The ‘Winter ‘19’ update from Salesforce will be released to all existing clients over the weekends of October 5th and 12th. This is one of three major releases from Salesforce this year, and contains hundreds of new features and upgrades to your existing CRM. All of these features are available to you to deploy immediately, but will require the settings to to be activated and set up by your consultant or in-house Salesforce developer.

If you would like to have these features setup in your system, get in touch and a Tenacre consultant will be able to help you plan and deploy the new features that will deliver value for your company.

Summary of new features

Out of the hundreds of new upgrades, we’ve selected the ten new features that we think will deliver the most value to our clients

Searchable List Views (22)

‘List Views’ are the pre-filtered views that have been setup on your system. For instance, most companies would have ‘My Open Opportunities’ as a list view for viewing the individual salespersons live deals.

With Winter ‘19 these list views are now searchable. This allows users to find information faster as they no longer have to scroll down through long lists of data to find the record that you’re looking for.

Improved dashboard charts (39)

The dashboard charts in Salesforce are brilliant at displaying summarised information, drawing data from your reports and displaying the results as charts and graphs. With the new upgrade we can now make these charts even better. The two improvements that we really like are

a) Control over the chart axis range - Previously the range of the chart axis was restricted, you couldn’t set the min and max values. In the new update you have control over the values in these axis

b) Choose to display whole numbers and the number of decimal places. We can now display data either in summarised format (AED1.3M), or in exact format (AED1,298,256.3345)

LinkedIn Sales Navigator (55)

If your business is focused on proactively creating new leads, or use Account-based Marketing techniques, then you will probably have considered the LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription.

In the past we could integrate the Sales Navigator tool into Salesforce, but the process was clunky and the user experience for the salesperson was poor. With the recent upgrade, the integration of Sales Navigator is much easier, and the user experience much improved.

Kanban list views for ‘Recently Viewed’ items (58)

Navigation through Salesforce and access to data has been improved by allowing the ‘Recently Viewed’ list views to be setup as Kanban views. This new feature allows us to show data in columns, sorted by a predefined value (such as Opportunity Stage, or Account Country)

Email tracking within Salesforce (64)

If you or your team sends emails from within Salesforce (if you don’t you should take a look at this feature!), you will now be able to track which emails have been opened. This feature is useful to salespeople, you can tell when a prospect has read your proposals or quotations.

Email Bounce Alerts (67)

Salesforce now highlights when an email has been bounced by the recipient’s email server. The new feature that displays the bounced email can also be incorporated into reports and workflows (like a Chatter message or automatic email) to notify the salesperson that the email has been bounced.

Add attachments to email templates (71)

Using email templates in Salesforce has always been a good idea. They save time writing repetitive messages, and templates can be used to ensure that all standard communication such as sending quotations or meeting follows ups are sent out error-free.

With the recent update, you can now add files or attachments to these email templates. This feature is really useful for sending out introduction emails such as

• Company profile PDF

• Case studies

• Invitation to an event with agenda

Task Reminders (77)

Using ‘tasks’ in Salesforce is a great way to organise yourself to make sure that you don’t forget to follow up on quotes, get back in touch with prospects or any other action that you want to be reminded of.

Now we can set reminders on the tasks so that you get a reminder automatically set on the tasks record

Import & integrate data (146)

In May of this year, Salesforce bought a company called Mulesoft for a cool $6.6 Billion. Mulesoft provides complex data integration tools (we’ve been using Mulesoft with for our integration projects for years now). It also provides a free ‘dataloader’ too that makes it easier to upload, update or mass delete records to Salesforce.

These tools were previously available as separate software applications that required a licenses, or at least a unique logon. Now they are all integrated within the Salesforce Setup menu, making it easier for your consultant or system administrator to manage data.