Why Sales Teams Should be Excited About Spring '15
What is there to look forward with the holidays being over? You guessed it, Salesforce Spring ‘15 release! Salesforce brings us its 46th release with over 250 new and improved features with over a 100 coming from the IdeaExchange. In part two of our series of the Salesforce Spring 15 release review, we dive into the world of the Sales Cloud. As done with every release, here are some features every sales team should be excited about and why.
Sales Path (Beta)
Sales Path is a new feature currently in Beta that guides your sales representatives through every stage of your company’s sales process and brings focus the important sales tasks within each stage. This enables the sales rep to close deals more quickly. If you have more than one sales process, you can have one Sales Path for each Opportunity record type which allows for more flexibility. Leveraging a wizard-like setup screen, an admin can easily create a Sales Path. After a record type is selected, you just need to specify the fields that the sales team needs to complete for each stage, along with some tips, links, or other information to guide your reps to success, and you’re finished. Its that simple. This will be a great way to minimize noise on a screen, add some extra validation and provide quick links to tools that can help move things along. One thing to note, Sales Path is only being released on Salesforce1. Hopefully when it becomes generally available it will be on the desktop version as well.
Duplicate Management (Generally Available)
Keeping your data clean and accurate can be a struggle for many organizations if you don’t have proper processes and tools in place. For sales teams, things like duplicate leads can cause confusion, affect lead assignment, and waste time in data entry. With Spring ‘15 Salesforce makes generally available Duplicate Management leveraging Data.com technology without the need for a Data.com license. The Salesforce ecosystem/community always had ways to manage duplicates but it required you to proactively go find them and it was limited in that it required an administrator to define what criteria was used to find a duplicate, in addition to any fees the application charged. This new feature-set allows admins to define a set of rules for what would be considered a duplicate and alerts the user when they try to create the record. (This is available on all objects including custom objects.) Further, you can actually control whether you even allow users to create duplicate records inside Salesforce. If you do allow for duplicates, Salesforce gives you an easy way to create reports so you can better monitor them.
Work.com
Has Work.com been set free? It appears that at least part of the feature-set has. Thanks Badges and Skills are now included for all Sales Cloud users for free. For those unfamiliar, Thanks Badges are a way to recognize your coworkers for a job well done and the post goes directly to their Chatter feed. Skills is a feature where users can declare individual skills, endorse other users’ skills, and search for experts with specific skills in their organization. How great is it that you can quickly search to see if anyone has expertise in a particular product that could help you win a deal and afterwards easily promote that person to the rest of the team with a Thanks Badge? These two new features are a great way to build a collaborate-and-team-first culture within your organization. Hopefully this is the start of a trend to make all the Work.com features free. For those Work.com licensed users, there are other cool features like more customization of coaching and enhanced goals that are worth taking a look at.
There are many enhancements in Spring ‘15 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. Please feel free to comment below, on the Salesforce Success Community, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @Salvatoriello.
