With all of the features and functionalities Salesforce has rolled out over the years, along with the apps available on the Salesforce AppExchange, it seems like there’s nothing the industry-leading CRM doesn’t do. But there are some functionalities that are inherently limited within Salesforce, and one of them is task management.
Salesforce does have a task management feature that sales teams can use to manage their day-to-day work. Each task is based on a schedule and can act as a daily to-do list for users. To maintain data visibility and centralization, each task can be tied to a particular campaign, account, contact, or lead. Users can also log notes relevant to the task to keep all comments in one place.
But there’s only so much you can do with Salesforce’s native task management features. For starters, Salesforce doesn’t support task dependencies. If an activity must be performed based on the completion of another task, Salesforce can’t accommodate that. The Salesforce tasks feature also doesn’t support collaboration. Some teams use Chatter as a workaround for this issue, but Chatter is essentially a social tool, so it lacks many of the features preferred by RevOps teams that manage long, complicated projects.
Ways to improve task management in Salesforce
Considering these limitations, most teams will need to customize their Salesforce instance or use project management tools with Salesforce integrations to gain the features and functionalities they need. And there are plenty of options to choose from.
Here’s how to manage tasks more effectively in Salesforce.
Organize your tasks with help from project management tools
There’s no shortage of project management tools available from Salesforce partners. Because they’re purpose-built for managing complex tasks and projects, integrating them with Salesforce allows you to level up your capabilities without having to jump back and forth between multiple tools.
Though Jira is widely viewed as a tool for software developers, RevOps teams can use it to manage projects as well. And since RevOps teams can incorporate many practices followed by DevOps teams to plan and manage tasks, it’s a good fit for managingchanges in Salesforce. A Salesforce-Jira integration enables you to lay out complex tasks in Jira and monitor your progress within Salesforce. For projects that require cross-team collaboration, the integration allows both teams to share information automatically.
Asana is another popular project management tool that integrates with Salesforce. Asana is known for its flexibility and multiple project views. Tasks can be added and managed, along with due dates, dependencies, priority levels, attachments, and more from within Salesforce. You can also view tasks created in Asana within Salesforce. Asana and Jira both allow you to set up intake forms to manage requests from go-to-market teams (sales, marketing, and customer experience) and streamline operations management.
Like Asana, Teamwork is another flexible project management tool favored by teams of all kinds. While it doesn’t integrate with Salesforce like the other tools mentioned here, you can set up integrations using API connectors like Zapier. You can add and update events, notes, and tasks in Salesforce using Teamwork. Teamwork can be especially useful for consultants who manage multiple clients and need features like time tracking and custom permissions.
Maintain good Salesforce documentation
RevOps teams are constantly navigating change, and keeping those projects on track requires a committed approach to change management. A key aspect of good change management is documentation. With so many users and systems dependent upon your CRM, making a change in one place can have a ripple effect on other systems and teams. When something goes wrong, documentation allows you to investigate. And when you hire new employees, being able to show them documentation of the changes made to your Salesforce instance allows you to onboard them quickly.
The challenge with documentation is it’s time consuming. Using automation tools from Salesforce partners can help. For example, your team can use a Change Intelligence tool like Sonar to automatically track what changes were made, when, and by whom. As you deploy changes from the sandbox to production in Salesforce, automated documentation makes your to-do list a little shorter. It also eliminates the potential errors that come from manually tracking changes with spreadsheets.
Improve team collaboration
One of the markers of RevOps success is your ability to support collaboration, and that starts within your own team. Using a Change Intelligence platform can improve collaborative operations management. For example, Sonar’s Initiatives feature enables you to view projects, see their full scope, and communicate with your team in a single view. Because teams are already using Sonar to plan and document change, Initiatives is a natural extension of those functionalities. You can assign tasks, share comments, and drill down for details on a task in one place.
Leveraging best practices to manage tasks in Salesforce
Whether you choose to use integrations offered by Salesforce partners or rely on a Change Intelligence platform, staying on top of Salesforce task management helps you simplify the complexity of revenue operations. With these Salesforce best practices, you can gain the visibility and capabilities you need to plan, track, and document your RevOps projects.