Makepositive | Part 1 of How To Improve Your Salesforce Experience

Blog 1 in the Quick Tips Blog Series

At makepositive we are lucky enough to work on a huge variety of projects across multiple sectors. This means, as consultants, we are exposed to a vast array of Salesforce functionality, both standard and across the different Salesforce clouds such as Service, Sales, Experience. The culture at makepositive has always been about sharing knowledge and learning from one another. This is why we have decided to share some of our top tips with you, our wider community of Salesforce colleagues and customers.

Every few weeks the amazing consulting team will be putting together some of their favourite features, old and new, to help others make the most of their Salesforce system.

Quick Actions to reference related data:

Our colleague Louise French, a Principal Implementation Consultant, has been using Quick Actions to get around limitations on showing data from related objects. Here’s her top tip to avoid hitting “Spanning Relationship” limits:

Louise often gets requests from clients to display values from a parent record (or Parent’s parent!) on a child. For example, displaying the Account’s address on an Opportunity. Salesforce allows only 15 ‘Spanning Relationships’ on an object, which means that if we create a cross object formula for every request these relationships can get used up quickly and before you know it you can’t add any more.

If the value only needs to be viewed and doesn’t need to be referenced then a Quick Action can be created on the Parent object with the relevant fields. This can then be shown in a ‘Related Record’ component on the Lightning Page to display this information. This component type can be set up to reference any action on any object connected through a lookup, and you can hide it if it’s only relevant in certain situations:

Salesforce Chrome extensions:

Our colleague Tom Fray, an Implementation Consultant, has some details on a few of his favourite and most helpful Salesforce Chrome extensions. The first is Salesforce Inspector. This puts a button on the right hand side of all the record detail pages. It performs a number of functions, but the main one is to view (and edit!) any field on that record, even if it isn’t on the page layout. This saves time as you can quickly view and edit hidden fields without adding and removing them from the page layout.

The second is Quick Log In As. This adds a button to Chrome that brings up the last User list view that you used. You can search for a user, and login as them without going to Set Up. It then takes you straight to the record you were on. This is incredibly useful for quickly testing record and field visibility as different users.

Dynamic Actions:

Sarah Neville, an Implementation Consultant, often gets requirements to show/hide actions on a record, based on record values/user criteria. Instead of creating a bunch of record types, page layouts and automation to achieve this, Dynamic Actions make it simple. So, how can you use Dynamic Actions?

Similar to how you add components to Lightning Record Pages and set the component visibility, you can add actions and set the action visibility.
To do this, navigate to a Lightning Record Page and select the Highlights Panel component. You will notice that there is a box prompting you to upgrade to Dynamic Actions. Click ‘Upgrade Now’. You can then choose to migrate actions from a page layout or start from scratch.
Note: Once you upgrade, the actions will be driven from the Lightning Page Highlights Panel and not the Page Layout. If for any reason you want to undo this, you will need to remove the Highlights Panel component and drag it back onto the Lightning Page again.
Once upgraded, you can select the ‘Add Action’ button and choose an action from a list of Standard Actions, Quick Actions, Global Actions and Productivity Actions. Then you can set the action visibility by adding filters in the same way you do for component visibility (use advanced filters for further granularity, such as lookups to related records, permissions or user filters, including profile and role).

Dynamic Actions are GA for custom objects (mobile & desktop) and, as of Spring 21, they are GA for the following standard objects (desktop only): Account, Case, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity. Dynamic actions for all other standard objects are Beta for desktop. You can read more about Dynamic Actions here.

We hope these tips have helped you explore some new functionality within Salesforce. Please let us know how you get on and feel free to share any of your own top tips in the comments, at makepositive we are all about sharing knowledge to build a stronger Salesforce community.

Stay tuned for more of the teams top tips in the coming weeks and if you would like to speak to one of makepositive’s Salesforce experts about how you can improve your Salesforce experience please reach out to us at [email protected] or complete the Contact Form on our website.

Author: Jackie Beckett with Louise French, Tom Fray & Sarah Neville

Quick Tips for Improving your Salesforce Experience – Part 1

Blog 1 in the Quick Tips Blog Series

Quick Actions to reference related data:

Salesforce Chrome extensions: