Salesforce is a robust and often confusing system to navigate, even for the most seasoned of Salesforce veterans. And since Salesforce is a living and breathing program that is constantly changing and evolving, there are always opportunities to learn new tricks.

Do you know all of the capabilities that Salesforce can lend when it comes to your inside sales/SDR/BDR process? Here are a few features that I find particularly useful:

1. Map your leads to accounts for better lead routing and view of an account

Using a custom object that relates to the account called “leads” (or “account leads” if you want to distinguish it from the standard leads object), you can relate the lead to the account. Once you have done this, it enables you to do lots of things: track lead activity history at the account level, do account-based marketing, ensure new leads are assigned to the account owner or custom owner field on the account, see a list of all leads at the account level, and more. You can also use roll-up summaries to count all open activities, active leads/contacts, number of calls/emails, or other activity.

2. Personalize automation beyond the name field

It’s important to personalize messaging to prospects in order to make it through all the noise. You can do this at scale by adding fields at the account or lead/contact level that allow you to research a lead/contact/account once, find something interesting about the person or company, and log it in Salesforce to use in your email/call campaigns. And the convenient thing is that you only have to enter it once—you can use the information again in templates or one-off emails. For example, if you just found out something cool about a company, such as winning an award for XYZ, you can automate a message reading “Hey John, I see that ABC Company just {something interesting}.” And the automation would output “Hey John, I see that ABC Company just won an award for XYZ.”

3. Prioritize using third-party intent data

Use third-party intent data to better understand when it’s the right time to engage the prospect. The intent data can sync directly into Salesforce at the account level and automate a weekly report that allows the inside and outside sales teams to see which accounts (and account owners) are surging for different topics that they’re searching online. It can even trigger a relevant email about the surging topic to the prospects of that company using marketing automation.

Whether you are a Salesforce architect, administrator, or simply a user, there is always something new and exciting to learn. Want to check out more tips and tricks? Check out Simplus’ Carolyn Adam’s recent blog post on getting the most out of your Salesforce org. Better yet, reach out to Simplus today for custom solutions.