Salesforce Custom Record Types: Powerful Tools for Improving Team Performance  

What are record types in Salesforce? 

Custom record types are a tool in Salesforce that allows administrators to configure different business processes, with different page layouts and picklists, for different groups of users in an organization.  Often, different users need access to the same objects in Salesforce, but with access to different underlying data.  This can result from groups selling different products, differences in organizational structures, or different information flows, among other use cases.  Record types are a powerful method that helps you keep your users focused, and not distracted or overwhelmed by irrelevant data. 

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Let’s take two examples.   

Figure 1 – An Example of Different Record Types with Small Changes on a Single Form 

The first shows two custom records with slightly different sales stages.  These are used by the same sales organization, but for different purposes.  One record type allows the sales team to handle new business; the other to handle renewals.   

Figure 1a shows an example of a record type meant to handle new business. The second row of this record type shows several fields that include Prospecting, Qualification, and Needs Analysis. These fields are specifically meant for users who handle new business for a company. Figure 1b shows an example of a record type meant to handle the renewal of subscriptions. Notice that much of the page is the same, except for the second row, which now only has the three sales stages of Proposal/Price Quote, Negotiation/Review, and Closed. This streamlined series of sales stages is more useful for users who handle subscription renewals for a company. 

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The second example is a bit more complex, as shown in Figure 2 (note the differences between the records highlighted in red).  In this case, one group of salespeople – the direct sales team – sells the company’s products to end-user clients.  Another group – the business development team – works to develop reseller channel partners to sell their products into verticals that the sales team does not call on.  These groups require different fields in their contact, lead, and opportunity forms.  For example, the sales team can classify a lead in terms of both the products it is seeking and the use cases the product will be used for.  The business development team classifies its leads in terms of the verticals it services (e.g. medical, education, telecom) and the resellers standard deal terms (e.g. fixed price/sale, percentage of revenue, etc.).  Each team needs Salesforce page layouts with these fields and the appropriate pick lists associated with each field. 

Figure 2 – Images of the two different record types used by the sales and BD divisions 

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Benefits of Salesforce record types 

Record types allow the administrator to set up these different forms and flows to make them most efficient for each group, allowing them to qualify, track, and close more deals, more quickly.  They are powerful, flexible, and adaptable to a wide variety of scenarios that organizations need to run their business.  These include enabling  

• A customer service department to handle different types of support requests 
• Different HR teams to recruit for different divisions of a large, diversified organization 
• Different processes for various departments working in different countries under different regulatory frameworks. 

Salesforce record types present challenges for administrators 

Record types also present unique challenges for our customers.  Like any customizable aspect of Salesforce, custom record types tend to accrete over time due to a number of factors: 

• Changes in administrators.  A new administrator replaces a prior one with no transition.  They don’t have insight into the existing record types and why they were created, so they create new record types when adapting an existing record type will do.  That’s one scenario.  There are many others that occur in transitions. 
• Changes in business structure.  Reorganizations occur both within divisions and across organizations more broadly.  In these cases, new record types are required, and often old record types are not deleted.  Even more importantly, departments and divisions can merge, which means duplicate records become a significant issue that needs to be resolved at the time of the merger. 
• Changes in organizational leadership.  Sales organizations, for example, get new leaders all the time.  Each one has their own view of how Salesforce should be used in their sales flows.  New record types are created for the new environment and processes, but old record types are not retired.  Or equally problematic: the new record types have different fields than the old record types and records must be ported to the new format. 
• Changes in business/market requirements.  Markets are changing faster and faster, resulting in organizations adapting with new products, processes, and better data.  Much of this is being driven by new technologies, like Generative AI, that require an entire reinvention of how business is done.   

A major trend right now impacting Salesforce administrators is Digital Transformation, where organizations are more tightly integrating their disparate SaaS and internal applications into a single platform with a single shared data ‘source of truth’ – often in the form of data lakes.  This means that all kinds of custom record types are needed to allow intelligent and efficient interfaces with the broader set of applications in the enterprise. 

• Incorrect configurations.  Incorrectly configured custom record types occur all the time, often due to time-to-market issues where an administrator must quickly get something working for a specific team and isn’t given the time to ‘do the job right’.  One of the most common first tasks we hear Salesforce consultants discuss is that they have to restructure or replace existing record types that are not structured correctly for the needs of the business.  Restructuring may require various manipulations of the underlying data, including adding content, deleting content, changing picklist options and reconciling the underlying data, or merging records. 

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An example of how DataGroomr helps with Salesforce record types 

DataGroomr customers use our tools to support the continuing evolution of their custom record types in Salesforce.  Rather than talk generally, let’s look at a specific example and how DataGroomr can help speed and simplify management of custom record types. 

Two divisions of Acme Corp have been selling two different sets of products to the same company and contact base with two different salesforces for many years.  Last month, corporate decided to merge the two divisions and their salesforces into a single unit.  Both units had a custom record type for their customers and contacts that had structures that were similar but not exactly the same.   Each record type had unique fields not found in the other, and where there were similar fields, the pick lists were different.   

There are obviously several problems here that need to be solved: 

1. Which record type will be the master or do I need a new, third record type? 

This is the core business decision that creates the context in which DataGroomr is used. 

2. Where the basic company and contact info isn’t the same, which record’s data will be used?  What is the most accurate or the freshest?   

DataGroomr helps with this.  It allows you to compare records from two different custom record types and determine which fields from which record should be kept, either individually or in bulk.  This is true even if there are many similar but varied records.  DataGroomr’s AI-assist helps accurately match records for the same entity (e.g. contact, lead, opportunity), and its intuitive user interface makes it easy to select which data to keep for each field. 

3. How do I know that either set of customer records has the latest data?  As part of the merge, I’d like to also validate existing data and perhaps even enhance with fields (e.g. email addresses) I do not have. 

DataGroomr’s Verify feature makes it easy to validate which data in which record is the latest and update to the best data if the data in the merged record is out of date. 

4. Which pick list values will be used? 

This is a business problem that ‘sets the table’ for how DataGroomr should be used in the merge process. 

5. If some pick list values are going to be removed, what happens to records that have that now deprecated pick list value?  How do we reassign to one of the remaining (or new) values? 

Once again, DataGroomr’s AI-powered deduplication engine helps to determine which values in a pick list should remain and, if there are missing values, allow you manually update the record or create automation rules that will fill in those values based on other features of the record. 

This is only one example.  There are hundreds of other uses cases with similar challenges where DataGroomr can make a Salesforce administrator’s job easier and less stressful by simplifying and, in many cases, automating mundane, repetitive data management issues. 

Conclusion 

Record types are thus a powerful core feature of Salesforce that also create complex management challenges for administrators.  We hear this from our customers all the time, which is why we work closely with them to make the continuous management required to keep their business running efficiently more manageable.