Designing sales process in our Salesforce.com consulting requires a way to capture activities for reporting. Management dashboards can then be used to align sales and service processes. Customization of the task subject field in Salesforce.com is an ideal area to:
- Help your users with recording activities consistently
- Increase user productivity
- Keep alignment on process execution
Adding Subject Tasks
The task subject field is a native Salesforce.com field. It is a hybrid text/picklist field. The picklist values have some starting default values. These can be changed out with new ones and reordered in the Setup menu area under Activities > Task Fields > Subject.
Once you have found this, do the following:
- Edit the existing fields to replace with values that your team uses
- Add new values
- Reorder the field values for the order they should appear.
This should now be available for your users to select. These are shorthand activities that are commonly and repeatedly used.
Note that if you are using Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition you are able to keep a master list of all the selectable Subject field values. Then using Task Record Types, you can present different users different page layouts with task subjects relevant to their role or your different business processes.
Setting Up Process
Your process should work from recorded Activities in Salesforce.com. There should be a sequence for each of your different processes and these should be segmented.
In our Salesforce.com consulting, we create a framework and knowledge base for your team to execute a repeatable process. When steps are completed, these are recorded in real-time and captured in management reports and dashboards. This is valuable to align new team members quickly as well as launch a new initiative. You will be able to see who is working with your process. Keeping it simple, clear and easy is critical.
Of course, there may be activities which are not part of the normal process. The flexibility of this field allows for adding a value manually. These can used to refine the list of standard task values if they appear consistently. This is part of continual success.
What task values are part of your Salesforce.com processes?