Hey everybody,

I'm hoping some other folks have had similar needs as this and come across some creative ways to solve the problem.  I am trying to come up with a way that we can track what products our clients are using at the account level.  I was hoping to keep this fairly automated, which meant a multi-select picklist is out since you can't update that with a workflow rule.

We have conservatively 10 different products a client could be leveraging.  What are some of the ways you have found to help automate the management of that list depending on closed/won opportunities or some other data elements?

Any ideas or feedback anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.  Let me know if there's any other detail I can provide.

Thanks!

Marc

Hello,

When we convert a lead to an account (or more specifically convert a lead to a contact that creates a new account in the process) is there a way for us to turn off the address and phone number of that lead being populated automatically at the account level.  More often than not the number and address we have for that lead are their desk number and the address of a branch office or something like that, so we don't want that carrying over and being listed as the main phone number and address of the account when it gets created.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Hello,

I believe contacts that are created from an account automatically populate the phone number and address of the account as an out of the box feature.  We work with organizations that have branches and offices all over the United States and this autopopulation is doing more harm than good for us as contacts get entered and the wrong information about their phone number and location is left on the record.

Is there a way to turn this autopopulation off?  I'd rather these fields stay blank than wrong.

Thanks!

Hi,

we are currently exploring using salesforce calendaring to track and book our sales teams calendars while attending a trade show.  it looks like the standard fucntionality for a public calendar won't work since we can add an event to both the public calendar but also tie it to that sales rep as well so they can see their individual prospect meetings but also their scheduled booth time.

a possible workaround was to create a "resource" for the trade show, so a resource called "New England Expo" which allows us to then keep track of the scheduling for the event overall as well as keep each rep's individual events tied to their own calendars.  however, the problem with this is that we can double-book the resource, because it's entirely likely that we'll have different reps meeting with different prospects at the same time or some people at the booth while other people are meeting with prospects that we'd like to keep as separate events on the calendar. 

is there a different way for us to try to capture this within salesforce, can we at least let salesforce double book a resource or is there some other way that might help us better keep track of these trade show schedules?

thank you very much for your help.

Hi,

I'm trying to export our contacts from multiple accounts, and am using a query that looks like this

select id,ownerid,..., from Contact where AccountId =('00587jhhjh79hjj','00578nhg8hujj'.....)

and I am getting an error that it did not expect the ( in the line.

Is there a different way I need to write this command to pull the contacts from multiple accounts at one time or is this not possible?

Thanks for any assistance!

We currently have a dashboard component which is using a formula on our report to show us the Total Minimum Contract Value of an opportunity.  (it;s just the sum o fthe Amount field)

For this example, the underlying report is showing us the correct value, 80,600.  The dashboard component this report feeds however is showing 81K.  Why is this rounding up and how can we change this to show the real value?

Hello again,

We're trying to build a report that will work as follows:

We want the report to be summarized by account and show us two things

1) Cases opened within a set period of time (like Last 7 Days)

2) Cases closed within the same timeframe

The report should not be the same cases that have opened and closed in the last 7 days.  it should look like this

Cases opened last 7 days

Andy America

Case #1123

            1124

            1125

Cases Closed Last 7 Days

Andy America

Case #1108

            1112

             1123

We'd have more of the standard colums in place, case owner, comments, stuff like that.

Can anybody help with how we can pull this into one report?  We can do two different reports easily, cases opened on this account, cases closed on this account but we'd like to get this information onto one report.  Any assistance would be awesome.

Thanks!

Hi all,

Our particular forecasting model doesn't allow us to use the standard Amount field on the opportunities as an accurate measure of a deal's worth.  We forecast based on Total Minimum Contract value.

I've explored using revenue scheduling but since we can't change it on the fly it isn't a good standin for the term length of the agreement.  Our workaround is to have a product line item for Total Minimum Contract value and then have the reps omit all the other products from their Forecasts when they submit them but this is in no way a scalable model and is fairly time consuming.

Can I make any changes to the Amount field or point forecasting to a different field to make this more efficient?

Ideally I'd like the amount field to either be formulated by something else or if I had the ability to have the amount field populated as the sum of only a particular product Type I could get it down with that as well.  From what I've read so far I may just be out of luck so I'm hoping somebody out here has a similar environment and may have come up with a good way to handle this.

I don't know if this is a limitation of Salesforce or I'm just missing something glaringly obvious, but my understanding of Field Updates is that you can update fields on objects other than the one the workflow is firing off of as long as there is a related object.

By default, aren't campaign members related to either a Lead or a Contact?  There is a hyperlink right to that record on the campaign member detail page.  So why can't I drive a field update on either of those objects through a campaign member workflow?

Do I really have to create brand new lookup fields in order to allow these workflow rules to work?

We use a particlar pipeline methodology at my company that a rep should have 3X his monthly quota in his 30 day pipeline and 9X their quota in their 90+ day pipeline.

I'm trying to build a report that will then support a dashboard that ultimately looks like this:

Example

I fully get how to set the breakpoints, etc so we get it color coded how we want after it is set, but where I am running into trouble is the report that would support this as a single dash.

I can't figure out how to get one report to give me a sum of their pipeline for all opportunities with close date less than or equal to 30 days and then another column that sums their greater than or equal to 90 days opportunities.

If I can help explain this any further please let me know.

Thanks for any assistance.

I have the following validation rule written thus far to use a Vlookup on a custom object to verify that another record has not been created with the same name

and(
        Name = VLOOKUP        
            ($ObjectType.Finale_Asset__c.Fields.Name,
            $ObjectType.Finale_Asset__c.Fields.Name, Name ),
    not(
     Id=VLOOKUP
         ( $ObjectType.Finale_Asset__c.Fields.Id ,$ObjectType.Finale_Asset__c.Fields.Name, Name )))

This indexes against all other Finale Assets to confirm the name is not the same and then does a check to make sure that it is not producing an error message because it found itself.

I need to expand this to include another field, a picklist with different asset types.

Ultimately the rule should work as follows.

An individual can not create a new record with the same name and type as an existing record.  A record can have the same name and a different type.

We could have Name = Doc A  Type = Document and Name = Doc A Type = Rule but not

Name = Doc A Type = Document and Name = Doc A  Type = Document.

Can anybody provide some assistance in getting the picklist portion of the rule included in this validation rule.  Where I'm coming across trouble is becuase it is a picklist, there is a limited number of formulas to try and work around this with, since we can't do another VLOOKUP against a picklist.

Thanks!

Hi

We're currently putting together a customized version of Assets to track which pieces of our intellectual property are involved in any given service request.

There will be multiple types of assets, right now these are being differentiated through a picklist (although I forsee a potential solution in utilizing it as a record type instead)

Two examples of types would be Document or Rule.

We do not want to have any two documents with the same name, any two rules with the same name, etc.  However, we could have one document and one rule that have the same name.  So we could have Type: Document  Name: BetaGamma  and Type: Rule  Name: BetaGamma

Is there a way for me to run checks either via workflow on record creation or on record edit or using validation rules to error out whenever a record is trying to be saved that shares a type AND name with an existing record?

Thanks for your help.

I haven't been able to find any indiciation this functionality is available.  We have bi-weekly salesmeetings and I'd like to automate reports to each of the sales managers of their direct report's pipelines in line with those meetings.  Is there a way to schedule a report to hit bi weekly or only every week?

Thanks.

Hello,

We are implementing some new pipeline requirements of our sales people and would like the visual aid of a dashboard to be able to show them quickly whether or not they are meeting the requirements.

What I'm trying to find out is, aside from creating a new dashboard category for each of our sales people and having them set that as their dashboards, is there a way for us to set dashboards for individual users on the backend without having them do anything.

So we create a dashboard that shows Salesguy A's pipeline metrics and expose it only on Salesguy A's homepage, Salesguy B's pipeline metrics are visible on salesguy B's homepage, etc.

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm trying to export all of the leads from my database that were created on 02/10/2011.  I know for the purposes of the data loader it needs to be in the format 2011-02-10T00:00:00.000Z to be read by the data loader.  However when formatted that way, the data loader isn't erroring out, but I'm not getting any data returned.

Has anybody used the data loader to do this and could suggest where I may be going wrong here?

Thanks!

I think I've found myself between a rock and a hard place.

We have two different business units.  As a function of what they do, they would need to see different dashboards, be concerned with different objects within salesforce, etc.

