Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant – Sales Cloud Solution Design

1. Lead Management

One other object in salesforce is critical and is heavily used by sales and marketing professionals in most organizations. Now this object is the lead object. So, what exactly are leads? Now, Leads are your prospects who have expressed interest in your product or service but who you haven’t yet qualified to buy. That means you don’t think this is currently an opportunity in the qualification stage. And in Salesforce, your goal with leads is to drive conversion. The moment a prospect becomes qualified to buy, you simply click on the convert button on the lead record to create a contact along with an account and a related opportunity. But first, you have to qualify that lead.

Now, in many organizations, sales reps can also create their leads. But the majority of the leads are created by your marketing team or your lead creation team, who create leads in Salesforce and then assign them to a sales rep. So some of the main fields or main data that you might want to store in a lead are first the lead name or the contact name of the person who is your lead here, and then the company name. Then there’s the lead source, which is typically a picklist field that you can define depending on your business to specify where the lead came from.

The rating of the lead is to show how high you think this lead has a chance to convert into an opportunity. It’s essentially a score that tells your sales reps or marketing team how many leads are more likely to convert and become opportunities. Then we have the email, the phone, the website, and the lead status. So let’s see how to create and manage leads in Salesforce. Now, I have this lead record opened up in front of me by the name of Miss Kathy Snyder, and the company that she is working for is TNR Corporation. And you can see some of the field values and some of the details regarding this lead. For example, the lead owner’s name, company title, and lead source So you can save all of this information in your lead object.

So when I just edit this lead form, you can see that the name has a salutation similar to the one we have seen while creating a contact record. So you can select the salutation here, and you can add the first name and last name of the lead. And then we have the company title. Lead source is the source of this lead, and that is how you learned about it. Then we have the industry. Now, if you remember, industry was also present on the account object as well. And you can simply add “industry” for TNR Corporation. Then there’s the lead’s annual revenue, phone, mobile, and email, as well as the lead status. Now, the standard lead statuses are new, working, nurturing, closed, converted, and closed, not converted. Whenever you create a new lead, the lead status is typically “new.” When your sales rep starts to work on this lead and starts to make contact with this lead, it becomes “working,” and “nurturing” is basically when you’re trying to find out what the client’s requirements are, what the needs are, and maintain constant communication with this lead, then we have “closed conversion.” That means we have qualified this lead, and this lead is now converted to an account, contact, and opportunity. Then we either converted or did not convert. That means this lead has become unqualified and will remain in the salesforce as an unqualified lead. Then we have the rating, which is either hot, warm, or cold.

And usually, a hot lead means that it has a higher chance of becoming an opportunity. Then we have some address fields and some fields that you can add. You can change the lead status from this path again, depending on your business needs. So if I just click on “Mark status as complete,” you can see that the lead status keeps on changing. Campaigns are some of the related objects of this lead. Campaigns are now used in Salesforce to tag leads. So if your marketing team is running a constant campaign, then they can create a campaign in Salesforce. And when creating a lead, you can tag that lead to a campaign to then check how much revenue each campaign has generated for your business. It’s a very handy tool, and it’s a very important tool for the marketing and sales teams to check which campaigns are succeeding in which regions, for which types of accounts, and et cetera. Now we have this convert button on the lead object. Now this is a very important button, as when you click it, you have the option to now convert and qualify this lead. And as I previously told you, when you convert a lead, the lead vanishes from the system for the end users as it gets converted into an account record, a contact record, and an opportunity record. Now this dialogue box has two sections. The first section is all about creating new things. Choose Existing is in the second column. Now there might be two scenarios when you convert a lead. If this is a completely new client, then you can simply choose the Create New Options option and create a new account, contact, and opportunity. However, if this contact or account is a new account altogether in Salesforce, then you can choose to simply update the existing records in Salesforce for Account and Contact.

Now, as I scroll down, you can see that we have a checkbox here that says “Don’t create an opportunity upon conversion.” Now once I click on this checkbox and convert this lead, Salesforce will only create an account and contact and will not create a related opportunity. However, if you want to create an opportunity, then you can leave this checkbox blank now. To show you how this choose existing functionality works, I’m going to just rename the company name to Salesforce just to show you how this choose existing functionality works.

So I’ve simply changed the company name to Salesforce. And now let’s click on “Convert.” How to Salesforce is an existing account in our Salesforce that we were aware of and worked on. So when I click on this “Choose existing” button, Salesforce automatically shows me that there is already an existing account by this name. So here you can simply choose the existing option, and whatever the account details that you have saved in this lead, for example, annual revenue industry, all this gets updated to the existing account record. And similarly, if a contact by the name of Kathy Snyder already exists in the salesforce, then again, it will show up in the Choose Existing option. I’m just going to revert this company back to Tnrcorp so that we can convert this lead. If I simply click on the “convert” button, you can see that it says your lead has been converted but no account, contact, or opportunity has been created in our system. So let’s go ahead and check what records have now been created. So this is the TNR Corporation, and all the details (such as the rating, phone industry, billing, address, etc.) have been captured directly from the lead itself.

And if I just click on the related tab, you can see that a new contact, Kathy Snyder, is now created in Salesforce for this account. All the details for Kathy that we have entered in the lead are now copied in the contact, and a new opportunity has been created for this account. So you see how by clicking just a simple button on the Lead record, three new records are created in Salesforce: account, contact, and opportunity. So using leads can save you a lot of time because you can create three records in Salesforce with the click of a button. The best part is that when you convert a lead, that opportunity is auto-tagged in the back end by Salesforce to give you an idea of how many opportunities are converted opportunities so that you can get an idea of how much business you are getting just from leads in the report analytics. As I’ve said earlier, when you convert a lead, that lead vanishes from the system, and you won’t be able to find it since that lead is now converted. Now if the lead is not qualified, you can simply choose the option “Closed, not converted,” and this will remain in your salesforce for reporting purposes.

2. What is Lead process?

Let’s take a very common scenario. Suppose your organisation has a very strong lead process and is highly dependent on it. And you have two types of leads coming in for your businesses. One type of lead has been created by the marketing team. Another type of lead is from your online website, where your clients can post a query about your products, services, or anything like that. So a lead coming from marketing can have different kinds of information and can have different kinds of drop-down lists. Similarly, a lead generated online may contain data that differs significantly from leads generated through marketing. But at the end of the day, both of these are leads. So how do you track different kinds of records in the lead object? Only for that do we have the record types. As you can see, when I click on the new button, I have two options that have been prompted. The first is marketing, and the second is online. You can create your own lead processes in Salesforce, catering to the type of lead that you want to save and track in the system. For example, you can see in my marketing lead that I have four lead status options open: working, closed, converted, and closed but not converted. Now, let’s take a look at the online lead. Now, when I click on Next, this is kind of the same form, but check out the lead status. I have omitted the “Open” status since this is an online lead and does not need to have an “Open” status. So my starting status for my online lead becomes “working.” Similarly, I can change, add, or omit different fields in my different record types as per my business processes. So we’re going to take a look at how to create and manage these lead processes in Salesforce.

3. Creating Lead Process

Now let’s try and create a lead process that is similar to the one that I’ve shown you in the previous video. We are going to create the lead process with two options. The first option will be for marketing, and the second will be for online sales. So to create a lead process, simply go to the setup page and search for the lead process. Then you will see a list of already-existing lead processes in your system. Here you can create a new lead process by simply clicking on the “new” button, and as you can see in the description of this, it says “create and maintain multiple lead processes,” and “lead processes use the Lead status field to identify a lead within the lead lifecycle.” So, in the lead processes, lead status is very important because it helps you differentiate between each lead record type. So simply click on the new button, and here you can simply name a lead process.

So I’m going to name it Web Lead, and the description will be for online sales. Then again, let’s read the description. It says to select a value from the available values list and add it to the selected values list to be included in the lead process. So here we are going to select status values that we want to add to this lead process. So if you remember, we omitted the open, not-contacted status from our web or online lead. And here I’m just going to remove this, and I’m going to select the default as working. Then let’s simply save. And as you can see, a new lead process has been created. Let’s create the marketing one, and here you have the option to clone it from an existing lead process. We have the option to select the status values. Now, I want all four of these states to be included in the marketing. So let’s not change anything in this plan. Save. Now, as you can see, our two lead processes have been created.

