SMB cheat sheet

Salesforce editions for SMB: Essentials (limited customization, up to 5 users on some plans), Starter Suite, and Professional; Enterprise adds full customization and API access.

Standard objects: Account (company), Contact (person), Lead (unqualified prospect), Opportunity (potential deal), Case (support request), Activity (task/event).

Record ownership: records are owned by a User or a Queue; sharing is controlled by Organization-Wide Defaults (OWD), role hierarchy, sharing rules, and manual sharing.

OWD options: Private, Public Read Only, Public Read/Write, and Controlled by Parent (on detail side of master-detail).

Profiles define object permissions and field-level security; Permission Sets grant additional access without changing the profile.

The AppExchange is the marketplace for third-party apps; Salesforce Labs apps are free and unsupported.

Sandbox types: Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, and Full Copy; Full Copy includes all production data and is used for performance testing.

Data Loader handles bulk import/export of up to millions of records; the Data Import Wizard handles up to 50,000 records for standard objects.

Lead conversion creates an Account (if none matches), a Contact, and optionally an Opportunity; the Lead is marked Converted and becomes read-only.

Opportunity stages map to a sales process; Stage probability is used in forecasting and can be set per stage.

Opportunity products and price books: adding a product creates an OpportunityLineItem; the total rolls up to Amount.

Sales Path guides users through key fields at each stage; it is configured per record type and stage.

Forecasting categories: Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed, and Omitted; forecasts roll up through the role hierarchy.

Web-to-Lead captures form submissions as Leads; it requires enabling and generates HTML to embed on a website.

Email templates and Quick Text speed up communication; Lightning Email Templates support merge fields and dynamic content.

Opportunity teams and account teams share record access with coworkers without changing ownership.

Case lifecycle: New → Working → Escalated → Closed; support processes control which status values are available.

Entitlements and milestones define service-level agreements (SLAs); milestone actions can trigger email alerts or escalations.

Queues route cases to teams; queue members must be users, roles, or public groups.

Case assignment rules automatically assign new cases to users or queues based on criteria.

Omni-Channel routes work items to agents based on capacity, skills, and routing configuration.

Knowledge articles can be attached to cases; article visibility is controlled by data category and channel.

Case comments and case feed track internal and external communication; email-to-case converts inbound email into cases.

Service Console (Lightning Service) provides a split-view workspace with related records, knowledge, and macros.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) uses a 1:1 model: each prospect maps to one lead, contact, or account.

Lead scoring in Account Engagement combines profile score (fit) and engagement score (activity); scores drive automation rules.

Email Builder and Engagement Studio (journey builder) automate nurture campaigns with triggers, actions, and rules.

Salesforce CMS stores content and delivers it to Experience Cloud sites and Commerce storefronts.

Commerce Cloud (B2C/B2B) uses catalogs, products, price books, and entitlements to define what buyers can purchase.

Promotions apply discounts via promotion rules; coupons are codes that map to promotions.

Campaign members track responses; Campaign Influence attributes opportunity revenue to campaigns.

Consent and preference management control opt-in/opt-out for email and SMS; GDPR/CCPA require documented consent.

Reports have four formats: Tabular, Summary, Matrix, and Joined; Summary groups rows and supports charts.

Report types define which objects and fields are available; custom report types join objects via lookup or master-detail relationships.

Dashboards display up to 25 components; each component sources a report and refreshes on a schedule.

SOQL queries data (SELECT fields FROM object WHERE condition); SOSL searches text across multiple objects (FIND 'term').

Data quality tools: validation rules prevent bad data on save; duplicate rules and matching rules identify duplicates.

Field types: Text, Number, Currency, Date, Picklist, Lookup, Master-Detail, Formula, Roll-Up Summary; formula fields are calculated at query time.

Einstein Analytics / CRM Analytics provides datasets, lenses, and dashboards for advanced analysis.

Data export: weekly export service and Data Loader; Schedule Export delivers data to a secure FTP location.

Automation tools: Flow Builder (record-triggered, scheduled, screen, and autolaunched flows), Workflow Rules (legacy), and Approval Processes.

Flow elements: Assignment, Decision, Loop, Get Records, Create Records, Update Records, Delete Records, and Subflow.

Record-triggered flows run before save (fast field updates) or after save (actions like email or creating records).

Apex is a strongly typed, object-oriented language for custom logic; triggers fire on insert, update, delete, and undelete.

Lightning Web Components (LWC) are the modern UI framework; Aura components are the legacy framework.

Agentforce uses topics, actions, and a reasoning engine (Atlas) to build AI agents; agents can be grounded with Flow, Apex, and Knowledge.

Einstein Trust Layer masks data, prevents data leakage, and audits generative AI prompts and responses.

Permission sets and profiles control access to Apex classes, Visualforce pages, and custom objects.