In my most recent project, I worked with a lot of ‘Client Servicing’ staff – a job role which involves engaging with clients, creating the relevant records on Salesforce and ensuring that our finance team has all the information needed to print out invoices, sales orders and so on.
At first glance, this process seemed relatively straightforward.
But as with anything, there comes a point where you do something repeatedly enough that you start to wonder:
“Surely there is a better way to do this?”
For my colleagues, this involved mass uploading ‘opportunity products’ to Salesforce.
Uploading one or two? Sure, no problem. Only takes about 3 mins.
Uploading more than 3? The process starts to become tedious. In case you haven’t done it before, manual data entry is no fun at all!
I was tasked with developing a ‘product’ that could help streamline this data entry process.
Our initial Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was driven predominantly by an extension called Google Sheets Data Connector for Salesforce.
With said extension, creating/updating large numbers of Salesforce records was a breeze!
In this post, we’ll go through the steps on how to install the connector as well as some possible use cases!
Some key resources:
Installing the Salesforce Connector
If you already have a Google Sheet open, go to the extensions tab and click ‘Get Add-Ons’:
Then, type in ‘Salesforce Connector’ in the search bar and click the extension shown:
You should then be able to install the extension if you haven’t already.
Then, go back to your Google Sheet and select ‘Click to Enable Add-On’ under the extensions tab:
Once you’ve done that, if you go back to the same item in the menu it should say ‘Open’.
Then, use the sidebar to log in with your Salesforce credentials. If you’re an average Salesforce user, select ‘Production’. For developers using a Sandbox, the same functionalities still apply! So feel free to use the tool as well.
Salesforce Connector Use Cases
Mass Uploading New Lead Information
You had a field day at some sales convention somewhere and now have a ton of new leads to upload to Salesforce!
Without the connector, you’d have to upload these leads one at a time. (audible gasp)
With our G-Sheet Connector, we can bulk upload this information all at once!
I won’t go into the details here as Salesforce can be quite customised between companies, but here is a summary of key steps:
- Use the ‘Import’ feature to import the ‘Leads’ object and all the required sub-fields.
- Add as many rows as needed with the corresponding leads information
- Use the ‘Insert/Update’ feature to send them back to Salesforce
If you need some help with that, check out this tutorial.
Mass Uploading Opportunity Products
If you use Salesforce to track your company’s products and you find yourself having to upload them one at a time for each new opportunity, you might find the connector to be useful.
In my case, we were dealing with about 5-7 products per order. So having a quick way to upload them to a particular opportunity was a handy time saver!
A summary of the key steps would look like the following:
- Import the ‘Opportunity Products’ object and all the required sub-fields.
- Add as many rows as needed with the opportunity product information.
- Use the ‘Insert/Update’ feature to send them back to Salesforce
There are details of using the connector which we haven’t really covered in this post, but hopefully you already have some ideas on how this connector can be useful for you!
If you need any help, comment down below and I’ll see if I can help!
Aiman Fikri 