4. Record Types

So, what exactly are Salesforce record types? You’ve probably heard this term several times during your Salesforce journey. Now it’s time to see what record types are and why they are used. Now, Record Types allows you to have different processes, so with different processes, you can create leads, opportunities, and cases as well, depending on your business type and your business needs. You can use Record Types to have different picklist values for your picklist fields. And record types also help you assign and show different page layouts to different record types and, therefore, to different users based on their profiles.

Now, you might create record types to differentiate your regular sales deals from your professional service engagements, which require different picklist values, different page layouts, or even that you show these deals to specific users only. So you can all achieve this using record types. Let’s look at some of the scenarios in which you might want to have record types on your object

Now, if you want to display different page layouts for one object based on your business requirements, then you should use record types; if you want to show different picklist values based on these requirements; or if you want to restrict field accesses on different page layouts based on the user’s profile and their role. So, to solve all of these use cases, you can use record types where the overall nature of the record is of one object only. However, different teams or different users might want to interact with that object in a different manner depending on their roles or the type of records they want to create on that object. And depending on this, they might want to have a different set of fields that are related to their role only.

5. Lead Record type & Stages

Now, before we go ahead and activate our Lead process and assign it to the Record tab, I want to show you something about the Lead status fields. Now, if you want to customize this dropdown field, I mean if you want to rearrange the values in the Lead status. For example, my lead status is currently showing the first value as “Open,” then “Working,” and then “Close Post.” What if you want Working to be the first stage and Open to be the second? Now let’s see if we can control this behaviour in the lead process. Now, in my Lead process, you can see I have only the option to select the available values in my Lead status and not an option to rearrange them. So in the lead process, we can only select the status values we want to apply to the lead process. However, if you want to arrange the lead values, then we need to go to the lead object. So in my object manager, let’s go to this lead object. Let’s look for the lead status in the fields and relationships.

As you can see, this is a picklist field. And if I just scroll down, I can see all the values that are available in this field. From here on, you can simply click on the Reorder button to reorder the various stage values. For example, I can simply rearrange “Working” to be the first stage. Let’s refresh our already-existing lead record. As you can see, after refreshing, our first status value changes to “Working” and our second status value changes to “Open.” So you can rearrange the values of the status in the field itself. As a result, you will be unable to reorder this lead status from the lead process. So let’s go ahead and create record types for this lead. Now, record types in Salesforce allow you to have different business processes, pick list values, and page layouts for different users based on their different profiles. So in our case, if we want to show different fields for web leads and marketing leads, then we can create a record type and add different page layouts to each record type. And then we can assign individual record types to a different lead process. So I’m going to make a lead process for marketing leads here. As you can see, I’ve chosen the lead process for marketing. And let me write a short description for this record type.

You can choose which profiles should have access to this record type or have the option to create a lead record for this record type. So you simply select which profiles will have access to this record type. And then you can select which lead page layout you want to assign for this record type. Here I’m going to select the Lead layout, which is already existing in my Lead Object, and let’s click on Save. Now here, you can see that our record type for the marketing has been created. And here are all the picklist fields in my lead that are available for me to edit for this record type. So let’s test it out. If I just click on this “new lead” button, you can see the top of the form page is showing “new lead marketing,” and it’s not showing us a popup because we have only created one record type. Now if we can just create a second record type, then it will ask us to select which record type we want to create this lead record for. So let’s go ahead and create a second record type for the online sales. You can select for which profiles you want to make this record type the default, so that whenever they create a new lead by default, they will be creating a lead for this record type only. And as you can see, we have created two types of marketing: offline and online. Now let’s go to the landing page and click on “New.” And as you can see now, we have two options: one for marketing and one for online. So let me just create this online lead very quickly. And as you can see, the status value starts with “working” and does not have any “open status,” which is exactly what we have added in our lead process for the online leads.