Is it possible to create a "virtual" home for business group B by creating a secondary Home Page Layout and then pointing their relevant dashboards, security/visiblity settings towards that, or can we for all intents and purposes clone the home tab so we have a brand new instance of the home tab to skin their way and point things to/from?

doing this with some salesforce objects is simple since we can create new record types, such as for leads, opportunities, etc and dictate what the default type is based on user profiles.

We're looking into the ability to resolve a parent and child case in parallel.

we have a couple of different service groups, so for example, a case could be opened in general support, and a determination is made that some work needs to be done by group A on physical hardware, and some work needs to be done by Group B for coding changes.

We now have two tickets related to a master that are operating in parallel and we want to be able to monitor the status of the master, such that when each of the two children are resolved, the master ticket can be closed.  But if the children aren't resolved, the parent shouldn't be able to be closed because the issue is still open.

I'm thinking it may be possible to put some workflow and validation rules behind this, but I'm wondering if somebody is aware of a more efficient and reliable way to get this done and can point me in the right direction.

Thanks

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to change the name of the Case Comments related list specifically.  I see in the page layout it says "can't customize this list" but does that also apply to the name?

For our organization we'd like for the Case Comments section to be known as Client Comments and we'll have a separate section for internal comments. 

Thanks for your help

Hi,

we are currently exploring using salesforce calendaring to track and book our sales teams calendars while attending a trade show.  it looks like the standard fucntionality for a public calendar won't work since we can add an event to both the public calendar but also tie it to that sales rep as well so they can see their individual prospect meetings but also their scheduled booth time.

a possible workaround was to create a "resource" for the trade show, so a resource called "New England Expo" which allows us to then keep track of the scheduling for the event overall as well as keep each rep's individual events tied to their own calendars.  however, the problem with this is that we can double-book the resource, because it's entirely likely that we'll have different reps meeting with different prospects at the same time or some people at the booth while other people are meeting with prospects that we'd like to keep as separate events on the calendar. 

is there a different way for us to try to capture this within salesforce, can we at least let salesforce double book a resource or is there some other way that might help us better keep track of these trade show schedules?

thank you very much for your help.

Hi

We're currently putting together a customized version of Assets to track which pieces of our intellectual property are involved in any given service request.

There will be multiple types of assets, right now these are being differentiated through a picklist (although I forsee a potential solution in utilizing it as a record type instead)

Two examples of types would be Document or Rule.

We do not want to have any two documents with the same name, any two rules with the same name, etc.  However, we could have one document and one rule that have the same name.  So we could have Type: Document  Name: BetaGamma  and Type: Rule  Name: BetaGamma

Is there a way for me to run checks either via workflow on record creation or on record edit or using validation rules to error out whenever a record is trying to be saved that shares a type AND name with an existing record?

Thanks for your help.

Hi,

I'm trying to export all of the leads from my database that were created on 02/10/2011.  I know for the purposes of the data loader it needs to be in the format 2011-02-10T00:00:00.000Z to be read by the data loader.  However when formatted that way, the data loader isn't erroring out, but I'm not getting any data returned.

Has anybody used the data loader to do this and could suggest where I may be going wrong here?

Thanks!

I am trying to capture how many hours did a user for for day on salesforce. Can anyone please help me generating a report in sucha  pattern.

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to change the name of the Case Comments related list specifically.  I see in the page layout it says "can't customize this list" but does that also apply to the name?

For our organization we'd like for the Case Comments section to be known as Client Comments and we'll have a separate section for internal comments. 

Thanks for your help

I have an Org where I need to undo People Accounts and go back to a more traditional method.

I was going to do this:

1) Use the data loader to update all records with a People record type to a 'regular' record type

2) Remove all mentions of people accounts in record type

3) Ensure all users default record type setting are updated

Does anyone know if this will work?  Is there a better way?

I want to make sure we the user leaves the Company field blank, it throws them an error message without saving the record instead of creating a People Account. 

Hello,

I have a custom object  on which I'd like to add a URL on the "New Object" form page.  If I create a custom link I cannot add it to the custom object form page as there does not seem to be a page layout by which I can add the link.

Do all custom objects have standard page layouts which cannot be changed?  Is there no way to add a custom url to a custom objects standard "New Object" form page?

I know this sound confusing & apologies if so but it's hard to describe this without adding a picture attachment (which does not seem possible).

Any ideas/help on this would be appreciated!