In Part 1, I covered new features you should use, including Lightning Web Runtime, Salesforce payments and enhancements to Salesforce CMS. This installment features recent enhancements to Sales and the Customer Data Platform. 

Sales: Analytics, Account Discovery Dashboard, AI and more

The latest sales updates are, in my opinion, a game-changer. They will make your sales process more efficient and easier to manage, which will help your teams close deals faster. Here are the highlights: 

Analytic efficiencies

Sales Analytics now provides filtering and faster access to data points, which gets you exactly what you need without sifting through irrelevant data. Sales managers (and reps) can determine which of their sales strategies are most efficient, which products are performing best and pinpoint areas that need improvement. 

Account Discovery Dashboard, now with AI

Account Discovery Dashboard now uses artificial intelligence with Einstein’s Discovery, which will help your business improve sales prospects and identify new growth opportunities. This feature can also analyze data to help your sales reps identify accounts with the highest prospective revenue returns while keeping your teams updated on the health of their accounts. 

Mandatory multi-factor authentication

Reps loathe multi-factor authentication, but it’s an extra layer of security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your account. Turning it off is no longer an option. 

Quick promotion set-up

A quick promotion setup option now simplifies loyalty management and promotions programs. Instead of building a system from scratch, you can choose from predefined eligibility, rewards and criteria such as product, order and account-based criteria to help streamline the eligibility process. 

In addition, promotions managers can select from rewards options such as percentage discounts, fixed amounts, or free items and apply them to specific products or the entire order. This setup option can also be customized and will ultimately save everyone time — something we all need more of in our lives.

Salesforce CDP 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) aggregate data from different sources such as CRM, email marketing and social media. In addition, you can activate data profiles to run more targeted content across both Google and Meta. 

Using Salesforce’s CDP, you can track and analyze customer engagement across all channels, which will help you create more targeted campaigns. The more you understand what resonates with customers, the more efficient your campaigns will be. That should yield more conversions/sales. 

The Account Engagement Optimizer will help you: 

• Identify improvements to your marketing automation system (think sales process and email campaigns) that will increase your ROI. 
• Identify risks to your marketing automation system to improve overall marketing efforts. For example, the Account Engagement Optimizer may flag a campaign to inform you that your click-through rate is lower than the industry average and prompt you to make changes.
• Prioritize recommended changes based on what is most important to your team. These recommendations will focus your team on changes that will make the biggest difference.

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Part 1 covers commerce and content management features, specifically the new Lighting Web Runtime template and enhancements to Salesforce Payments and CMS. Overall, this release provides a more user-friendly interface that simplifies the platform without sacrificing performance. 

In addition, more AI capabilities are provided that enable you and your team to work smarter and have more meaningful conversations with customers. Finally, Salesforce is making it easier to integrate external data source inflows. Simplifying the use of inflows will help your business run more seamlessly, which in turn, will make your customer experience better. 

Build sites faster and cheaper with Lightning Web Runtime (LWR)​ 

For B2B businesses, the new Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) commerce solutions will enable web developers to build out sites cheaper and faster. The improved functionality will help your business perform better by alleviating slow run times and providing more personalized experiences. 

The LWR template for B2B stores makes it easier to customize your storefront because the larger components have been broken down into smaller ones. For example, the commerce header can now be broken down into logos, navigation, search, cart features and more. That leads to better-looking sites while maintaining the user-friendly experience your customers expect. 

The new framework also improves run speed and performance. The LWR checkout process is now highly configurable, making it faster for users. Previously, checkout processes used flows. Now, Salesforce Commerce offers a fully configurable checkout for B2B businesses driven by LWR components.  

Salesforce Payments is now more seamless 

Quick payment processing is a critical component for modern ecommerce businesses. Salesforce has made the process more seamless with its new payment framework, requiring less backend coding. Instead, more configurations are less technical and more user-friendly. 

Additionally, the new framework allows you to seamlessly integrate third-party payment providers for a more functional and secure checkout. For your customer, a new click-and-go function simplifies the checkout process.  

Approvals, view and restore added to Salesforce CMS

Upgrades to Salesforce CMS improve work processes, including:   

Approving content

Consultants and contributors can now create, edit and view content in their workspace. Once complete, other users can approve it or request changes. This functionality enables you to further operationalize content production and accelerate publication. 

View and restore content by version

Salesforce is catching up to WordPress by offering functionality that lets you view all previous editions of content, see who published it, track changes and revert to older versions if needed.  

Part 2 of these notes can be found here.

