As a salesforce admin or user of salesforce, there comes a time when we need to sell the value of the feature upgrade salesforce provides us. So here is a simple way of understanding the value of Winter 14 and how would it help your company to succeed? I would categorize the features of Salesforce into 4 categories.
1. Customer insight
2. Productivity
3. Save Money
4. Colloboration and Knowledge share.
Customer Insight Features.
Here is 3 features which would help to understand your customers and offer you more insights.
Reports on custom object data
1.Users can now get the data they need right on their most-visited pages, without having to go to the Reports tab. You can embed report charts in record detail pages for any standard or custom object. Users are empowered to make decisions based on data they see in the context of the page.” There are some limitations- 2 reports per page,
and users can refresh up to 100 reports every 60 minutes.
2. Forecasts now support the ability to show Opportunity Splits, a previous feature that allows you to share sales credit across multiple opportunity
team members. Forecasts are just getting better and better, as they also now support the ability to forecast Product Groups. This would help to understand salesteams and their value and your better selling product categories.
3. Analyze Historical Trends
Historical trending comes with a new custom report type designed to highlight changes between any five snapshot dates. It adds the ability to analyse day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month changes in the Opportunities object and up to three custom objects. This would help to understand sales variances between months and compare them.
4.Analytics API – Access Salesforce Report results via an API. External applications can now access reports using the api which would help to share reports to non Salesforce users.
2. Productivity Features
Here are some core features which would help to increase the productivity.
a. Temporarily disable users.
It is always a pain to deactivate users when they leave your company if these users own a lot of accounts, contacts and opportunities. So now with WInter 14, you can prevent users from logging into your organization temporarily by freezing user accounts , while you perform the steps to deactivate them, This would help to clean up the accounts and contacts and opportunities shared by the disabled user later.
2. Salesforce Console for Sales
Console for sales cloud would help for inside salesreps to cut down button clicks. Salesreps can view all leads, move them to different ques and perform all functions in one screen saving button clicks.
3. Additional Search “All fields” on Enhanced Lookups
Salesforce lookups have always used the “Name” of the record to search for a match in a lookup field. Now you can use an “all fields” option to search across the record. This makes it easier to find the correct records. Now you have the ability to find a Contact by email address, or locate an Account by Account Number—very helpful.
4. workflow rules on user object
Think of a usecase where you would like to provide an user temporary access to salesforce and disabling them after a period of time. Now this can easily be automated when you have a temp user to set an expiration field,and have a workflow deactivate the user on that date? Now with the user object available on the workflow field, user action can be automated on standard and custom objects.
3. Saving Money
Knowledgebase Articles are now available to “read” for the majority of users* without an additional feature license. Only the users who create, edit, delete, and publish knowledge articles require an additional feature license. Chatter will also be included for draft articles, to help collaborate on content prior to publishing. Time to share and spread the knowledge!
*Chatter Plus / Force.com license users will still need the feature license. This would help to save money for the licenses which you had pay before.
4. Colloboration and Knowledge share Features
1.Auto archive chatter groups
Now that groups are auto-archived after 90 days of inactivity. Auto Archiving comes turned on by default in Winter 14 so this is a feature ,you will have to address if you do not want your groups auto-archived. This would help to clean up unused chatter groups.
2. Mention Groups
Chatter now makes it easier to reach out to internal specialist groups. This improves connectivity and collaboration when you need it most. Need help with a certain product for a sales pitch, or service support? Simply @mention a group of experts and have it appear in all of their feeds, as well as in the group feed. Find the information you need and get a collaborative response faster. This would help to reach out to all the members in a group quicker.
So with these features, you can maximize salesforce usage by increasing sales, save money, increase productivity and better knowledge share. Please feel free to email me at buyan@sforcemaximizer.com for any questions and please click like if you like the article.
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