6. Lead Conversion Field Mapping

Now it’s time to see how to map the lead fields to custom fields of account, contact, and opportunity upon lead conversion. which means when a lead is converted in Salesforce, you can predefine the custom fields on leads to be mapped to custom fields of accounts, contacts, and opportunities. So, for example, if you have a custom field called SLA on your list and you want to give it, you would want that value, the field value that is present in this field, to be populated on the account that will be created upon conversion.

So you can map the SLA field of Lead to the SLA or some other field of the Account object as well. So to map the leads, simply go to the Object Manager and Leads, and there in the Fields and Relationships option, you’ll see a button called “Map Lead Fields.” Now, once you click on it, you’ll see some options. Here it says to use the tabs to map each of the organization’s custom lead fields to one of your custom account contact or opportunity fields. These mappings are used when converting leads to When you convert leads to account contacts or opportunities, which I’ve already explained earlier, you can see that there are three tabs named Account, Contact, and Opportunity. Each represents the lead field and the associated account field.

So you have the option to map the Lead fields, which are appearing on the left hand side of the column, to the Custom Account fields, which you can access via these drop-down values on the right hand side. Similarly, the same is true for contact and opportunity. So in our case, I have this custom lead field called “SIC code,” and I would like to map this field to the “Tracking Number” field on my opportunity so that whenever a lead is converted into an opportunity, the Sic code value in this field gets populated into the “Tracking Number” field of the opportunity. Once the tracking number is selected, simply click on “Save.” Now there’s an error mapping the lead field to a field that has the same length. That means the length of this number field is not equal to the character limit of the tracking number field on the opportunity.

So let me just check what the correct length of both of these fields is. Once we correct that, we should be able to map the values. So this is another lesson learned here: the fields that are mapped to each other on the lead object should be of equal character length; otherwise, it will create problems in the field mapping as well as on the lead conversion. So our tracking number is of length twelve characters, and let’s see our SIC. So the SI code is 15. Let me just edit that and make it twelve as well. Let’s save this and go back to our lead mapping. Let’s try to save this. Now it’s saved. Let’s try to convert our lead into an opportunity. To see if the value in the SIC code is populated with the tracking number, simply click on Convert. Once a lead has been converted, let’s go to the opportunity page and verify. As you can see, the tracking number has been populated from the Sic code of the lead record. This way, you can map your custom lead field.

7. Quotes

Now let’s see how you can implement and enable quotes in your sales force. So basically, a quote is a document that contains information about the products or services your customer wants to buy. This may also include your and your customer’s contact information, as well as a table of prices totaling a grand total and a few-place basis, or for details, dates, and signatures. You can also use the word “quote” to describe any electronic record of the quote data that’s presented in a PDF format. This record includes details such as expiration date or grand total, along with information about each product on the quote such as the discount percent or net amount on the opportunity. So how can you use quotes in salesforce? Basically, you and your sales team create quotes from the quotes-related list, which is available on the Opportunity object. After you click on the “new quote” button, you enter some basic information, such as when the quote expires, and then you choose products and services to include in the quotation.

These are standard Salesforce products, and they contribute to the total quote among other values. This is a trailhead on salesforce trailhead.com that I recommend you visit because it contains all of the information about the quotes and will be a great stepping stone for you if you are new to quotes in Salesforce.

To give you a quick overview of what quotes are used for and why they are used, So one thing to notice is that you can create as many quotes for a single opportunity, and each quote can have multiple products, and the primary quote pushes the total quote amount into the amount field on your opportunity. And the related products list also updates with the products from your quote. So if you later make a different quote primary, your opportunity automatically updates. To reflect the new details, simply go to the opportunity object, and on the page layout, check the related list of your page layout to see if you have the option of adding a quote coming here.

And I’m not seeing quotes here. That means I have to enable quotes in my system first. Then I should be able to see the quote-related list. Simply cancel that, and then, from the septuplet’s quote search, click on Quote Settings, and then Enable. Now this feature allows users to create code and generate a PDF of the code. Simply click on Enable, and you have successfully enabled the code in your salesforce.org.