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Marketing, Loyalty Programs and Customer Service features from the winter release are summarized in this edition. Part one featured updates to Commerce and Sales. 

New capabilities enable marketing/ecommerce teams to share insights, optimize engagement and transaction experiences

Perhaps the most exciting update is the new Ecommerce Marketing Insights App, one of the many new features within the Intelligence platform. 

As digital-first consumer engagement and transactions continue to become the norm for brands, ecommerce and marketing insights are critical. Thus, marketing and commerce teams must come together to understand how marketing investments impact commerce spend. But oftentimes, these teams operate in silos and don’t necessarily share all of their data and insights appropriately. 

The new Ecommerce Marketing Insights app helps break down these silos, allowing teams to combine their data from the point of awareness and consideration, all the way through conversion. This helps to gain insights that inform loyalty and retention strategies, as well as optimize engagement and transaction experiences. 

Marketing Cloud supports more third-party integrations

External Actions were updated to enable marketers to integrate third-party martech apps into Marketing Cloud Engagement. Marketers can do all kinds of things all from within an engagement studio program, including:

• Sending an SMS message to a prospect.
• Registering a prospect for a webinar.
• Sending out surveys.

External Actions are fully customizable and built on top of Salesforce Invocable Actions, which provides options from no code to full code to build your own actions. External Actions can also be listed on the AppExchange, which over time, will provide a growing library of out-of-the-box tools for marketing teams to use.

Member badges, engagement widgets added to loyalty programs

There were several enhancements to engage loyalty members through journeys and improvements in gamifying retention strategies in the latest release. 

You can now build stronger member relationships with new loyalty member badges that can be displayed on member profiles and are completely customizable. Let’s say you want to reward your channel partners for carrying new products. You can define the badge type, how long it’s valid for and the image you’d like to use for the icon. 

Also, you can further engage your customers by embedding Member Engagement Widgets on external portals and websites to enable loyalty program enrollment, view member loyalty information and view and enroll members in promotions. The widgets are easily configured based on your branding needs and you can create widgets to drive differentiated member experiences.

One of the reasons you probably chose Salesforce is that you’re getting these updates without having to do any work yourself — they’re rolled out to all Salesforce users no matter how engaged or disengaged from the platform they are. While that makes it easy on the surface, it also makes it easy to fall into the trap of not really paying attention to them. 

Collaborative customer service added to Service Cloud

One of the biggest items in Service is upgrades to swarming ability, which enables organizations to collaborate with experts to solve customer issues. The new capabilities are available in a few ways, including:

• An enhanced swarming set-up page.
• The ability to solve issues as a team directly from Slack with the Service Cloud for Slack app.
• The ability for agents to add multiple swarm members at once, automatically close swarms and update swarm record names.

The Service platform has also enhanced its capabilities for Facebook Messenger. Services teams now have the ability to deliver richer customer conversations by creating an extensive library of interactive message components. This makes it easier for agents to share enhanced links, send questions with static or dynamic options and schedule appointments. 

Additionally, agents will now be able to transfer a session to another agent or flow, as well as leverage new session statuses to route and track messaging sessions more intelligently.

Next release

Throughout the coming year, I’ll be breaking down each of the Salesforce Releases to help you better understand how they can help your business. Look for my next article on Salesforce Spring ‘23 Release soon — the early preview looks like it will be a big one.

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Few customers take advantage of the thrice-yearly release updates rolled out to every Salesforce user. I get it. Folks aren’t always paying attention to the releases because they’re focused on running their business, tending to the million things that come up each day. 

The full edition of this Winter’s ‘23 Release comes in at over 700 pages. The boiled-down, brass-tacks summary is still 32 pages.

Few business executives have the time and bandwidth to keep up with the ins and outs of these updates. Your admins and marketing operations people may slog through the whole doc but may not connect the dots between business initiatives and platform functionality. 

This series will connect those dots. I’ll summarize what you need to know about the latest release in five key categories: commerce, sales, service, marketing and loyalty programs.

I’ll cover the features that will help you make better decisions for your business and maximize how you use the platform. 

Based on features in this release, Salesforce is focused on:

• Improving the base platform (adding ease that your hands-on admin and developer teams have requested for a long time).
• Creating even more ways to connect with customers.
• Offering more industry-tailored options that bring value to a business more quickly.

Robust support for subscription selling added to Commerce 

Adding a subscription pricing model benefits most businesses, whether you’re a fan belt manufacturer or an artisan dog food company.

Making it easier for your customer to buy your product is always a win-win, and this release makes implementing subscriptions more seamless from the backend with the Connect API tool. 

