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Salesforce Activity Business Value
- Liz Enright
Analytics
Summary |
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Salesforce Activity is designed to be lightweight and efficient for users to quickly log interactions with their customers. This page outlines the benefits of this lean approach and what value can be gained without additional customisation. |
Table of Contents |
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Lean by Design
Salesforce recommends a maximum of 8 fields on any actions such as Activity (source). Adding more than 20 fields can severely impact user efficiency. Activity Reports currently have 24 fields and up to 3 related objects that need to be populated.
Activity Definitions
Activity is the general Salesforce term for a record that is a Task or an Event:
Tasks - this is for a user’s “to do list” or “have done” list which can include due dates and comments.
Events - these track meetings; these are usually face-to-face or digital and can be synced from a user’s Outlook calendar.
Think of them as a “to do” list of tasks and a diary/calendar of events – jobs to complete versus meetings to attend (including past interactions).
Tasks can be further broken down into:
Log a Call - most commonly used by sales people. It represents any interaction with a prospect of alumni that has already happened. Log a Call is helpful as it can use different page layouts to a standard New Task and can be optimised for recording interactions quickly. Log a Call will always be used for an interaction that has already taken place. It does not necessarily need to be for a call and can represent other forms of completed interactions.
New Task - something that you, or someone else you designate, is going to do in the future. This can be a task to call a prospect to follow up, send a proposal, or send a Thank You.
Email - this is used for email exchanges and can be synced directly with Salesforce directly using integration capabilities like Einstein Activity Capture.
Reporting Insights from Events and Tasks
The out-of-the-box fields recommended by Salesforce can provide a variety of insights for both trends and performance.
Salesforce Field | Reporting Insights | Example |
|---|---|---|
Subject |
| Qualification Meeting |
Due Date |
| 1/1/24 |
Assigned To |
| Liz Enright |
Name |
| Ms Jane Smith |
Related To |
| Major Gift Opportunity for Medicine |
Priority |
| High |
Comments |
| Met with Jane |
Description (for Events only) |
| This is an initial meeting with Jane to qualify her philanthropic interests, capacity, and any other connections with the University. |
