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In part 1 of this series, we outlined the concept that the start of our sales day as an “Outside Salesperson” starts on the Home Tab of Salesforce . As you could see in that article, the Home Tab was looking pretty sparse. In fact, it is down right empty!

Thats no good! Our managers are looking at their sales metrics and saying “What the heck is Peter doing?” and “Why isn’t Peter scheduled to make calls?” and most importantly, “Why do I keep this guy around as a Salesperson?”. These are questions we don’t want our bosses to ask us. As Salespeople, the only time we want to hear from our boss is when he or she is telling us how great we are and how they are planning on increasing our comission rate. Verbal reports are for “Old Style” sales organizations. This is the age of the computer! This is the age of “pulling data” rather than “pushing data”. In a word, we need to do some CALL PLANNING.

Call planning starts, as is evidenced from the previous article, with a blank slate. Our week is empty. Our tasks are complete. We need to fill these areas in. We need to show our bosses how busy we are. So lets get to it.

Activities

Events and Tasks are the two primary activities tracked within Salesforce . From the documentation…

Activities are both tasks and scheduled calendar events. You can define and track activities for many different objects, including campaigns, accounts, contacts, and leads. - https://na3.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/activities.htm

Note: The link above isn’t a link because, well, your mileage [in thise case mileage=server] may vary. If you look at your browser while using Salesforce you should see the URL. If you look at that URL you will see is starts with NA followed by a number. The NA stands for (I believe) North America. By taking the documentation link from above and changing the NA part appropriately, you will be able to go the relevant documentation. For example, if you are on NA2, the previous URL would be:

https://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/activities.htm

It should also be noted that you will need to be logged into Salesforce for this to work. And thats it!

And that is the sum total of the documentation on what a Task or Event is. So lets take a little time to define them more clearly.

Events are things that we would put in our day planner. They are things that are going to do on a particular day and time. Examples of Events might be… “Meeting with ACME Publishing 10/3/2006 11:00 AM EST” or “Phone Call: Alice Smith 10/3/2006 8:00 AM”. The key is the time factor. Events (as the name implies) happen at a particular point in time. They don’t nessecarily need involve a physical meeting, they only need to be things that happen at a specfic time.

Tasks are things that we would put on our To Do list. They don’t nessecarily happen at specific time (though we might have a deadline by which to complete a task, i.e. scratch off a To Do). Examples of tasks might be “Schedule a meeting with ACME Publishing” or “Get a copy of the purchase order from Alice Smith”. The key in this case is that we have something to do, a time frame within which to do it, and a way of “crossing it off our list” when it is done.

Lets examine how these look in the interface.

To begin, we need to create an activity. Lets outline what we want to accomplish in our example. Here is what we are going to do.

• Schedule a meeting with Jack Rodgers of Burlington Textile Corp of America for 10/06/2006 at 11:00 AM.
• Set ourselves a task to Prepare a sales presentation for Jack Rodgers that should be do on 10/06/2006.

Now, there are essentially three basic approaches to creating any activitiy.

1. Create an Activity using the “Create” Control on left side of the interface. (See Image 1)
2. Use the New Event or New Task button on the Home Tab. (See Image 1)
3. Go to the account or contact directly and create the activity using the New Task or New Event button. (See Image 2)

Image 1: Creating Activities from the Home Tab

Image 2: Creating Activities from within Accounts or Contacts (in this case, a Contact)

My preference is for option three. I find that it is easiest, and provides us with the most information. When we create the Activity using options 1 or 2, we still have a lot of data entry to do, as all of the fields will be blank, as you can see in Images 3 and 4. We will need to provide the who, what and where. If we use option 3, much of the information is already filled in, as you can see in Images 5 and 6.

Image 3: Creating a Task from scratch using option 1 or 2.

Image 4: Creating an Event from scratch using option 1 or 2.

Image 5: Creating a Task using option 3.

Image 6: Creating an Event using option 3.

Though the difference is not significant, the few extra steps saved by not having to search around for the additional information to complete the fields means that we are that much faster and more efficient.

Now we can complete or example by filling in the fields with the remaining information and pressing the save buttons. Images 7 and 8 show the completed Task and Event prior to saving, while Image 9 shows the Home Tab and how it has changed.

Image 7: Task with fields completed.

Image 8: Event with fields completed.

Image 9: Updated Home Tab

With the updated Home Tab, we can now see our new Event and our new Task. If we had completed these steps earlier, and were merely checking Salesforce with our morning cup of coffee, we would see all of our scheduled activities for the day, as well as our To Do list. All immediately relevant information is displayed along with links to more detail. We are ready to plan our day, and better yet, we don’t need to let our bosses know what we are doing, because they can see our calendar to.

That would complete are basic goal, which was to schedule Tasks and Events during our morning planning process. This only covers the very general approach to working with Activities, and future posts will enhance the basics we have covered here. Obiviously, working with Activities isn’t something we do simply in the morning, but throughout our working day.

Happy scheduling!