Now select the page layout, essentially defining which page layouts should have the option to have quotes under them. So I want all the page layouts to have the option to quotes Simply return to the opportunity layout, and we should now see quotes in the related list. You’ll notice that the codes-related list was automatically added to the page layout as you scroll down. Simply click on Save, and let’s refresh our opportunity record. And if I scroll down in the related list, I can see that the quote option is available here. So let’s start off by creating a new quote in the system for this opportunity. Let’s take a different opportunity where I already have some products attached to it.

Let’s create a quote. This is the expiration date of this quote. You can add a date to it. Then we have the quote name. You can name it to distinguish what this quote is for and what it represents. Then we have the status of this quote. Let me just add it to craft some currency values here. Let me just enter some dummy values. Then I have the option. I have the lookup field to contact Solet Cloudy; contact Alan Johnson at the phone number. This is all just dummy data. Once this is filled out, let’s quickly click on Save, and we have created a quote record in Salesforce. As you can see, it has already gathered all the product information from the opportunity record itself, and you have various options here. You also have a related list of quote PDFs, which I’m going to tell you how to use it.

Now, from the button tab, simply click on Create PDF. Now, all of this information from the opportunity and from the quote record has been gathered here into a PDF format, which you can now download or use to save as a record in this opportunity itself. This is the format of the PDF code. This is a standard format. You can change it in the PDF object. Also, you can change the layout of this whole quotation as per your needs once I click on Save. As you can see, this first draught version has been saved in Quote PDF format for your convenience. So you can basically create multiple quotes for an object opportunity, and you can then create multiple quote PDFs for a single quote record. So this is how you and your sales team can use quotes from Salesforce to quickly create the quotes that can be sent to the client.

8. Sales Process and Stage Probability

So the sales process is a very important topic in terms of the Sales Cloud certification exam. Now in salesforce, the opportunity stages and the probability percentage are very special fields, and the probability percentage is a standard field that is connected with your opportunity sales stage.

So whenever you keep on changing your opportunity stage age, depending upon what probability percentage you have set, your probability percentage will also keep changing. As you can see in this sales process, each stage has been assigned a different probability percentage, and you have the option to customize and change these probability percentages with each stage value. So let’s see how we can do that. So let’s go to the Opportunity object, and here in the fields and relationships, simply search for the stage. Now, once you scroll down, you can see that there is a column called “Probability,” and here you can assign different probability percentages for each opportunity stage. You can select the focus category and type of the opportunity as well. So, if you have a different stage value, you can assign it to be an open opportunity with a forecast pipeline, omitted, or whatever your business requires. So depending upon your business processes, you can simply change the values of the probability percentage and the forecast category as well.

9. Understanding Validation Rules

So let’s talk about the validation rules in Salesforce. Now, when you think of validations, what comes to mind first? Now, basically, “validation” is something related to having a checkpoint in your system or in any real-life scenario where you are basically checking something to see if it’s right or not or if it conforms to certain defined standards. Similarly, in Salesforce, validation rules play a similar part hereto understand it more easily, let’s take a simple example.

First, the sales director of your organisation needs to prevent data from being saved in Salesforce unless a specific field is completed. And additionally, this field is not required until certain conditions are met. So you have an object, and whenever a user creates a record, then there are certain conditions that need to be met first before saving that record. So, your sales director in your organisation wants the users to fill out some information in that record, and if it’s not filled out by the users, then the salesforce should not allow them to save this record. Furthermore, there must be some conditions that must be met before your users can even save that record.

So, after hearing this scenario, what usually comes to mind? Which solution will work the best here? The first option is to make the field that your sales director wants users to fill out mandatory. Now, making a field required might be possible in some cases, but in our case, we need to have some additional criteria for the users to even save this record. Making a field required will not work in this case because it will make this field a mandatory field on our object, and there will be no way to add conditions to it. Then the second option is to use Apex codes so that the users do not enter bad data. Now again, Apex is a possible solution, but it’s not the easiest or it’s not the efficient, because first of all, not everyone is well versed with Apex. And also, it’s not a very efficient solution if you need to write advanced code for each and every use case in your salesforce.org. And in Salesforce, you should always check for a declarative option first and go to Apex programming only if the point-and-click methods do not apply. So the best option becomes the validation rules.

