Admins / Users

10 Salesforce Features You May Not Know About

By Lucy Mazalon

Even if you’re an experienced Salesforce professional with a few years’ experience under your belt, you will still be discovering Salesforce features the expansive Salesforce platform has to offer.

In this guide, I dig up 10 Salesforce features that you may not have come across – but are useful to have in your ‘back pocket’ should the need arise in your organization. Meeting user requirements with standard Salesforce features is always better than building a custom solution that is at risk of breaking with each Salesforce release.

How many of these uncommon features do you know?

1. Auto-Response Rules

Auto-response rules automatically send emails to Leads or Cases that meet certain criteria.

These can be used to let prospects know you’ve received their contact request, or assure customers you’re working on their support request.

Set multiple rules with different emails templates to take legwork from your team and still provide a good first impression. See below for two Lead Auto-Response Rule examples:

2. Enterprise Territory Management

Territory management controls Account, Opportunity and Contact access based on account criteria. This enables you to structure a sharing system that suits your sales territories. It’s common for territories to align geographically, but they can be based on other characteristics, like industry or product.

You may have heard that the original Territory Management was retired in June 2020. Now, get to grips with Enterprise Territory Management – it sounds like it’s geared only towards corporates, but it’s for organizations of all sizes, just with more flexibility than before!

Learn more!

Trailhead: Territory Management Basics

3. Multiple Currencies & Advanced Currency Management

For any organizations dealing with customers in different currencies, Salesforce’s Multiple Currencies feature is a must. Advanced Currency Management takes it a step further.

Multiple Currencies and Advanced Currency Management are two different features that are often used together for effective currency management.

  • Multiple Currencies: the ability to use multiple currencies in opportunities, forecasts, quotes, reports, and other data. Assign users different default currencies, and also change records to a certain currency.
  • Advanced Currency Management: manage dated exchange rates within Salesforce opportunities, allowing you to map a conversion rate to a specific date range. This means that if an Opportunity is ‘closed won’ in January, the opportunity amount, when converted to any currency, will be fixed for that date and won’t change in the future, regardless of any curreny fluctuations.

Currencies feature on the Sales Cloud Consultant certification, where you’re likely to get questions about activating Advanced Currency Management, and the implications of doing so.

4. Related Contacts

Related Contacts are the name of the Account related list that displays ‘Account Contact Relationships’. These are how you can define ‘relationships’ between contacts (individual people) to accounts (a business).

Not all relationships in the real world follow the classic B2B-business-cookie-cutter approach following a neat one contact to one account structure. With Account Contact Relationships you can reconstruct reality with networks of individuals working with multiple accounts, or working with accounts in different capacities (eg. employee, agent, partner, affiliate, contractor etc.)

Learn more!

Salesforce Account Contact Relationship Fields – Relate a Contact to Multiple Accounts

5. Account Teams

Salesforce Account Teams received a major upgrade in the Winter ‘20 release, which resolved the multiple limitations it had since the feature transitioned to Lightning. An Account Team is simply a group of users who work on an account together, identifying who is working on an account, by Team Roles. 

Admins should consider enabling this feature to manage larger sales teams that require more flexibility in account ownership.

Learn more! 

Best Practices for Using Salesforce Account Teams

Trailhead: Sales Team Collaboration

6. Reporting Snapshots

Salesforce Snapshots allow you to take a picture of a set of records and freeze the data on them for future reference. Bonus: they’re included out-of-the-box in all Salesforce orgs, and are easy to set up. 

The most common use case is Opportunity Pipeline Change over time, but you can also use Snapshot to capture Case volume-per-rep changing over time, API Calls trends, or the number of Leads owned by users, over time.

Snapshots involve creating a custom object to hold the results of the snapshot. 

Learn more!

How to Set Up Salesforce Reporting Snapshots

7. Content Delivery

Content Delivery allows you to deliver documents (PowerPoint, Word, PDF files, and others) to a recipient by providing a custom link to an optimized web-based version for easy online viewing, or download.

Content Deliveries have sending options including password protection (optional/required), locking down the option to download, and notify the sender when the content is viewed.

8. Salesforce to Salesforce

Salesforce to Salesforce enables you to share your CRM data with other companies using Salesforce, usually between partner organizations that work on the same Opportunities and mutual customer Accounts.

Native to the Salesforce platform, Salesforce to Salesforce does not require custom development – of course, it will need to be set up to only share the data you want to share.

9. VSCode

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a free and open source product from Microsoft, available on Mac, Windows and Linux. It’s a ‘developer’ tool that Salesforce Admins sometimes ‘borrow’ to speed up Salesforce configuration.

In Paul’s Introduction to VSCode guide, the example he works through is: add two custom fields under the ‘Amount’ field on 15 Opportunity page layouts that contain the ‘Amount’ field. To edit each individual page, ‘time consuming’ is an understatement!

VSCode appears on the Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator exam where candidates need to ‘describe the options available to move metadata between environments (change sets, Salesforce extensions for Visual Studio Code).”

Learn more!

Introduction to SFDX and VSCode for Admins

VSCode for Salesforce Admins: A Deeper Dive

10. Custom Settings

Custom Settings can be used to update constantly changing elements without having update individual elements one by one. For example, Custom Settings can be used within Flows to update constantly changing elements without jumping into Flow Builder each time.

Learn more!

How to use Custom Settings in Salesforce Flows  

Are you a “Salesforce Super Saiyan”? Next, check out “21 Salesforce Features Everyone Should Know in 2021” and how many you tick off! 

This article was originally published under “10 Obscure Salesforce Features” at the end of 2014. Reading it was like a time capsule when I saw “Big Deal Alerts” – who remembers those from the ADM201 exam?!

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

Comments:

    Lou Guberti-Ng
    September 13, 2021 5:21 pm
    Does anyone have experience using Content Deliveries in Lightning? I've enabled the feature per the help documentation and this blog https://admin.salesforce.com/blog/2016/send-content-easily-lightning-email but it doesn't look like there's the ability to prevent downloads or require a password for access like in Classic. Those two features are must haves for my intended use case
    Shailly Sharma
    September 13, 2021 8:20 pm
    Thanks for this article. This are very cool features. I loved VS Code integration with Salesforce Org. Pretty much we started all customization using code and deploying it with pipeline

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