Billion Screen CRM - 13 Steps

Step 1 – In this scenario, you are scheduling a visit to a customer in Los Angeles, California, and want to identify other customers in the area. You start be logging into the Home screen of Salesforce.com.

Step 2 - You use the Lookup Search function to search for “ca”.

Step 3 - Salesforce.com’s results include all instances of “ca” in all fields related to the Contact entity. This includes examples where “ca” is contained in the contact’s name or company name. Clearly, this does not help you to identify accounts in California.

Step 4 - You could use Advanced Search on “ca”, but this only allows you to expand the scope of your search to include other entities and information contained in notes and attachments; which will not help you to refine your search results further.

Step 5 - Salesforce.com includes basic filtering capabilities that an administrator must setup. Additionally, the address details of your search results will not be displayed unless your results pane has been customized previously.

Step 6 - You’ve failed to locate Los Angeles-based contacts using Salesforce.com’s Lookup and Advanced Search Capabilities. You now have to try constructing a Salesforce.com ‘View’ to see if that will help.

Step 7 - Views allow you to construct a search against specific fields, rather than all of the fields associated with a particular entity (as is the case with Lookups and Advanced Searches).

Step 8 - You create a new View with “mailing State  = California”.

Step 9 - Your View returns no results. Salesforce.com does not offer State picklists out of the box, therefore, variations of California such as  “CA”, “Ca”, “Calif”, “California”, or misspellings, will result in incomplete search results.

Step 10 – You are relying on trial and error at this stage, so this time you use “mailing State  = CA”.

Step 11 – This time, you did manage to generate a list. However, you forgot to include ‘Mailing City’ in the fields to be displayed, so you have to drill down to each individual contact record in order to determine its address details. For example, you click on the first entry on the list: Marc Benioff, to access his contact record.

Step 12 – You can now see from Marc Benioff’s contact record that he is based in San Francisco, not Los Angles. Therefore, you need to go back to your View list.

Step 13 – Back in your View list, you continue to work your way through your contacts in order to determine which ones are based in Los Angeles. If this was a larger list, you may find it difficult to keep on top of your progress as you move between list and record views.