The Salesforce Spring’ 18 release is fast approaching and like last year, it’s now time to start looking at the latest features and inclusions. With the spring release notes published in December, there’s a lot for us to get our teeth into when it’s finally released, and there’s lots to be excited about.
With it expected to go live in a few weeks time, we’ve gone through the notes and taken a look at some of the features that we think will have an impact in the way people will use Salesforce in the future.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring
The Spring 18 release has promised to add new features and improvements to deepen Einstein’s ability to help turn leads into an opportunity scoring. Einstein Opportunity Scoring will generate opportunity scores based on the record details, lead history and any type of related activities involved with the opportunity and related accounts. Information about the opportunity owner, such as yearly win rates, is also used to calculate the score. This is a new feature in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
Salesforce Feedback Surveys
Something that will be completely new to Salesforce is Salesforce Surveys. Surveys had been mentioned a few years ago but their inclusion in the Spring 18 release has come as a surprise to many. The new survey application will be able to create easy-to-use forms to collect feedback and important marketing data from your leads and customers. Whilst there are some survey tools that integrate with Salesforce already available – this new built-on application promises to harness the power of Salesforce when viewing collected data, creating data reports and dashboards. Once released this feature will be available in Classic and Lighting Experience at an additional cost. We think this will be a welcome addition to the Salesforce roster and expect a wide uptake for users.
Reactive Dupe Management
Removing duplicates can be a frustrating and time wasting exercise for most Salesforce users , with lots of data constantly being inputted into Salesforce it can be difficult to track duplicate data and it often builds up over time. However, with the recent inclusion of duplicate and matching rules in Salesforce it has become easier to alert users to any potential duplicates that sit in your data and then remove them. Salesforce has now announced you’ll be able to report on, view, and merge duplicates which already exist in your system. You’ll also be able to share job results with others and merge the duplicates—all within Salesforce, making it even easier to manage duplicate data, as well as reducing the time wasting involved with removing it.
LinkedIn Lead Integration
This is something that has been discussed for a while now – the ability to use Salesforce to generate leads by using Linkedin. Using LinkedIn ads, this new feature will capture lead information from Lead gen advertisements, automatically adding leads to Salesforce. When a prospective customer fills out the built in form on a LinkedIn ad, Salesforce will now convert the inputted data directly into a new Salesforce lead. It’s been suggested that users will be able to add up to 500 leads from LinkedIn per day. We expect this to be fantastic news to those who already deploy LinkedIn ads as part of their marketing tactics to generate new leads.
Community Calendars
Traditionally, users have been using a 3rd party AppExchange solution in order to have a community based calendar. Communities will now give users the ability to view their calendar and view others’ Salesforce Calendars from within the community. You’ll be able to share your My Events calendars with other team members and add their calendars to your view. To get this feature you’ll need a Customer Community Plus and Partner Community license. It’ll definitely be feature that will help the larger sales teams.
For a more detailed look at what to expect from the Salesforce Spring ‘18 release and some of the exciting new features that will be available, it’s worth checking out the spring release notes. Alternatively, if you’d like some more information on how Salesforce can benefit your organisation, get in touch.