In an effort to continuously deliver the best results to its clients, Salesforce rolls out three new releases per year. With the Spring ‘18 release, Salesforce offers an array of new updates and options that benefit its users. We, your expert Consultants, get to read hundreds of pages of release notes sparked with words like ‘lightning’ and ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’ to discover what is beneficial to you and your business. You might be wondering how the newest update might help you, so let us take you through some of the features that will add value to your daily business activities.
To showcase real instances of how these improvements may be utilized, we will give an example of their use from a Marketer’s perspective, as well as a Sales Manager’s.
Mary, the Marketer
Mary, the Marketer, uses Salesforce to keep track of her various lead generation initiatives. She has a simple New Year’s resolution: explore new channels for lead generation. Thus, she broadcasts a targeted ad on LinkedIn, which turns out to be very successful and generates over fifty leads per day. This euphoria is, however, short-lived: it dawns upon her that she has to import all those leads in Salesforce manually through CSV import, or worse, create them manually one by one!
Salesforce’s Spring ‘18 release will feature an all-new LinkedIn integration. What does this entail for Mary? Essentially, anytime a potential customer clicks on her LinkedIn ad and enters their details, Salesforce will automatically create a new lead in the system. Better yet, any metadata embedded in the LinkedIn ad (be it personal information such as name and email, answers to survey questions, campaign, or date and time of submission) can be mapped to default or custom Salesforce Lead fields. This means Mary can have any lead generated from her LinkedIn ad automatically linked to a specific Salesforce Campaign, where she can track her ROI more accurately. She can also group the data by day or time, to see when submissions are at their peak.
Sally, the Sales Manager
Sally, the Sales Manager, uses Salesforce to ensure that Leads are being followed up on, and Opportunities are being nurtured and won by her reps. However, her biggest challenge remains that her team will often dedicate considerable efforts to nurture leads which end up being an incorrect fit for the company, or attempt to close a deal for months, only to lose it. Meanwhile, some high quality leads slip through the cracks.
We live in an age when machine learning can turn data into valuable business insights; what if Sally could leverage the power of machine learning to prioritize, with a quick glance, which leads or opportunities should her team spend their precious resources on? Salesforce’s Spring ‘18 expands the Sales Cloud Einstein suite with all new Opportunity Scoring and improved Lead Scoring insights. Einstein looks at record details, history, and related activities to calculate a score for a given Lead or Opportunity, which Sally can then see on the compact layout of Opportunity or Lead records. She can also hover on the score to see more detail on the main contributing factors that increase or decrease the score. For example, an Opportunity moving quickly through the stages will yield a better score. On the flipside, an Opportunity will have a lower score if it is associated with an account that has a history of low Opportunity close rates, or if the Close Date keeps getting pushed further. Sally can use these insights to quickly direct her team’s efforts.
Improvements to Sales Cloud Einstein do not stop here! Einstein learns how past opportunities were handled by Sally’s team, and uses that data to formulate predictions about future performance. Sally can set sales targets or KPIs, and see at a glance whether her team is expected to meet those goals. The icing on top? Einstein can also send insights to Sally’s mobile device when she is on the go. For example, if there is an unusually low amount of activity on one of her prospects, Sally gets notified and is suggested an immediate action to call or email that lead.
Whether you’re a Mary or a Sally, Salesforce Spring ‘18 will help you focus on what you do best, be it growing your business or building lasting relationships with your customers.
