Why Sales Teams Should Be Excited About Summer '14

Summertime is just about here and with that so is the Summer 14 release notes providing over 320 pages of Salesforce fun and excitement. If you missed part 1 of our review series, feel free to check out our rapid reaction blog. In the second part we get a bit more focused and dive into the world of the Sales Cloud. Here are three features every sales team should be excited about and why.

Opportunities Splits

One key area of Opportunity management that gets a lot of love in this release is Opportunity splits. Opportunity splits allow for credit on Opportunities to be split among team members. Prior to this release, Opportunity splits were not very customizable. They were limited to only two types (Revenue and Overlay) and weren’t fully integrated into the Salesforce Collaborative Forecasting model. With customizable splits in Summer 14, you can now add custom fields and types, validation rules, triggers and see splits on opportunities directly in any splits-based forecast. This flexibility allows companies to easily see the complete picture around who was involved with a sale and what type of credit they should get.

Collaborative Forecasting

A better forecasting experience has been an area of focus for Salesforce in recent releases and it hasn’t stopped with this one. In addition to being able to easily access split information as mentioned above, sales teams can now forecast on custom opportunity currency fields for more flexibility. You can also see Overlay Forecasts to track revenue from team members not directly responsible for opportunities and access historical forecasting reporting to see how Forecasts have changed over time. The historical trending for Forecasts is very interesting in that it allows you to see how well you forecast. With a custom report type you can highlight changes between five snapshot dates and this is all done through Salesforce’s native reporting and dashboard engine. One side note on forecasting, if you are still using Forecasting 1.0 (Classic), it will be retired with this release.

Customizable Price Books Entries

Price books became customizable in Summer ‘13 and only a short year later, price book entries are customizable. You can now create fields, validation rules and page layouts for your price book entries for more flexibility, data quality, and control. One of the biggest benefits of this enhancement is easier integration. One of the primary drivers for this feature request was to be able to store an external id on price book entries to allow for synchronization with external sources. This will save a lot of time for back office people and allow for faster and better reporting.

There are many other enhancements in Summer ‘14 like Territory Management 2.0 which is going into Beta, and, better reporting around Activities which might be of interest to you. I would recommend you take a look at our rapid reaction blog as mentioned above as well as skim through the release notes to see if anything else catches your attention. If you would like to discuss further tweet at me at www.twitter.com/Salvatoriello or comment below.