Why Sales Teams Should Be Excited About Summer '13

Summer is approaching and with that we can expect some exciting new features and functions that Salesforce.com will be offering as part of their Summer ‘13 Release.

For all of us Sales Cloud lovers, Salesforce stayed true to the core and added some nice time saving and overdue enhancements to Opportunities. As done for Spring ‘13,  here are three features from Summer ‘13 every sales team should be excited about and why.

Opportunity Splits

The ability to split credit for Opportunities has been a request for quite some time and with Summer ‘13 you finally get it.  There will be two types, “Revenue Splits”  which provides credit to team members who are directly responsible for revenue that an opportunity creates and “Overlay Splits” which provides credit to team members who work on an Opportunity but are not directly responsible for generated revenue.  The Revenue Splits must total 100% of the Opportunity amount but the Overlay Splits do not.  This feature is great and will roll individual sales credits into quotas and pipeline reports without the need to create duplicate Opportunities which is a nice time saver.

Activity Enhancements

There are a few small enhancements to Activities that I thought were worth mentioning. Previously, the limit on Contacts associated to shared activities was 10 but with this release they get a bump to 50 which helps with Activity accuracy. Email to Salesforce got a nice boost piggybacking off of the previously mentioned bump in the number of Contacts related to a shared Activity. Previously email to salesforce would create a separate email task record for each contact in an email but now with Shared Activities being enabled, it will relate up to 50 contacts to an email task record.  This enhancement helps users get a more clear and accurate view of their historical Activities.Lastly, to go along with the Shared Activities theme, all reports will now show all Contacts related to the activity instead of just the primary contact.

Customizable Price Books

Keeping up with the love for Salesforce core functionality, Summer ‘13 offers customizable Price Books.  Previous to this release, business groups could have their own price book but no ability to customize them for their specific needs.  With Summer 13, custom fields can be created along with page layouts and record types to give each group this flexibility. Users can also now easily see their price lists through the new Price Books tab.An example use case would be a company that has seasonal price books. By creating a custom date field users can specify the start and end dates during which the price book is active. Price Books are looking more like a first class object by the second! Additionally, to save a step in the archiving process, Salesforce created a new Archive button that now quickly archives the price book without directing you to an error page that it did previously.

There are many enhancements in Summer ‘13 and I would recommend you take a look at our rapid reaction blog as well as skim through the release notes to see if anything else catches your attention.   Hopefully these few got you as excited as they got me.  If you would like to discuss further tweet at me at www.twitter.com/Salvatoriello or comment below.