Connect API resources now support subscriptions and multiple product-selling models: 

• One-time sales where products are sold for specific prices once. 
• Term sales offer time-limited subscriptions. Products are sold and renewed for a specific amount of time, e.g. 12 months. 
• Evergreen subscriptions offer products on a recurring basis until canceled.

Configuring charges for collecting local taxes in international jurisdictions was also enabled. 

Dig deeper: Salesforce unveils features to boost automation for marketing and sales

Additions to sales enablement functionality

Overall, I’m loving the general focus on enablement through enhancements with dynamic forms, screen flows, and Slack integration. 

Teams can now build and launch enablement programs that drive to the most important KPIs for your business. You can now focus on specifics, like programs for a particular region or product, and offer incentives to drive business from them. 

And, dynamic form improvements mean end-users have more flexibility with fields and sections to display on page layouts. 

Sales teams can now better access, update, share records and get important notifications on their key accounts directly within Slack using a new integration. Sales can collaborate in account- and opportunity-focused Slack channels while accessing Salesforce data. 

And, you can make it easier for sales teams to work with colleagues throughout the enterprise in departments such as fulfillment, shipping, and finance. This is enabled using Slack and providing real-time access to data stored in Salesforce to everyone who needs it.

Next time, I’ll dive into the latest service, marketing, and loyalty programs features included in the Winter 2023 release.

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Genie is the latest stage in Salesforce’s multi-year customer data journey. It launched a CDP, to be known as 360 Audiences in 2020. In early 2021, the name was withdrawn in favor of the simple Salesforce CDP. Now Salesforce is dreaming of Genie.

Getting clearer on Genie. When we reported this news last month, we did say:

In terms of what is announced here, the distinction between Salesforce CDP and Genie is not immediately clear, although Genie is implied to be larger in scale and faster.

“At Dreamforce, a new data platform and enhancements to Slack” September 21, 2022

Since then we’ve learnt more about the offering, in part through a conversation with Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM, Unified Data Services and Einstein at Salesforce.

One thing Auradkar made clear is that Genie is neither separate from nor a simple addition to Salesforce CDP. It is, rather, a rethinking of the CDP and its capabilities.

Back in 2020, Chris O’Hara, then Salesforce’s VP of product marketing, spoke of integrating Salesforce CDP with the sales and service clouds as well as the marketing cloud. It now seems this never really happened; the aim is that Genie will finally bring this about.

Structural change. What Genie represents might be described as a structural change to the way customer data is handled within Salesforce. As is well known, the Salesforce platform was constructed in large part through acquisitions, leading to customer data being siloed in various applications. Genie now constitutes an active common layer supporting (at least) the main applications — CRM, marketing and service — and making consistent customer data available to all of them (at great scale and speed, Salesforce says).

In simple terms, Genie supports engagement and experience at the app level by providing:

• Real-time decisioning.
• Event processing.
• Machine learning.
• Analytics.

(This according to a demonstration by Auradkar.) Through identity resolution, a single view of the customer, across applications, will be available for decisioning, processing, ML and analytics.

Why we care. The CDP race between Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, Oracle Unity and Salesforce’s offering under various names and guises, is not over. It’s important to get as clear as possible on what these major CX platforms are offering when it comes to wrangling customer data consistently across what have been essentially disparate systems.

It’s even more important as we watch the CDP space itself grow more disparate, now encompassing independent enterprise CDPs, CDPs that execute on data held outside the CDP (e.g. in a data lake), and CDPs that are packaged with broader ecommerce, CMS and digital experience offerings. And all shades in between.

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Marketing Cloud’s Account Engagement API enhancements are designed to automate personalization and engagement. It does this with new integrations for the company’s CDP and external segmentation tools. 

Users can now create and share segments within the CDP, enhance them with additional account attributes for personalization and activate engagement across channels. For example, a company could attract freemium software users with a personalized enterprise software upgrade journey across video, email and mobile.

Dig deeper: Salesforce launches pilot NFT cloud

Other upgrades include:

• Composable Storefront for Commerce Cloud. This lets retailers take a headless approach to commerce while offloading the management of site hosting, security and scalability. Users can create and deliver flexible, custom commerce experiences to any device or application without additional expensive architecture.
• The Store Associate app gives retail workers fast access to customer insights and inventory levels. It is designed to create more personalized shopping experiences via ship-from-store functionality, Buy Online Pickup In-Store and omnichannel inventory visibility. 
• Contact Center for Service Cloud hopes to improve agent productivity and efficiency with a unified agent desktop across all channels and AI-powered recommendations.
• The Service Catalog automates frequent service requests, like refunds or subscription plan changes. Customers can make these requests through a storefront-like experience. 
• Flow Automation Packs automates the life cycles of various tasks — like managing incident tickets and customer onboarding processes.
• Einstein Bot for Sales can perform multiple tasks including answering customer questions, connecting them to the right rep via Slack and automatically scheduling meetings.
• Enablement tracks sales rep’s achievement milestones and delivers training programs in the flow of work, ensuring they are up-to-date on the latest product features and new sales techniques.

