Salesforce Spring 2020 release is upon us. At Red Argyle we review each release from three different perspectives:
- Salesforce Spring ’20 Release: A Consultant’s Analysis
- Developers Guide to the Spring Release
- What Your Business Needs to Know about Salesforce’s Spring ’20 Release
This blog focuses on what your business should know about the Spring 2020 Release.
Skip ahead if you already have a release plan; if you don’t, read on.
With every release we think you should do three things:
- Review features that are going to be turned on or off automatically with the release which might impact your users.
- Check out the released items and determine if there is anything coming with the solution you own. This way you can see what you can take advantage of and deploy to your users.
- Do a general review of what else is being released with the products that you don’t own. From there, do some product research and see if anything catches your eye. This will ensure that at least 3 times a year you are spending time learning about what is available.
About Salesforce Releases
Salesforce comes out with three releases a year. The releases are packed with things for your business that you want to consider:
- Features that are being retired
- Updates and features you may want to consider turning on for your users
- Updates and features for immediate release that you are going to want to understand and address right away if needed.
Where can you find information about the Spring 2020 Release? Start here.
Managing releases is one of the ways to drive the most value from your Salesforce instance. Keeping tabs on the releases ensures that your solution is healthy and that your users are not surprised by anything.
Task Queue Assignment
Salesforce now allows you to create queues for tasks. Why is this so cool? Well, keep in mind that an admin can create a queue for a type of task. Each queue can have members (Users) associated with them. This now allows you to lean on other cool Salesforce features like workflows and templates. So, let’s pull all of this together. In sales, I often need someone to send a contract. Now you can assign the task to the Sales Support queue, which will automatically send an email to each of the members in the queue for help.
Want to learn more about Task Queues? Check out this Video.
Want to learn how to set up a Task Queue? Check out this help page.
What a great way to increase productivity and collaboration.
Email Enhancements – Scheduled Emails and List Email Drafts
Salesforce has done a lot over the years to enhance sales ability to craft and send emails from Salesforce. If you have not checked it out in a while you should.
With the Spring 2020 Release, Salesforce now allows you to schedule sends and creative draft List (views) to create recipient lists.
Sales reps can now specify email arrival times to increase the chances of an email being read. They can schedule an email to arrive at the start of a contact’s workday, for example. The new Scheduled Emails component also lets reps update the content of a scheduled email, and change its scheduled date and time as needed.
Sales reps can take their time when creating list emails. Reps can now save their work as a draft and return to it later. Your sales reps can identify the right people to email by using search criteria based on Account fields. Previously to do this in Lightning, you had to add a formal field to the contact that pulled down the information from the Account. With more fields in a filter reps can narrow down their contact list more precisely.
These enhancements do a few things to make the rep more productive, but what I like most from a business perspective is that they bring the reps work into Salesforce and it increases the use of activities.
CMS Changes and Enhancements
Salesforce continues to think about and come up with creative ways to help us deliver content to our users. The new CMS from Salesforce is a hybrid CMS that allows us to create and deliver content to any channel.
The Salesforce CMS now being a hybrid CMS means that you can create content in a central repository and syndicate it to any endpoint- whether that’s an experience or a site powered by Salesforce or another system. This allows you to create content once in Salesforce CMS, and then reuse it across different channels.
Why is this change important? Because it is breaking the tight link between content and presentation often seen in a traditional CMS. You can now use Salesforce CMS to serve more endpoints, inside or outside of Salesforce. By separating content from presentation you can add your content once in Salesforce CMS and then decide which channels to share it with. After that, you can add the content to the various websites, portals, or mobile apps where you want the content to appear.
High-Velocity Sales
If you have sales reps doing any type of business development you really want to check out High-Velocity Sales from Salesforce. It does a lot of things, but at its core you can build a sequence of sales activities defining a Sales Cadence; Sales managers can perfect the sales process to bring out the best in their reps and make every sales success easy to repeat.
What is High-Velocity Sales?
Check out the Product info here.
Check out this video.
The 2020 enhancements to High-Velocity now allow for Sales Cadences to be set up with Branches based on Email Engagement and Sales Cadence can now be setup up to Send Emails Automatically.
Sales managers can create sales cadences that lead reps through different outreach steps depending on whether a prospect engages with an email. New listener branch steps wait for prospect engagement with an email and advance to the next appropriate step based on that engagement. For example, sales reps can follow one path if a prospect clicks a link in an email and another path if a prospect doesn’t.
Where: This change applies to High-Velocity Sales in Lightning Experience. High-Velocity Sales is available as an add-on in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions.
Want to learn more about the Spring 2020 enhancement to High-Velocity Sales? Check out this short video.
Action Plans
If you have not heard of Action Plans it might be because you are not in one of the editions of Salesforce that offers it. Currently, Action Plans while available in Lightning Experience are only included in Salesforce Government Cloud with Lightning Scheduler, Financial Services Cloud, and Consumer Goods Cloud.
There is a package on the AppExchange that has been around for a while that the feature is based off of. We are not sure how well they are aligned, but it might be worth taking a look at if you are interested. The Spring 2020 Release updated the ability to create documented checklists, but the concept of action plans is interesting and we thought you might want to further explore it. Want to learn more? Check out this Video.
We think Action Plans have a lot of uses and that from a business perspective they can really support quality, the customer’s experience, and efficiency.
Bringing it home
If you do not have a release strategy- you need one. At least 3 times a year someone should be taking a look at what is being retired and what is now available for you from Salesforce.
We want to highlight a few changes with this release as well as highlight a few features from Salesforce that we think are great that many organizations we talk with have not yet seen or checked them out. Spring 2020, like every release from Salesforce, has hundreds of changes coming.
Make sure you take a look at what might impact your org. Also, look out for what new things you may be able to leverage during this release. If you are having trouble making sense of all of this, give us a ring!
