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Admins often manage Salesforce for their entire company, which means they’re responsible for everything from delivering critical projects and training team members to keeping data clean and assigning sales leads. The best admins are constantly learning about new technology, processes, and apps that can help everyone on the team perform better, and the innovative solutions they sleuth out and recommend are often the secret sauce that help teams blow goals out of the water.
At Dreamforce ‘15, we asked three admins — with 23 years of Salesforce experience among them — to share the apps that help get more done. Read on to see which apps Michelle Seufert of SunGard, Amber Boaz of CodeScience, and Leyna Hoffer of Edmentum think all admins must add to their arsenals.
Amber is a certified Salesforce administrator with experience developing custom applications for businesses and nonprofits. Amber is Project Manager of CodeScience, Inc. Here’s a look at Amber’s top picks.
TaskRay: Manage projects with ease, right from Salesforce.
“The best part about TaskRay is how visual it is. You can run your meetings from it, because it gives you visibility into everything you need to know in one place: who’s working on what, when it’s due, when it’s overdue, etc.”
Field Trip: Run reports on standard and custom field usage.
“Field Trip lets you see which fields are actually being used, which is great for data cleanliness and for cleaning up your page layouts.”
FormAssembly: Create web forms that collect and send data from Salesforce.
“This is a great tool for data entry into Salesforce.”
Salesforce CRM Dashboards: Access best practices dashboards right out of the box.
“Salesforce CRM Dashboards lets you easily see how you stack up against industry-standard KPIs.”
Michelle is Senior System Administrator for SunGard Financial Systems, and was previously the Salesforce administrator for Paypal.
Distribution Engine: Share leads fairly every time.
“Distribution Engine balances lead distribution, so more leads go to the reps with higher quotas.”
CalendarAnything: Create customizable calendars from any standard or custom object.
“We use CalendarAnything in meetings to map out Salesforce releases, when we’re upgrading the new sandbox, when projects are coming, etc. If we realize we have too many projects coming, we can update the calendar right there in the meeting.”
Salesforce Chatter Dashboards: Monitor and manage Chatter adoption and engagement.
“Chatter Adoption Dashboards installed eight dashboards and more than 130 reports in five minutes.”
Salesforce Adoption Dashboards: Get visibility into user adoption of key features.
“It allows us to easily see trends, like how many opportunities have been created this quarter compared to last.”
Leyna is a certified Salesforce admin and Salesforce MVP. She is responsible for managing and administering all sales and marketing applications on Salesforce at Edmentum.
DemandTools: Control, standardize, verify, deduplicate, and import Salesforce data.
“DemandTools is a data-quality power tool set; it de-dupes and sometimes saves me days of work. I cannot do my job without DemandTools.”
Milestones PM: Manage and track projects for the whole team.
“It helps us prioritize every project. We can see which projects are open, how far along we are in each project, if there are tasks that are blocked, and more.”
Config Workbook: Extract Salesforce data into Excel format fast.
“We use Config Workbook in conjunction with Field Trip to see what percentage of fields are being used. With one click of a button, you can download a workbook on all of the data about an object.”
Draggin’ Role: View and manipulate users and roles from a single custom tab.
“Draggin’ Role helps you change roles easily — just drag and drop.”
Once you’ve installed these apps, be sure to check back at the AppExchange, since new apps are added every day.
“I make a date with the AppExchange once a month just to see what’s new out there, then I download apps that look interesting into my sandbox to see what they do,” shares Leyna Hoffer.
