September 15, 2020 BY RYAN SHEA
In today’s new normal, successful companies are collaborating and engaging with customers remotely. This move to remote
work means that teams around the world have to go digital, fast. Executives, managers, and individual contributors need
real-time access to centralized customer and business data, so they can continue to achieve their goals from anywhere.
To keep your remote team productive in Salesforce, we recommend setting up permissions that give every team member
access to all the information that’s relevant to their role. That way, every team member can always see what’s next and
take immediate action.
Whether you’ve already set up Salesforce or you’re launching right now, take a look at your user management plan and
review your data access permissions.
Check your users against your employee list
First, take a look at the logins you have set up in Salesforce. Check your current users against your internal list of
employees. As you review your users, ask yourself: Does every executive, manager, and individual contributor have a user
account? Is everyone on the team represented?
With entire teams working remotely, every team member needs to be able to enter and access data that’s relevant to their
role. For instance, we can no longer rely on power users to relay Salesforce knowledge or surface reports and dashboards
for other team members.
If anyone is missing, make sure you get them set up in Salesforce.
Once a new account is ready, let your team members know they can now access Salesforce data. Be sure to give them any
information relevant to how they can access, enter, and use data in their day-to-day work.
Use profiles to give the right object access
Once you have all your users set up, it’s time to give each of them access to all the data they need. The first way to
control the data your users can access is with profiles.
Profiles give individual users access to objects in Salesforce by object type. For example, you can use profiles to give
a sales representative access to Account and Contact objects.
Your Salesforce instance has standard profiles included, which determine the base-level access your users can have. The types of access determine whether a user can create, read, edit, or delete a record under a specific object type.
We recommend reviewing the profiles you currently have and making sure they cover all the needs of your remote team. Are
there any groups or individuals that require a new profile type? If so, you can simply clone an existing profile and
adjust the permissions in that profile to give your team more targeted access.
Watch this video to learn more about setting up profiles.
Use roles to give the right record access
After your users get access to specific object types with profiles, they will want to engage with data that has been
created or modified by other team members. That’s where roles come in.
Think of roles as a way to represent your organization’s structure in Salesforce. For instance, your role hierarchy can
give different levels of access to individual contributors, team managers, and executives.
We recommend starting out by reviewing your internal team structure and mirroring it with your roles in Salesforce.
Then, share this structure with team leads and executives, so they can provide input and ask any questions about
Salesforce data access.
Building an accurate role hierarchy in Salesforce ensures that your team gets essential customer information, team
performance data, and progress reporting while they are working from anywhere.
Watch this video to learn more about building an effective role hierarchy.
Set your team up for success with these next steps
Following the steps we covered here will help you streamline access and set your teams up for success. For more
information, check out our User Management Best Practice Guide to get a deep dive into user management and key resources
to help you go further.
Then tell us how you’re keeping your remote teams productive. We want to hear about your experiences! Here’s how to
share your story:
