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Salesforce Administrator Course

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  1. Introduction
    4 Topics
  2. Get Started
    5 Topics
  3. Configuration & Setup 20%
    21 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  4. Object Manager & Lightning App Builder 20%
    20 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  5. Sales & Marketing Applications 12%
    15 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  6. Service & Support Applications 11%
    9 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  7. Productivity & Collaboration 7%
    5 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  8. Data & Analytics Management 14%
    18 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  9. Workflow/Process Automation 16%
    9 Topics
    |
    1 Quiz
  10. Prepare for Success
    1 Topic
  11. Taking the Exam
    3 Topics
  12. What's Next?
    3 Topics
Lesson Progress
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Activities are a huge part of building strong relationships with your prospects and existing customers. You need to be contacting potential leads, following up with existing customers for future sales opportunities, and recording the conversations you have with them about service issues. 

When you work with a lot of existing or potential customers, you need to know who contacted them and when, to ensure you are contacting them enough but not too much! This is where Activities in Salesforce are so useful. 

Imagine you are a sales team member, going to visit an existing customer. You walk in full of confidence about your pitch, but you weren’t aware that there have been multiple product issues and they have a ton of open Cases in Salesforce. You are blissfully unaware that the service team has been speaking to the customer but the customer is still dissatisfied! The pitch bombs and relations are bad. This could have been avoided if the emails, calls and meetings had been logged in Salesforce. The sales team member would have seen them and been able to proactively deal with them or at least had the heads up that a sales pitch might not be what the customer wants right now…

Types of Activities

Activities in Salesforce include Tasks and Events.

  • Task – A task is a to do item with a due date.
  • Event – An event is a meeting with both a start and end date, plus a start and end time.

Activities can be related to one or more records in Salesforce such as Account, Contact and Case. 

Activities in Salesforce use:

  • WHOID – To relate to Contacts and Leads.
  • WHATID – To link to Account, Opportunity, Case and other objects, including custom objects.

Activities have some cool features, for example, Activities related to a Contact can roll up to their related Account (if enabled). This feature is not recommended for orgs that associate Contacts with multiple Accounts, 

Follow Up Activities

Users can easily create follow up tasks and events. The benefit of this feature is that it copies some of the details from the original activity! 

Group Tasks

If you have a task for multiple users, you can create a group task. A group task can be assigned to up to 200 users and an individual task is created for each user. 

In Salesforce Classic, a group task can be assigned to public groups, roles or multiple users. However, in Lightning, a group task can only be assigned to public groups or multiple users!

Shared Activities

If required, you can enable the shared activities feature in Salesforce. This is ideal for inviting multiple attendees to a meeting, as you can create an event and invite up to 50 contacts. Although you can have multiple attendees, you can still assign a primary contact.

Shared activities are also available for tasks.

Multi Day and Recurring Events

You can enable multi day events and recurring events in Setup > Activity Settings. 

  • Multi Day Events – Allows users to create events that span multiple days.
  • Recurring Events – Allows users to create events to repeat/recur at a set interval.

Activity Notifications

Users can determine what activity notifications they receive for tasks and events via their personal settings.

Task Queues

In some instances, it can be useful to assign tasks to a queue so that any queue member can complete the task. 

A queue can be created in Setup > Users > Queues.

Activity Timeline

The Activity timeline is available in Lightning Experience only and displays activities in a timeline. The timeline can be filtered to show specific activities. 

Activity Related Lists

In Classic, activities are displayed in two related lists: ‘Activity History’ and ‘Open Activities’. 

In Lightning, you can opt for this view by selecting ‘Related Lists’ from the ‘Default Activities View’ in Setup > User Interface > Record Page Settings.  

Task Tab

In Lightning Experience, a user can view all of their tasks (or tasks in a queue) using the ‘Tasks’ tab. This is a great way for them to quickly view and work their tasks.

Calendars

You can view your events using the Calendar tab. Personal calendars can be shared with individual users.

As well as seeing your own personal calendar, you can create public calendars; public calendars can be used to manage group activities. 

Public calendars can be shared with individual users, public groups, roles, roles and internal subordinates, manager subordinate groups, managers groups, territories, and territories and subordinates.

You can also add resources to events as attendees – ideal for booking meeting rooms or equipment.