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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