If you are a Manufacturer using Salesforce, this post will help you prepare for key features allowing you to do more, provide insights to your users and prevent problems.

Sales Team

Do More

1. Does your team need to see sales forecasts for 15 months or custom fiscal periods at a glance? Now they can! Previously the limit was 12. For quarterly forecasts, the limit is still 8.

Grant Access to Records, Report and Dashboard Folders, and List Views by Territory

Sharing rules give groups of users wider access to records than what organization-wide defaults allow. Now you can define sharing rules based on the users assigned to territories. For example, keep opportunities private, except for California reps, who need to view and edit opportunities assigned to Oregon reps. You can also share report folders, dashboard folders, and list views by territory.

Add Sales Reps to Groups and Queues Based on Territory Assignment

Now it takes just a few clicks to add all the reps assigned to specific territories to groups or queues. For example, you can add all your Florida reps to your East Coast public group. It’s faster than adding reps one by one and helps you avoid redundant groupings of users.

Share Individual Records by Territory

In Salesforce Classic, reps can share the records they own with the users assigned to territories. Sharing this way lets users grant wider access to records than what organization-wide defaults allow. For example, your team’s opportunities are private, but reps assigned to California work deals together, so they share their opportunities with coworkers.

Expanded Enforcement of Daily External Email Limit for New Orgs

Each org can send 5,000 single emails per day to external email addresses. For orgs created in Spring ’19 and later, this daily limit is also enforced for email alerts, simple email actions, Send Email actions, and REST API. If one of the newly counted emails can’t be sent because your org has reached the limit, we notify you by email and add an entry to the debug logs. For orgs created before Spring ’19, the daily limit is enforced only for emails sent via Apex and Salesforce APIs except the REST API.

If you are a new Salesforce user, you would send 5000 emails per day and for current customers, it is only applicable for custom code only.

Prevent Problem

Customizable Forecasting Is Being Retired

Customizable Forecasting is scheduled for retirement as of Summer ’20. After the feature is retired, users can’t access Customizable Forecasting and its underlying data. We encourage you to migrate to Collaborative Forecasts. If you are using Customizable forecasting, you need to move to Collaborative forecasting quickly.

Account For Your Customers’ Email Opt Out Preferences

If your customers choose Email Opt Out or the Don’t Market email privacy setting, your company should send them non-commercial emails only, such as product shipping updates and service plan changes. Previously, Salesforce didn’t account for these settings and didn’t send any emails to these customers. You can prevent reps from sending email to customers with these privacy settings by removing their Send Non-Commercial Email permission.

If you are GDPR compliant, now you can have sales reps send transactional emails to customers when the send Non commercial email option is turned on.

Cloud flow designer will be retiring soon

With the new flow builder coming up, the old cloud flow designer will be retired since it is built in Flash. So stay on top with the new cloud flow builder which is faster and much simpler to use.

Saving Time

Return Bounced Emails to Senders as Attached Files

Help reps keep track of emails that aren’t delivered by returning bounced messages to them. When an email bounces, it is now sent as an email attachment to the sender’s email address. Returning bounced emails as attachments comply with security measures that help to protect against fraudulent emails.

 How to use it: For companies handling privacy emails, instead of now handling the bounced emails to a separate mailbox, the sender will be notified on this and he can talk to the contact or lead and fix the email saving time.

Access Salesforce Information Directly from Google Calendar

If you using Gmail for your emails, Sales reps can now easily access the matching Salesforce data while viewing or creating an event in Calendar view. No more double-clicking the event to drill into the details to see Salesforce data.

Log Emails to People Who Aren’t Email Recipients from Outlook and Gmail

Previously, sales reps could log emails from Microsoft® Outlook or Gmail to contacts, leads, and person accounts in Salesforce that matched an address in the To or CC fields in the email. Because an email can include important information, reps can now log messages to any people record, ensuring that pertinent information is recorded in Salesforce. Sales reps can search for other people using global search in the Gmail integration pane. Emails logged to other people records are included in the record’s activity timeline.

Use Salesforce email templates in Outlook and Gmail

How to use it: If you are using lightning for Outlook and Gmail, you can now allow your users to send emails using Salesforce email templates easily. User can select the template and send the email from your favorite device.

