Glossary

Have you never worked with Salesforce before, or only rarely, and are unfamiliar with terms such as "template", "custom object" and "opportunity"? Don't worry, many people feel the same way when they start out. To help you get started, we have compiled a list of the most important terms and explain them in this article.

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About the system itself and its structure

Your org – short for organisation – is your personal Salesforce instance. All data is stored here and all colleagues work in this org.

A user is someone who uses Salesforce. They have their own username and password to log in. Permissions to view, create, edit or delete data can be assigned individually to a single user or to a group of users.

Objects are how all data records are organised in Salesforce. Objects are similar to tables or tabs in Excel and can be viewed as tabs or lists.

Objects

Salesforce contains standard objects. These data types are already provided by Salesforce. They include:

• Account: This is where information about companies is stored, e.g. customers, suppliers or partners.
• Contact: Contains information about individuals, such as the employees of a company, and is typically assigned to an account. Each individual contact is a separate data record.
• Opportunity: This is where the entire sales process is mapped, from quotation to contract conclusion.
• Lead: A person or company that is potentially interested in your product or service. Once you have gathered more information and there is concrete interest in working together, the lead is ‘converted’ and Salesforce can create an account or contact from the lead at the click of a button.

and standard fields such as name, address, or telephone numbers.

However, Salesforce offers the option of adding custom objects. These are metadata, which means that they are not included in the standard Salesforce package. For us, these are, for example, sprints, concepts, or tickets. They are used when we extend the standard Salesforce process to replicate your business processes. This ensures that your organisation is tailored precisely to your processes.

Returning to the topic of leads, it is important to explain what lead management and lead nurturing mean.

Lead management is the umbrella term for all measures and processes involved in generating and converting leads. Leads are first identified, then qualified and finally converted or transformed into customers. This helps leads learn more about the product, the company and existing successful, satisfied customers. The focus here is on engaging, informing and nurturing customers. This makes it more likely that they will convert into buyers, as they can identify better with the product, for example.

Lead nurturing refers to specific actions taken to nurture leads. These include newsletters, product announcements via email, website or social media, and communication about general information on products and the company. This keeps your leads up to date and reminds them of your company on a regular basis. Different tactics are created for different leads, focusing on how the potential customer can best or most easily be reached. Some leads can be communicated more effectively via regular emails, while others are better reached via social media. This depends on where the leads spend most of their time or how they came across the company and its products. You can find this out with Salesforce at the click of a button.

For successful lead generation and conversion, it is also important that you know the different types of leads. A new lead is any potential customer about whom you know something, such as a visit to your website, their email address in the contact form or contact via social media channels. With a working lead, active conversations can already be conducted, such as via telephone, email or social media. Nurturing is a lead who is not interested in a purchase at the moment but may be in the future. That is why it is particularly important to focus on good customer service, effective customer care and customer loyalty. An unqualified lead is not interested in the offer. And a qualified lead is one who shows interest in a purchase or business and has therefore been successfully converted into a customer.

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The Salesforce interface.

We now know the structure. But how is the information actually displayed in the interface?

A record (or data record) contains individual data. A data record can be, for example, a single customer (in the Contact object) or a company (in the Account object).

Records are divided into fields where information is entered. Just think of a cell in Excel. There are different field types, such as text, number, checkbox or selection list.

Merge fields are so called because they merge information from the rest of the system with the templates for an email or document. If you make changes to field information for certain objects, such as the name or address of a contact, in other places in your organisation, the information in your template will also change automatically. If necessary, you can of course change or add to the template yourself, but the likelihood of errors creeping in is much lower than with manually created texts, provided that the relevant field information has been entered correctly into the system beforehand.

Formula fields aggregate and ‘manipulate’ values from one or more other fields. Among other things, you can perform calculations and display links and text. You cannot enter anything manually in formula fields.

The layout (or arrangement) of fields on the Salesforce interface can be customised according to your preferences. Select the order and grouping and which fields you want to see in which position. With an interface that is customised for you, your work is much easier!

A few tools you can work with.

You're almost a Salesforce pro! But there are a few more tools that can make your work even easier.

A task is a job that you can assign to yourself or another user in Salesforce. These can be entered manually or created automatically.

List views are a quick and easy way to get an overview of all records in an object. You can easily filter the data to display only specific records that are relevant to you.

All business processes involve creating different documents and sending various emails. You can automatically select templates stored in Salesforce for defined process steps. All important data stored in Salesforce can be automatically inserted into templates as needed. This saves you a lot of time when creating documents and sending emails.

A report is a list of records that meet specific criteria you have selected. It can be displayed in tabular or graphical form. The report gives you full control over all important key figures.

Want to see all important key figures at a glance in graphical form? With dashboards, you can. Using different chart types, you can generate graphical representations of all data available in Salesforce in seconds.

That's it for the vocabulary! Congratulations! You are now fluent in Salesforce!