Salesforce Tasks tip – setting the Related To field

Set the ‘Related To’ field on Salesforce tasks without scrolling through all your opportunities, accounts or contacts & reduce errors.

Let’s say you want to set up reminders to call on your open deals next week.  You can do this by creating tasks on your open opportunities in Salesforce.

If you go to the ‘My Tasks’ section on your ‘Home’ tab, you can click the ‘New’ button to open a task.

The problem is, now when you want to link the task (the phone call) to your opportunity, you end up scrolling through a long list of opportunities (both closed and open) to find the one you want.  Not only is this a pain, it increases the chance you’ll put the task on the wrong opportunity since you only see the opportunity names.

What to do?

One idea would be to filter the list of opportunities to shorten the list.  Unfortunately Salesforce doesn’t allow you to use lookup filters on the “Related To” field on tasks.  So that won’t work.

So the easier way to create the task is to find the opportunity first.  Once you’ve found and opened the right opportunity, use the ‘New Task’ button in the ‘Open Activities’ section.  This way the opportunity is automatically associated with the task in the ‘Related To’ field.

Salesforce tip:  Go to the opportunity (or account, contact, etc) first.  Then create the ‘New Task’ from there.  That way the task’s ‘Related To’ field will be automatically & correctly filled in.

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