Watch a demo in action for Lighting for gmail features

Marketing Pardot

Configure the Salesforce-Pardot Connector with Improved Navigation and Design

Connect your sales and marketing teams faster with the redesigned Salesforce-Pardot connector edit page. You can now configure Connected Campaigns, Salesforce User Sync, and Marketing Data Sharing right from the connector page. While editing your connector, select a tab to see your options.

This would help you to use sync campaigns between Salesforce and Pardot and also choose the right records to be synced between Pardot and Salesforce.

Choose Which Records Sync Between Salesforce and Pardot

Gone are the days of adjusting sharing rules and organization-wide defaults. Now you can use Marketing Data Sharing to decide what syncs between Salesforce and Pardot. And because selective sync rules are managed in Pardot, you don’t need to be a Salesforce admin or even have a Sales Cloud license.

See Marketing Asset Performance on Campaigns (Generally Available)

When you connect Pardot and Salesforce campaigns, you can see exactly how much engagement your marketing campaigns generate, right in Salesforce. Search for campaigns and marketing assets in Salesforce, and view engagement performance from records and reports. No more exporting Pardot asset data to share reports—your users can do everything from Salesforce.

 How to use it: This is the most important reason on why you should sync campaigns from Salesforce to Pardot.

Service Cloud

Suggest the Right Recommendations with Einstein Next Best Action (Generally Available)

Present the best options to your agents and customers, such as a discount, a repair, or a suggested next step. Apply your company’s business rules, predictive models, and data to refine and personalize offers and actions. Einstein Next Best Action refines many possibilities into a few spot-on recommendations, making it easy to deliver a customized service experience.

This is a paid feature which you should check with your account rep on.

View Transcripts Without a Live Agent License

To provide more consistent support, every user with a Service Cloud license now has a 360-degree view of a customer’s support history and can see past chat transcripts. Previously, a support agent needed a Live Agent license to view chat transcripts. So when a customer chats with an agent and then follows up on another channel, such as email, the new agent wasn’t always able to see the full history. A Live Agent license is required to deliver service using Live Agent in the Lightning Service Console.

Communities

Increase Engagements by automating badge creation with Missions feature.

Game mechanics, such as using badges, are a great way to get your users involved in your community. The down-side is this is often done manually and can be time consuming. Instead, use the Missions feature to assign badges automatically. Community managers have their say in which action earns a badge and when it can be awarded, and then Missions takes care of the rest. Members can see which badges they haven’t yet earned, inspiring action.

Help Your Members Stay on Topic

You can configure the Ask button to block users from choosing a new topic when they ask questions under a selected topic. For example, a user selects the topic New Products and clicks the Ask button. But then in the Posting to field, the user selects another topic. To avoid potential confusion about the location of their question, use the new property to help your users keep focus and easily find their way back.

Why you should use this feature: This helps create topic experts which is helpful for self-service and engagement.

Provide Search Engines with the Freshest Content Snapshots immediately instead of weekly

Salesforce takes a weekly snapshot of your community’s published public content, which works well for most updates. But let’s say you update a page’s content with important, time-sensitive information, such as price changes for a flash sale. Now, instead of waiting for the weekly update, you can take a snapshot every 24 hours to refresh the page content served to search engines.

Help Customers Get Answers Fast, and Lighten Your Support Load

When members have questions put your best information forward and let them help themselves. Configure the Ask and Contact Support & Ask buttons to respond with pertinent articles and previous answers when users ask questions. Members can cancel a question when the response hits the mark, or they can continue to post their question.

Have your re sellers and distributors update leads in bulk and use predefined Salesforce list views.

Not only can you do so much more from a record list these days, but you can also control which options are available. New controls let you allow folks to edit the record list without sending them to the record detail, show or hide the actions buttons, and show or hide the search bar.

Why you should use this feature: This would help you to drive more engagements with your distributors and re sellers.

Assess Audience Effectiveness with Google Analytics

Curious about how effective your audience targeting has been? Wondering whether audience members are clicking their target content? Google Analytics tracks the click path of your members so you can understand how different audiences behave when they visit your community. Use this information to help drive engagement.