Why we care. With inflation, supply chain problems and labor shortages, companies need all the automation tools they can get. Companies know this — 91% of organizations say they need automation technology, but only 23% have actually implemented it. Salesforce seems focused on helping with this.

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It also announced a series of new partnerships, with the partners set to debut new apps on the Salesforce AppExchange.

NFTs for Commerce. The NFT cloud, currently in closed pilot, will let brands securely (and with no coding required) mint, manage and sell non-fungible tokens within the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Adam Kaplan, SVP emerging technology at Salesforce, explained the benefit to brands at a pre-Connections press conference.

“It’s really about driving engagement and community,” he said. “We’re seeing super-passionate communities in the NFT space. It’s not about the art. Yes, the art should be great, but that’s not how brands are leaning into this.” What’s important, he explained, is utility. “What we mean by utility is that as an NFT holder I receive certain benefits. It could be something in the digital world, it could be something in the physical world.”

Examples in the fashion sector include being able to vote on the color for a new piece of clothing, receiving exclusive clothing items, joining meet-ups with designers. Primary use cases, he said, include fashion, retail, CPG and media.

Other Commerce Cloud announcements. In addition to the recently announced integration of TikTok with Commerce Cloud, enhancements include:

• Commerce Marketplace, allowing brands to display and sell products from other companies, increasing cart value and earning commissions.
• Commerce for Customer Service, giving service agents a full view of order history and enabling them to provide a superior post-purchase experience issuing, for example, returns, exchanges and promotions.
• Seamless Commerce, an all-in-one sales, order management and payment solution.

New to marketing cloud. Marketing Cloud news was less eye-catching, but included:

• Triggered campaign messages allowing personalized customer engagement based on product catalog and behavioral triggers.
• A digital command center for Slack, monitoring activity across both Marketing and Commerce Clouds.
• Intelligence Connector for Commerce Cloud, allowing marketers to connect campaign and order data.

New partners joining the Salesforce CDP eco-system include Acxiom, Criteo, LiveRamp, MediaMath, Neustar and The Trade Desk. New Commerce partners include  Amplience, Avalara, Bringg, AppFrontier, Forter, and Poq.

Why we care. The investment in developing an NFT cloud might look like Salesforce trying to catch the trendy Web3 wave if it weren’t for the serious and plausible explanation of how brands can benefit. This economy is all about experience, community, trust and what one might call products-as-a-service. It’s intriguing to hear how NFTs can fit into that framework.

Also, don’t overlook the Commerce Marketplace, allowing merchants to behave like their on Amazon without leaving the Salesforce eco-system.

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TikTok has been adding shopping features steadily over the past year, positioning itself to compete with older social networks. “TikTok is home to a new kind of commerce experience, where community, entertainment and commerce blend, creating unique opportunities to engage with consumers and drive impactful results,” said Melissa Yang, Head of Ecosystem Partnerships at TikTok in a release.

Specific offerings. Among the capabilities created by the partnership are:

• The ability of Commerce Cloud merchants to publish their products easily on Tik Tok using catalog-focused advertising solutions with simple one-click set up.
• Use of the TikTok pixel to analyse and optimize campaign performance.
• Advanced Matching to improve audience building for retargeting.

Merchants will be able to launch TikTok as a sales channel within Commerce Cloud.

Why we care. What is the future? Is it the metaverse? Is it CTV? Is it social commerce? Or is it something we’ve yet to anticipate? It’s a wise bet that, unless social media completely implodes, social commerce is going to be a big part of the future. It’s where audiences are and the ability to help them discover and purchase products without sending them to a different channel is priceless.

And for marketers targeting Gen Z and Millennials, TikTok is where the action is right now, with over one billion monthly users, almost half in the valuable 10-29 year old demographic. How long that will last, who knows? But it’s significant that Instagram and YouTube are trying to become more like TikTok every day.

