CRM Demand Tools - Mass Effect

Are you looking to update a group of records within salesforce but want to avoid having to manually search, locate the record, and make your desired change? Would you rather export a group of records to Excel make the changes within the spreadsheet and simply upload the changes? Mass Effect provides you the ability to do just that and much much more.

Recommendations for using MassEffect

• If you are looking to update leads/contacts that you are unsure exist within salesforce and do not have a unique identifier to identify potential matches, please utilize the "People Import" tool as it provides varying matching levels other than exact such as fuzzy, alphaclean etc
• If you have just completed and import using "People Import" and wish to manipulate the data in a spreadsheet, please save the report located on the final step which includes the id field for both matched records as well as newly imported records.
• If you are looking to update group of any records you know exists within salesforce, using MassEffect create a report to export the fields you wish to update and be sure to include the id field.
• If the updates you perform in MassEffect are routinely completed with identical mapping and update options, simply save the scenario to avoid having to identify the mapping and update options with each process.
• If the group of records you are looking to update is a routine task schedule the salesforce report to run automatically. This report can then automatically be emailed to your user group including the id, so they can simply copy and paste the data to a spreadsheet, make the desired changes, and process the updates using MassEffect.
  
• If you are using Excel 2007 please be sure to save the file under the previous version as xlsx is not an acceptable file type.
• Be sure your report does no contain duplicate id's as it will produce errors on the final stage of Mass Effect for those duplicate records and will not complete the desired update.

I have created three videos (available on the Salesforce User Guide site as well as in the Screencast video side bar of this blog) demonstrating some uses of mass effect such as:

• Updating an Accounts "Program" field
• Updating the "Status" field of a lead from "New" to "Contacted"
• Updating a group of tasks from "Not Staretd" to "Completed"