Why you should use this feature: This feature should be used right away. You can view your audience engagement using google analytics.

Partner communities

Create Partner Account Relationships and Data Sharing Rules (Generally Available)

If you have multiple distributors and needing different levels of access to your object records, sharing rules can get complicated. Easily create sharing relationships between partner accounts and protect confidential data by sharing only select information. Channel account managers can use account relationship data sharing rules and account relationships to target how information is shared and who it’s shared with.

Here is an example of creating an account sharing rule:

Here is an example of how orders can be shared to your distributors based on the account sharing rule:

Give New Users a Taste of Your Community Before They Sign Up

We’ve added async email verification for community self-registration. Async email lets users verify their email address at any time. You send users a verification link in an email message. Users can verify their email address by clicking the link when it’s convenient. Welcome new members by giving them access to your community without delay. You can also customize the email message so that users can recognize your brand.

Why you should use this feature:This would allow you to have your community members to login and use the community if there is a challenge with email issues.

Localize Login Prompts and Custom Error Messages for Login Discovery

When you use the Login Discovery page type in My Domain and Communities, you can localize the login prompt with a custom label. You can also localize custom login error messages in Apex. For example, you can alert users when they try to log in with a personal email address instead of their corporate email address.

 Why you should use this feature: With this feature, you can create custom error messages with multi language messages using custom labels.

See What Your Guest Users See

To take the guesswork out of your community’s security design, you can see what your Lightning community looks like to visitors who haven’t logged in. Previously, when you previewed a community, you were viewing it as an authenticated user, so it was difficult to know exactly what guest users could see.

Why you should use this feature: You can now preview your community on how anonymous users can see your community.

Salesforce Admin Power

Display an Image and Capture Address Information More Easily in Your Flows

Two new screen components improve your flows. Use the Display Image component to insert images in flow screens. Use the Address component to display a complete address form that’s customized to your settings. 

You can create new forms with standard picklist feature for country and state and create quick forms for your users.

Check a Field’s References Before You Edit It (Beta)

In a sandbox org, you can view the references to a custom field, such as in a formula, layout, or Apex class, with the click of a button. The new Where is this used? button lists where a field is used and where changes to the field appear. You can communicate changes to others who use the field in a formula or other context.

How to use: This is one feature admins will love. It will help save time on impact analysis. This feature does not do reports and dashboards yet but will be covered in future.

Clone, Deploy, Upload, and Validate Change Sets with Fewer Clicks

You no longer have to load the change set’s detail page to initiate these operations. We added links to the Inbound Change Set page that you can use to initiate validation and deployment operations for both deployed and undeployed change-sets. If the change set has been deleted from its source org, these operation links aren’t available. If deployment of the change-set is in progress, these operation links aren’t available until after the deployment completes. We also added links to the Outbound Change Set page that you can use to upload or clone change-sets. If the change-set doesn’t contain any components, the Upload link isn’t available.

Save Time by Cloning Sandboxes (Generally Available)

Sandbox cloning simplifies the management of multiple concurrent work streams in your application life cycle. Clone an existing sandbox for each type of work, such as development, testing, and staging. As you move from one development stage to the next, clone an existing sandbox rather than using your production org as the source. This pattern simplifies the customization of individual sandboxes. Your colleagues can easily clone individual sandboxes instead of sharing one sandbox to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

Developers

Force.com IDE Is Being Retired in October 2019

The Force.com IDE plug-in for Eclipse is in a maintenance-only state. We will still provide support through our official channels for the product until its retirement date on October 12, 2019, but the only updates will be for critical security issues that arise before the retirement date.

Developers now should use Visual Studio Code for development going forward.

To summarize, the top 3 features for Manufacturers are the following:

1. If you are in classic and use standard profiles, be prepared to have users experience lightning end of the year. So your options are to stay away from standard profiles or move to lightning. Click here for next steps on this.

2. If you are using gmail, plan to use the new chrome extension which has some good features on email templates and sharing.

3. Be prepared to learn how to use the new flow builder instead of the old flow designer.

As always feel free to post your comments on your favorite feature or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.