Salesforce.com For Dummies. Paz Jon

we delve into the mechanics of navigating Salesforce, familiarize yourself with these basic terms:

      ❯❯ Salesforce: The secure website that your users log in to that contains your customer information. Salesforce.com, Inc., offers a family of products used by hundreds of thousands of customers, but each company’s secure website is separate from the other websites and may look different in order to suit that company’s unique needs. When we use the terms Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud, those are parts of Salesforce specifically meant for use by sales and marketing or by a support organization.

      ❯❯ Home tab: The main page that appears when you log in to Salesforce or click the Home tab.

      ❯❯ Tabs: Clickable words appear in a row across the top of any Salesforce page. When selected, a word is highlighted and looks like a tab. Each tab represents a major module in which your company needs to know some information. By clicking a tab, you go to a tab-specific home page. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears.

      ❯❯ Tab home pages: These are the pages where you go to find, organize, and manage specific information related to a particular tab. For example, to access your opportunity records, you could go to the Opportunities home page.

      ❯❯ Object: Often used interchangeably with the name of a tab. Generally used by administrators when talking about creating custom apps. For example, you may tell a user to “click the Account tab,” or you may hear your system administrator refer to the “Account object.”

      ❯❯ Apps: Tabs that have been grouped together and given a name, providing you with the convenience of seeing only those tabs most relevant to you.

      ❯❯ Record: A record is a page in Salesforce made up of a bunch of fields that hold information to describe a specific object. For example, a contact record typically contains fields pertinent to a person, including name, title, phone number, and email address. A record is displayed on a detail page.

      ❯❯ Detail page: A web page that shows both the saved record and a set of related lists pertinent to the record.

      ❯❯ Chatter feed: If you have Chatter enabled (see Chapter 6), you’ll see the center column of your logged-in Salesforce experience with a chronological list of updates made by you or other co-workers. This feed is a critical way for Salesforce users within your organization to communicate with each other.

      ❯❯ Search bar: In the upper-left portion of your Salesforce page, a search field resides as another way you can quickly find companies or contacts. Search results returned can be customized to return only a certain type of record.

      

We often use the terms record and detail page interchangeably. From a detail page, you can perform and track a variety of tasks related to the specific record. For example, if you have and are looking at an Account detail page for Cisco, you see fields about the company and lists of other records related to Cisco.

      ❯❯ Related lists: Lists that comprise other records linked to the record that you’re looking at. For example, the Account detail page for Acme may display related lists of contacts, opportunities, activities, and so on associated with that company.

      ❯❯ Sidebar: Located at the left margin of a Salesforce page, the sidebar displays messages and alerts, custom links, recent items, and a drop-down list that you can use to create new records.

Accessing Salesforce

      You need to log in to your account to access your company’s instance of Salesforce because every company’s Salesforce website is different, and Salesforce.com goes to great lengths to protect your company’s information.

       Setting up a password

      The first time you log in to the Salesforce service, you’ll do so from an email you receive containing your Salesforce login information. To set your password, follow these steps:

      1. Open the email and click the link provided.

      A page appears, prompting you to set a new password and security question.

      2. Complete the fields.

      Be sure to select a question and provide an answer that can verify your identity if you forget your password. Use this password from now on unless your administrator resets the password.

      3. When you’re done, click Save.

      The Salesforce home page appears.

       Logging in

      You log in to Salesforce just as you would any other secure website.

      To log in, open a browser and follow these steps:

      1. In your browser’s address bar, type https://login.salesforce.com and then press Enter.

The Salesforce.com login page, shown in Figure 3-1, appears.

      

To save yourself steps when logging in, bookmark the login page in your favorite web browser.

      2. Enter your username and password, and then click the Log In button.

      Your username is typically your corporate email address. Click the Remember Me check box if you want your computer to remember it. After you click Log In, you may be asked to register your mobile phone. This is an additional, optional security step. After this step, your main home page appears.

       FIGURE 3-1: 1 Logging in to Salesforce.

      

For security purposes, Salesforce notices when you’re trying to log in to the website from a different computer or a different browser than the one you first used. If this happens, make sure that you have access to your email or mobile phone (remember when Salesforce asked you to register your mobile phone number?) because Salesforce emails or text messages you a confirmation code to confirm that you are who you say you are.

Navigating the Home Page

      Every time you log in to Salesforce, you begin at your home page. The look and feel of the elements on your home page are similar to other users’ home pages, but the tasks and events that appear in the body of the page are specific to you.

      Use the home page to manage your calendar and tasks, stay informed of the latest Chatter conversations, jump to other areas by clicking tabs, or access recent items by using the sidebar. If your company has customized the home page, you may also see key charts or graphs from your company’s dashboards (visual snapshots of key performance metrics based on your custom report data).

       Finding records with Search

      At the top of every Salesforce page, you’ll find the Global Search bar. You can find a majority of the information that you want by using Search. To search for information, follow these steps:

      1. At the top of Salesforce, enter keywords into the Search field and then click the Search button.

A Search Results page appears, as shown in Figure 3-2. Salesforce organizes the search results in lists according to the major types of records, including accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities.

      2. Scroll down the page. If you find a record that you want to look at, click a link in the Name column for the row that represents that record.

      The detail page appears, allowing