As we’re sure you all have seen and heard - Salesforce recently hosted their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.?We were out there as attendees and there is a lot to unpack about what Salesforce announced. Dreamforce always has a BUNCH of announcements - some are new things that aren’t quite ready for you to roll out, but some new features are, and we’re always happy to chat through them.
We wanted to pull together a list of things we thought should be on your radar. The big things we saw, which generally fall into three major themes: artificial intelligence (AI), data, and reporting, are:
AI: AI was the top focus of this year’s event, with an emphasis on how data combined with AI and your CRM can radically change your business. The Einstein 1 platform was the big announcement at Dreamforce, which is a re-architecting of Data Cloud and the underlying Einstein AI framework. Here are a few products that showcase the power from these initiatives:
- Einstein Copilot: As part of the Einstein 1 release, Salesforce announced Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant that will be in the right-hand rail of every Salesforce app. The idea is that it will be an open-ended sales assistant for the end user which, in addition to natural language chat capabilities, will be able to trigger Salesforce workflows. Workflows will be completely customizable and able to leverage underlying data in Data Cloud as well as the usual Salesforce objects and records. Release Timing: Some features will be available as pilots right away while others are due to be released later this year. As of September 2023, Salesforce anticipates GA in February of 2024.
- Contact Intelligence: Salesforce has redesigned and vastly improved what you can do from the Contacts homepage with the introduction of the Contact Intelligence View. In this view, users can quickly filter their contacts, see aggregate activity statistics for the resulting records, and take action to reach out directly from the contact home page. To see detailed activity for individual records, users can click the side panel icon next to the record name and instantly see metrics for the total contacts in your criteria, contacts with no completed or recent activities, overdue and upcoming activities as well as activities due today. Release Timing: October of 2023.
- Einstein GPT: Salesforce has been talking about this one for a while and finally released pricing in July ($50 per user per month). What is it? Einstein GPT for Sales connects Salesforce data with the generative capabilities of AI and LLMs. In practice, this means it allows your sales team to generate personalized emails to send to contacts and leads with minimal prompts - which is a major time saver for sales reps. The email capability is generally available with another tool called Buyer Assistant (in beta). Two other components called Sales Assistant and Call Summaries are expected to be generally available in October 2023. Release Timing: Available today, with additional features set to launch in October 2023
REPORTING: What good is all of this data and AI if you cannot report on it? Here are some new tools that will help with that:
- Activity 360 Reporting: Activity 360 has been in beta for a while, but will be generally available in the Winter ’24 Salesforce release. One of the drawbacks of Einstein Activity Capture has been the ability to fully report on all activities due to the fact that they were stored on AWS and technically not in Salesforce. Activity 360 Reporting attempts to solve this issue. In the Activity 360 Reports folder you will find pre-built reports that show you all activities, including emails captured by Einstein Activity Capture, across Salesforce records such as opportunities, accounts, and contacts. This requires at least one Einstein Activity Capture paid license.
- Revenue Intelligence: This has been out for over a year now, but it is getting more attention. Salesforce touts it as a data-driven approach to business decision making that shows the entire revenue lifecycle. In a nutshell, it combines some very cool looking Lightning components, embedded Einstein predictions, and some CRM Analytics dashboards. Features include: Einstein Opportunity Scoring, Deal Health Insights, Collaborative and Predictive Forecasting, and Pipeline Inspection. Einstein powers this with personalized dashboards with configurable metrics that are adaptable to your business and allows real-time monitoring of pipeline status through flow charts. This is essentially everything a sales manager would want to see all in one place. As a bonus it also comes with a CRM Analytics Plus License so you have the full suite of analytics tools. Here are two of the newest features:
- Commit Calculator: Being able to view a forecast and pipeline dashboard is fine, but what if you could interact with it and run multiple what-if scenarios? The Commit Calculator allows you to remove commits, omit, or add deals all without adjusting any of the underlying data. Release Timing: Winter 2023
- Track Historical Changes in Formula Fields: Also part of Revenue Intelligence and such a simple but powerful thing is the tracking of formula field changes. This was formerly a black box but now whenever a data point that is buried in a formula field changes you will see the change in History Trending. If your main revenue fields are formula based, this is a huge win for pipeline and forecasting visibility. Release Timing: Winter 2023
- Sales Planning: Sales Planning is a unified platform built on Sales Cloud for yearly planning, carving, territory setting, and quota management. This new feature allows for creating actual sales plans (hence the name) more accurately and efficiently by incorporating factors such as ramp time, potential attrition, and supporting roles into capacity planning. Plans are built off of key business criteria with out-of-the-box templates to jumpstart the process. All of this allows for planning revenue targets and rep quotas, territory design using a map or a tree structure, continuous planning for compelling events such as product launches and economic headwinds, and segmentation using any combination of automated and manual assignments through all levels of your hierarchical structure in Salesforce. It is not all AI driven though. Salesforce has also invested in migrating many of their tools that had been up until recently solely in the domain of their Industry cloud products. These are now finding their use cases in more mainstream products.
- OmniStudio for CPQ+: Salesforce has released a new way to create Quote documents (or any documents, really) from within CPQ. Using the low-code interaction builder that is the OmniStudio technology, admins can quickly create custom document templates within a drag and drop, modular experience. On the front-end, sales reps can walk through a wizard to generate customized, dynamic documents to send to their customers. Release Timing: This is currently available with CPQ+ licenses.
- Salesforce Contracts: Salesforce has announced their foray into the CLM space with the generically (but on brand!) named Salesforce Contracts product. This offering allows an admin to standardize and auto-populate contract templates from pre-approved terms and conditions and Salesforce record data. This also gives the ability to automate approvals and capture e-signatures. In addition, both Salesforce users and their customers can redline documents which can then be stored in draft versions or as fully executed contract documents right in Salesforce.
DATA: And last but not least, Data Cloud has been another main initiative in the world of Benioff. Here is how that is going to benefit Sales Cloud license users:
- Free Tableau and Data Cloud Licenses: Salesforce has now given access to the new Data Cloud for all customers using Salesforce Enterprise or Unlimited Editions. This allows them to unify up to 10,000 customer profiles at no cost.?To help with this on the BI side, customers can now analyze their data with two free Tableau licenses. These will be the Creator level licenses which will allow full access to all that Tableau has to offer. Add a few (relatively inexpensive) Viewer licenses to this and you are off to the races with interactive, cross-platform dashboards that can be placed right within your Salesforce instance.
There are a lot of exciting updates to digest. As always, the DCS team is here to help you navigate and explore these exciting updates for your organization.?
DCS is a woman-owned technology consultancy focused on Salesforce, founded in 2015. This year, we have supported over 100 clients. One third of those clients have worked with DCS for four plus years! We have a 4.9 star rating on the Salesforce AppExchange.
We have 60+ US based team members and are growing. Our team has over 175 certifications across Salesforce and connected tools, ranging from Salesforce Admin to Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA).