Dig deeper: Zefr promises brand safety on TikTok with new AI offering

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Why we care. You can’t have seamless customer experience without improved employee experience and workflow. Some of these improvements to the Service Cloud address both issues. An agent needs to have real-time data and insights in one place, whether at a call center, working remotely, or on-site with a customer.

Efficient workflows for service calls and other service and marketing insights benefits from conversational intelligence. Even though the cloud is doing it, it means organizations have the opportunity to listen to customers better.

Service Cloud call features. Salesforce partners will roll out telephony connectors to integrate phone and customer data. This will make automated call transcriptions possible and enable agents to receive intelligent real-time suggestions to help customers.

A new integration with AWS Contact Lens brings advanced transcription to Amazon Connect customers. Sentiment analysis and keywords from phone calls enables better coaching for service agents.

Dig deeper: How Salesforce put its Slack acquisition to work

Out in the field. For in-person service calls, the Salesforce Field Service App now has a multi-level offline briefcase. This allows agents to access the right records offline. These records include secure contracts and customer data. The Field Service App places work plans, workflows and relevant safety checks all in one place for agents on a work site.

Salesforce also introduced a new visual remote assistant for customer support. This powers a virtual support session using augmented reality that customers can see on their phone screen. The agent can point and draw on their phone, directing the customer in a one-on-one session.

CDP features for Marketing Cloud. For the Marketing Cloud, marketers benefit from CDP features such as new streaming insights and data actions. Following real-time data signals, automated actions can be triggered by a new customer, a recent product transaction or a payment issue.

AI-powered advanced identity resolution brings customer data together from different sources. It automatically matches multiple spellings for customer names to assemble a single robust customer profile. Salesforce also introduced new capabilities for building anonymous profiles with rich data histories ready to merge with an existing customer profile when the match is made.

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“Every company that I speak to… they’re all going through major digital transformations,” said Benioff, adding. “And our job remains to help these companies grow and achieve this transformation.”

Why we care. Benioff made clear that his optimism about digital transformation is tempered by world events, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing pandemic. That optimism, however, does reflect rising tides across marketing technology. According to Benioff, revenue for his company was up $7.3 billion in revenue and 26% growth year-over-year for 4Q.

Benioff also offered a glimpse into how a large organization is welcoming back professionals to their New York office space and events.

COVID morale. About a year ago, when vaccines were rolling out in the U.S., it seemed like 2021 was going to be the big comeback year that would usher in another Roaring Twenties. Then the Delta and Omicron variants emerged, forcing organizations to be extra vigilant about opening up offices and hosting live events. But the Salesforce leader sees promising signs.

“We’ve got significant numbers of our employees back here in the office,” Benioff. “I was just with them. And I also just spent a tremendous amount of time surveying [New York City] and how things are coming back to life here kind of in our post-pandemic reality that we’re now entering, and it’s powerful.”

He added, “We’re really turning a corner in our battle with the virus. And I believe, in many ways, COVID is behind us. And certainly, I know that Omicron and BA.2 are very serious [variants], but we are in a very different position in the world today, fighting these things, than we were a couple of years ago.”

Remote onboarding. The Salesforce fiscal year kickoff event was held last month at New York’s Javits Center and welcomed 5,000 employees in-person. Overall, 35,000 of Salesforce’s current 75,000 employees started with the company after the pandemic began, so they hadn’t attended an event like this during their career with the company.

“When we asked, in the room, how many of you have not attended a Salesforce kickoff, stand up and be welcomed, I would say 75% of the room stood up,” Benioff said.

Safety Cloud. To serve Salesforce customers who are also navigating the safety challenges in hosting live events, the company has made available their Safety Cloud and put it into practice.

“We’re interconnected with a number of COVID tests that we’re dynamically updating,” said Benioff. “We did our best to have a very safe program, and we’ve been doing this now. We’ve had two Dreamforces with this program with our Safety Cloud. [And] we’ve had the kickoffs.”

It’s a sign of the times, as is Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud, which allows orgs to measure and manage their carbon footprint. It might not have been as intuitive, initially, as how Salesforce integrated their Sales Cloud or Service Cloud into their CRM, but these emerging business needs have been timely additions to the Customer 360 portfolio.

Dig deeper: What a Salesforce NFT cloud service could mean for marketers

New B2B divisions. In the B2B space, Benioff also pointed to organizational restructuring among some consumer enterprises that are carving out a distinct B2B arm. Ford is one such company.

“They’re doing a B2B business unit at Ford to complement their B2C unit, not so unlike a lot of our other customers like Home Depot. But I’ll tell you that Ford Pro [is] really looking at targeting professionals, targeting productivity.”

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