Why Sales Teams Should be Excited About Spring 16

What better way to get over the post holiday blues then with the Salesforce Spring ‘16 release!  Salesforce brings us 392 pages of new features and functions coming to a Salesforce org near you. This release, as expected, is heavily focused on Lightning Experience enhancements so I am going to change things up a bit.  Since some of you have embraced Lightning and others like myself have not, I am going to focus on enhancements that will either make your life easier with Lightning or get you to turn it on. Here is a list of quick hits on Lightning that sales teams should be excited about:

• Opportunity Calendar: Stay on Top of Opportunities (Beta):  Sales teams can now track opportunities they own right in their calendar. This is a nice visual to help plan future activities on an Opportunity.

• Filter Your Activity Timeline by Activity Type:  Your activity timeline shows all types of activities on an opportunity, a lead, an account, or a contact.  Spring ‘16 allows you to filter on these activities so you can just see calls or meetings.

• “All Overdue Tasks” List: Overdue tasks now have their own view so they reduce noise on the screen.

• Inline Editing: Inline editing is now available in Lightning. Prior to this release you had to click “Edit” before you could update a record when in Lightning. (Yeah!)

• Home Page Enhancements: Today’s Tasks show the next 5 tasks due today and Upcoming Events show the 5 upcoming events on the user’s calendar.  When an event passes, it will drop off the list.

• Access Global Actions (Composer Window):  On any Lightning Page, you can access the composer window to log a call, create a new event, task or note without ever needing to navigate away from the current page.

• List Views: You can now create and edit list views.  

• Notes: In addition to being able to add a Note as part of a Global Action (see above), you can now add images to your notes and restore previous versions.

• Opportunity Teams:  Opportunity Teams are now available in Lightning and show up as a related list. Settings for opportunity teams aren’t yet available in Lightning Experience so you will have to switch to classic to enable them.

• Campaigns: Now available in Lightning and you can add members all on one page. Salesforce also adds a nice visual donut chart to illustrate the Campaign Status.

• Data.com: Now available in Lightning.

• Reports and Dashboards:  Dynamic Dashboards are now available in Lightning and you can view Matrix Report Details.

• Right Clicking: You can now right-click on a tab image in Lightning to open in a new window or tab.

Will I turn on Lightning?  I am still not sure especially with features like Forecasting still not available but I can say for sure that I am considering it. There are many other enhancements in Spring ‘16 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