Defining, Automating, and Managing Different Business Processes in Salesforce

The business processes in Salesforce eventually move around four things –

1. Lead Processes
2. Sales Processes
3. Solution Processes
4. Support Processes

Now you need to associate the business processes with multiple record types and make them accessible to the users based on their profiles.

Technically, all these fields are picklist values that denote how far you have been progressed for any particular business process. In other words, each picklist value is a step in the business process. The Salesforce developers need to define these picklist values carefully otherwise it may put your users in trouble when defined poorly.

So how your business processes should look alike? Are you still confused? If yes, let us have a quick look at an example to give you a clear idea on business processes and its picklist values.

Managing Business Processes in Salesforce

Think about a Company that has three sales divisions – Hardware, Software, and Consultancy. The IT division (Hardware and Software) consists of sales process having ten steps while consulting department consists of a 7 steps sales process only. To manage these two different sales processes throughout the Company, the administrator can do the following tasks –

• Define the master picklist values

You need to define the complete picklist values that you are planning to use for Lead Processes, Sales Processes, Solution Processes, or Support Processes. Once it is done successfully, move to the next step to define the business processes.

• Create two separate sales processes

Now you have to define two sales processes for each of the divisions one for hardware & software division, other is for consulting division. In case of consulting division, exclude the steps that are not necessary.

• Define and associate the record types

Now create three record types for all three divisions and name them ‘Hardware, Software and Consulting’ and connect them with the respective sales processes.

• Add record types to the user profiles

Now add the three record types to the user profiles working in respective divisions. Here are few steps that you should follow to complete this step successfully.

• For this purpose, login to your Salesforce account, type ‘Record type’ in the quick find box.
• Select the Default record type option, you can create a new record here either you can use it automatically or customize the options as per your requirements.
• In the end, click on Save option and record is added to user profile successfully.

Defining a structured business process in Salesforce

Here, we will discuss an example of Lead status but please don’t take it for granted. If this structured business process does not suit your work model then please don’t use it but please try to innovate it so that business process can be made more suitable and result-driven. Take an example, where we have been added 1000 leads to a database during last few months. So, how did it work and what was the result? Let us check out the details in next section.

1. Open or create a NEW database where no activity is logged as of now or we are expected to create a virgin record in the system.
2. Contacts process – In this step, activities are added to the database but they are not connected to the right contacts yet.
3. Contacted – Here, conversations are started with the target person but this is not sure either each of the leads is qualified or not.
4. Qualified or convert – This is the time to make a lead conversion. Now, the person is interested to know about the product prices and proposal. Also, they need the product in next few days if prices are suitable. In this case, the person will be added to the sales pipeline and add the profile to the qualified list with the message that lead has been converted successfully.
5. Follow-up Marketing – There is no opportunity that can be converted to the same day but it always takes certain time span. This is the reason you should set up reminders and adopt best follow-up marketing tactics that are suitable for your business.
6. Not-qualified leads – if any contacts don’t show much interest in your products or don’t buy anything then he is added to the non-qualified leads category.
7. Exclude Contacts – There are few contacts that are not interested in getting product updates or any news about your business. So, these contacts should be excluded from your database.
8. Dead Contacts – There are few contacts that were responding well earlier but went on silent with the passage of time. So, you should prepare a different business strategy for these types of contacts.

Based on the above discussion, you need to define eight picklist values to define the business process clearly. As a rule of thumb, you should shrink the number of picklist values for a particular business process if they go into double digits. To make the things easier for you, let us see how you can automate the business processes in Salesforce Consulting.

Automating Business Processes in Salesforce

Salesforce offers a list of powerful tools that enable users to automate business processes without any coding skills or technical background. The popular tools for automating business processes include –

Workflows, Visual workflow, Lightning Process Builder, and Approval Process etc.

• Workflows – This tool allows to automate the business process that can be summarized with multiple IF/THEN statements where certain conditions are true and others are false. There are certain actions that happen immediately and few are scheduled to execute after a particular time span.
• Visual Workflow – With the help of this tool, even complicated or complex business processes can be simplified or automated where feedback is taken from the End User and based on which inputs are provided. Also, records can be deleted from the list that is not required.
• Lightning Process Builder – This tool allows you to automate business processes that contain multiple IF/THEN statements with a graphical representation and an interactive user interface. Also, the entry and exit criteria are also defined for each query and records are executed as soon as criteria are met.
• Approval Process – This tool is used to enable the approvals that are required for different scenarios. Each business process has to go through the different approval process as soon as one record is submitted or rejected.

Final Words:

With this discussion, this is clear to how to define and manage a business process. If you wanted to automate the business process then study the tools carefully and decide on the best product that suits best for your business process. They can also be used in combination to automate more complex business problems. Always define the business process in detail before you start automating it that will help you in deciding the right tool and make the things easier for you.