Let’s have a field day!
Earlier this week, my friend Garry was a guest blogger on Salesforce’s official blog. His post was about the five fields that every Salesforce instance should have. Garry’s post focused on some really great fields around customer metrics and selling opportunities. But it got me thinking – what are some of my favorite fields to create when I go in to a new org? I tend to think more about prospect profiling. Here are a few Account-level fields that are must-haves in my book.
Territory
This is a great one, and super useful with smaller sales teams. It a formula field that calculates the territory (or sales rep name) based on state. You could certainly make it more general for larger teams – maybe sales regions for managers.
IF(ISBLANK(BillingState), "None",
IF(CONTAINS("AK:AZ:CA:HA:NV:NM:OR:UT:WA", BillingState), "Smith",
IF(CONTAINS("CO:ID:MT:KS:OK:TX:WY", BillingState), "Williams",
IF(CONTAINS("CT:ME:MA:NH:NY:PA:RI:VT", BillingState), "Jones",
IF(CONTAINS("AL:AR:DC:DE:FL:GA:KY:LA:MD:MS:NC:NJ:SC:TN:VA:WV", BillingState), "Bair",
IF(CONTAINS("IL:IN:IA:MI:MN:MO:NE:ND:OH:SD:WI", BillingState), "Greene", "Other"))))))Fortune Ranking
A bear to maintain, but incredibly useful, adding a text field to track the Fortune 1000 ranks is one of my go-to fields in a new Salesforce org. Working with a great data provider can help to ease the burden of keeping this field up-to-date.
Type
Ok, this is actually a standard Salesforce field. So why is it on my list? Customization!! Making sure that the values available in this field are relevant to your business is a key step. This field in particular is important because it appears on the account hierarchy page. Now there is not a lot of customization that you can do to this page, so putting your company language in this field is vital. I like to use it to flag customers, former customers, partner, vendors and competitors – but use it for what makes sense for you!
Those are my top 3 Account must-haves. What about you? What are the first fields you create when setting up an new org?
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