonderful ways for your users to filter and sort records for a specific object. Think of list views as similar to an Excel spreadsheet.

Most of your users should be pretty comfortable with the concept of tracking items in Excel. List views allow them to do the same thing, but without building the spreadsheets and with the data in the list automatically updating whenever changes are made to the records.

Let’s get into it.

As the admin, you can create new list views for your users, but it’s a good idea that eventually they understand how to create list views for themselves. We suggest making sure your users are trained to build their own views.

There’s a lot of utility they’ll get from segmenting records in a meaningful way, and you don’t want to be stuck having to create a new list view every time a user has a request.

A list view is the Salesforce equivalent of Excel. It’s simply a table of data about the records of any one object that can be filtered to include what we want to see.

The difference is that we don’t update the table, although we can. Instead, by keeping our records up to date, the list views will always show the most current version of the data.

Your users should know how to build their own list views. Sorry, did we say that already?

This is simply the best way to know that they’ll understand how Salesforce works and how to get value out of it by getting the data they need to perform their jobs.

Let’s have a look at a very simple concept for a list view.

In this example, we will build a list of all our accounts in California. Because we want a list of accounts, we start from the Accounts tab and then click on the cog icon for List View Controls. From here, select New.

We’re prompted to give our list a name.

In this case, we’ll call it “All Accounts in California.” The List API Name will automatically populate.

By default, when you get Salesforce, only system administrators will see the option at the bottom to create list views for other users. We’d suggest just leaving it this way.

Once your users know how to create a list view, the only option they really need is “Only I can see this list view.” List views are personal productivity tools, and there’s no reason a user should be building a list for anyone but themselves.

Then click Save.

The filter selection will automatically appear. It is from here that we decide which data we want to see on this list.

The first option is to select the standard filter for account ownership by clicking anywhere in the box. The options are All Accounts or My Accounts.

Because this list is for all accounts in California, we will change the setting to All Accounts and click Done.

Now we’ll add another filter.

This is a three-step process where we select the field, the operator, and the value.

To select the field, we’ll manually scroll through the list. In this case, it will be Billing State or Province.

The list of fields is simply all of the fields on the Account object.

The operator, as you can see, is a list of mathematical-like equations.

For this example, we’ll keep it as Equals.

Then, the value we key in is simply the two-letter state abbreviation. In this case, CA for California.

We click Done, and then we click Save.

We advise you to hide your filter panel by clicking the X once you’re done to give you more space on the page.

The resulting list shows that we have six accounts in California.

Next, we want to ensure that our list has the columns that matter the most to us. Perhaps we’d like to include the street address and the city as well so that we can prospect properly.

In order to do this, we’ll click the List View Controls cog again and click Select Fields to Display.

From the list of available fields, we’ll manually scroll to find Billing Street and Billing City. We’ll move them over to the list of visible fields by selecting them and then clicking the sideways arrow pointing in the direction of the visible fields.

We’ll get rid of Account Owner Alias in the same manner, but in the opposite direction, and replace it with the Owner First Name and Owner Last Name, which are easier for the user than the five-character alias field.

Once they’re in the Visible Fields column, we can arrange them by using the up or down arrows.

When we’re satisfied with the ordering, we can click Save.

Now, if you’re thinking you’d like contact names on here as well, well, unfortunately, the list view won’t do this. List views are for single objects only. We’d need a true report to do that.

Fortunately, though, the Reports lesson is up next.

Let’s say that we want to modify this list and include all accounts on the West Coast.

Instead of starting from scratch, we can take this list and make changes to it. Click the List View Controls cog and select Clone.

Get rid of the text “Copy of” and call this “All Accounts on the West Coast.”

Now, to edit the Billing State and Province filter, click in the box and amend the value field by adding Oregon and Washington using their two-letter state codes and separating the values with a comma.

Click Done, then Save, then the X.

Now you have two custom account lists, and they show up in this directory whenever you click the drop-down arrow by the current list.

The last demo I want to show is perhaps the most important list your salespeople will ever use. It’s a list representing their opportunity pipeline with a neat twist called the Kanban board.

From the Opportunities tab, advise your sales team to click on the drop-down arrow beside Recently Viewed and select the pre-built list called My Opportunities.

Now go to the chart icon beside the Controls cog, and from here select Kanban.

Kanban is a Japanese term used in a lean manufacturing system to show how components move along a production line. Salesforce uses it to display records that are part of a process such as this.

It is a great visual display of a salesperson’s pipeline.

These orange triangular warning signs indicate that there is no new task or event associated with the opportunity.

So, it’s a great reminder to create a new task or event to move the deal forward.

Have them pin this board to their Opportunities tab so it’s the first thing they’ll see when they click here.

Okay, that’s the basics of a list view.

Once again, we feel strongly that all of your users should understand this functionality. They really should understand how to pull data out of Salesforce in a meaningful way.

If they can create their own list views, it tells you that they understand how the data model works. They’re more likely to be enthusiastic Salesforce users, and they’ll eat up less of your time.

Next up, Reports.

Talk soon!