Now, validation rules are not so difficult to implement, but they still require a thorough knowledge of your salesforce data, the salesforce objects, and your business processes. Now, validation rules also have some conditions, and those conditions are also written in the form of code. However, once you’ve written a large number of validations and know which functions to use in which use cases, it becomes very natural. Now, validation rules basically verify that the data that is entered by the users in records meets certain standards that you specify before they can save it; you add them in the form of small codes in a validation rule. And the validation rule allows an admin or developer to create conditions where records cannot be saved unless they meet those certain criteria. And validation rules are made up of four parts. The first is the validation rule name. Second is a description field, where you should write a short description of what this validation rule does. Then there are the field conditions, which require us to write some code to indicate that if set to true, the record will be saved with an error. Then we have to write an error message—the exact message that will be prompted to the user whenever a validation rule condition is met.

10. Validate Data in Opportunity

There are numerous types of data reported in Salesforce reports, where data plays a critical role, such as an opportunity close date, a case close date, or an account creation date. Dates play a very important role when creating reports and dashboards in Salesforce. So today our use case revolves around the date field. And now I’m on my opportunity list.

And here we are going to create a validation rule where the rule will check if the closed date is less than the creation date of the opportunity record. So there cannot be a scenario where the user creates an opportunity with a closed date before the creation date because, ideally, that scenario cannot happen. Second, we will modify a validation rule to include one more condition that checks if the opportunity is in the closed one or closed stage, and the closed date cannot be in the future. So imagine a scenario where you have Opportunity records that are marked as closed with a marked-closed date of December 2020, but you are viewing the Dashboard in November only. So it doesn’t make any sense that there are records that have been closed with a future date. So that really hampers the overall analytics of your reports and dashboards and also desensitizes the data in your Salesforce.org. So here we are going to create a validation rule first to check that the user should not mark a value in the “closed date,” which is before the “creation date.”

So here in the formula, I’ve selected the Close Date API name, and then we can simply compare it with the less than sign and get the standard created date of the opportunity. Now, when I am checking the syntax, it says that the incorrect parameters are expected Date and receive time date. So basically, the opportunity creation date is a date and time field, and we are comparing it with the close date, which is a complete date field. So in Salesforce, you cannot directly compare a date field with the date time field directly. You need to first convert the date time field to a date field, or you can also convert the date field to a date time field. So here I’m going to convert my createddate, which is a date time field, to a date field using the function Date value. Now, the Date Value function simply creates a date from a date-time field. So when I enclose the created date in this function, as you can see upon checking the syntax, I haven’t gotten any errors. So right now, this date value extracts only the date value from the created date. Now, let’s save this validation rule and first check this out.

So the create date has been set to November 29, 2018 in the Opportunity Record. And if I just change the close date to any date before that, as you can see, I’m not able to do so. So a validation rule is working fine; now let’s add the second criteria that we discussed: if the user is closing an opportunity, then the closed date cannot be marked as a future date. So let’s just first check if the user is actually closing the opportunity, and you can check by using the stage field as well. But another easier way is to simply get the “Is closed” standard checkbox, where it automatically checks to true if the user closes the opportunity, and enclose a formula inside the or function.

Because we want to restrict the user if either of these conditions is true, I can simply use the and operator with the Is closed, and then I can check if the closed date is greater than today’s date. So I can simply check if the date is greater than the today function. Now that the close date is a pure date field, the today function also gives out only today’s date only. As a result, because we are comparing the date field with another date, we do not need to convert any dates to date times. So I’m just going to update my error message, and now let’s test it out. So if I just mark my opportunity as a closed one, as you can see, I’m not able to do so because my close date has been marked with a future date. So this is how you can create a validation rule with multiple conditions, you can throw the user a common error if you want, and you can use the date value function to convert a date and time field to a date field and compare it with another date as well.