Reduce Clutter and Boost Productivity in Salesforce

NEW from the Tether Tips Blog – Reduce Clutter and Boost Productivity in Salesforce 

A really practical tip from one of our Lead Salesforce Consultants Rory McDonnell this week.

Introduction:

As someone who has seen a lot of Salesforce Orgs over the years it never ceases to amaze me the amount of unnecessary clutter on the page. Users will often get excited and have lots of requests about things they would like to add to their Salesforce instance (fields, buttons etc) but won’t give much thought as to what should be removed.

Any time I am consulting with a company, either in a brand new instance of Salesforce, or an existing set-up, I am always conscious as to what unused or irrelevant clutter can be removed. Having a simple clean instance not only looks pleasant, but it also makes the user experience a lot easier. 

There are four main things to look at when doing the initial decluttering.

  • Tabs
  • Fields
  • Buttons
  • Related Lists

Taking the time to go through each of these and removing any of the excess is something any good admin/consultant should do at least once a year.

Take a look at all the tabs along the top of the page. Are you using Leads, if not then no need to display this object and confuse users. How about Campaigns? Nope, then remove them too. Do this for all unused tabs. To do this you need to go into setup and then ‘app manager’, find the app in question (in this case ‘Sales’) and remove the unused tabs.

Fields:

People tend to add too many fields to each object in order to ‘cover all bases’ but in reality the majority are rarely, if ever, used. I’ve been in Sales jobs before and there is no way I am filling out hundreds of fields on an opportunity! On any object I’d hazard a guess that in most normal sales processes people would fill out a max of 20-40 fields over the duration of the deal. Don’t have 100+ fields on the page that need to be scrolled through, confusing the user and making it hard to find the information they need.

Buttons:

Buttons are another area that can be decluttered. Out-of-the-box Salesforce provides a number of buttons/actions. Just because they are provided doesn’t mean you would need them or want to use them. Determine what functionality you want to have with the specific object and then only leave the buttons that meet that requirement. If leads don’t need to be submitted for approval then you should remove that button. If it doesn’t make sense to create a new case from a lead then get rid of that too. Remove everything that doesn’t make sense for your business requirements. 

Removing these buttons can be done either on the page layout, or thanks to a recent update, by opening the lightning page and using dynamic actions.

Related Lists:

The final place to declutter is the related lists. Similar to buttons, Salesforce out of the box will often add all related lists to each object. Each business will use a subset of these lists so again I would recommend removing all the unnecessary related lists. Just leave what you need, whether that is one related list or twenty.

The related lists displayed can be chosen on the page layout of each object.

Here at Tether we promote a periodic Salesforce Audit, and also taking feedback from Users to ensure that their workflow stays efficient and productive. Reducing Clutter in your Org streamlines processes and takes the heavy lifting out of your day. Sometimes the minimalist approach can really boost efficiency in terms of record creation and update. Why not take a look at decluttering and boosting your teams productivity along the way.

I hope this helps you on your way to a clean and tidy Salesforce Org and happier and more productive users.

Thanks for reading, We hope this has helped.

The Tether Team

#salesforce #salesforcecrm #tethertips #crm

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