Corrao Group Blog

The Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Notes bring many exciting features for companies across all industries. Last month we posted Our 8 Favorite Enhancements from the new Winter ‘22 Release. In this blog, we dive deeper into the release notes to highlight the new features for Consumer Goods Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot. It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic. The features outlined in our blog are some of the best features available in the Lightning interface.

Consumer Goods Cloud

Boost Field Reps’ Productivity with Product Sequencing

Boost field rep’s productivity by placing their onsite tasks in the best order to make the most of the time they spend at stores. You can now eliminate confusion with a predefined, logical sequence of products to help your reps understand which product’s assessment indicator to capture next.

Maximize Store Sales by Using Predictions

Sales managers can now make smarter decisions to improve sales by using predictions that give them intelligent insights into store sales activities. Out-of-the-box templates can be used to create your smart sell story. Smart sell story predictions can help schedule store visits and identify the best selling activities for your sales reps.

Manage Product Availability with Account Hierarchy for Products (Generally Available)

The products that a sales manager assigns to a retail store parent account are now automatically available to all stores in that account hierarchy. Previously, the manager has to assign products to each individual store.

Consumer Goods Cloud Mobile App

“Complete field execution activities wherever you go.” Field reps can now access store information and data, and complete activities offline even if they are disconnected. You can synchronize data during or after the visit once reconnected. Salesforce is also introducing offline inventory audits in this release.

Sales Cloud 

Pipeline Inspection Enhancements

With the help of Einstein, use the new AI-driven close date predictions to see which potential sales opportunities are least and most likely to close each month.

Einstein Conversation Insight Enhancements

You can now match your phone and video conversation records from video and phone calls to the corresponding opportunity so you can get a continue to execute a 360-degree view of the deal. This allows for other team members to get caught up without slowing others down.

Territory Planning Enhancements

Develop territories based on your sales team structure (Inside sales, sales operations, new hires, senior management). Based on capacity constraints, intelligently plan for all your teams and skillsets to sell smarter.

Multiple Variant Testing

According to Salesforce, High-Velocity Sales is a streamlined solution tailored to inside sales teams (including sales development and business development reps) and designed to speed up the sales process. With new A/B testing in the High-Velocity Sales (HVS) Cadence Builder, you can now test up to three variants per node for each action type (such as comparing email templates) to discover which best practice is truly the best for each step.

Service Cloud 

Customer Service Incident Management

Diagnose root causes and address major incidents faster, all while improving the customer experience and satisfaction. Customer Service Incident Management allows your service teams to rapidly identify and prioritize tasks, assign the right expert, and improve customer communication.

Appointment Assistant: Self-Service Scheduling

Increase customer loyalty by providing real-time appointment updates and flexible scheduling. To minimize call volumes, balance agent workload, and avoid no-shows, empower your customer to make, reschedule, cancel, and confirm appointments using digital channels.

Einstein Bot Enhancements

With the latest enhancements, you can now build an intelligent Einstein Bot in only a few clicks. Admins can now build new bots quicker with the “Intro Template”, which comes prebuilt with relevant workflows and dialogs to handle common service and sales use cases.

Service Cloud Voice: Prescriptive Setup for Partner Telephony

Admins can now use easy templates and menus to create a contact center and connect their partner telephony account for user syncing, single-sign-on, and queue mapping.

Pardot 

Send Slack Notifications to Pardot Users with Completed Actions (Beta)

Speed up your sales pipeline with a completion action that notifies your team in Slack when prospects or customers interact with your marketing assets.

Build Landing Pages Faster with Drag-And-Drop Editor

If you’re using the Pardot Lightning App, you can now create landing pages inside the Lightning Experience. Enabling these features allows your users to create a landing page record in just a few clicks.

Create Custom Components for the Email Content Builder

Create custom email components to use in Pardot’s drag and drop builder. Custom components will help your users create more engaging content for their customers.

Bring Your Own Encryption Keys to Pardot

Users can now bring and manage their own encryption keys to protect their Pardot data.

About Corrao Group 

Since 2002, we’ve helped B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Sources

• • Salesforce Winter’22 Release Notes
  • Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Trailhead
  • Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Trailhead Photos

In part 4 of our blog series, we mentioned how working with a Salesforce consulting partner is the best route for success. It’s now time for your partner to take you through a suitable sequence of implementation phases. Salesforce is best implemented in phases, setting up and training users from each department. Doing so helps boost user adoption and allows for the correct transfer of business processes into Salesforce. Making sure each department is set up on Salesforce before moving onto the next department is key to a successful implementation.

Implementing Salesforce in Phases

Before diving into the implementation, it’s crucial to take the time to map out all your business processes and core KPIs. These KPIs could be based on revenue, tasks, service, sales, or more. Understanding the current pain points of your organization will help ensure Salesforce is customized and maximized to ensure business success. With an entirely new platform, Salesforce can become overwhelming to your users because of its flexibility. The phased approach for implementing Salesforce allows your users to ease into the platform and ensure adoption.

Best practices for implementing Salesforce in phases include:

• • Phase 1: Migration of current systems. Quick and efficient phase. Best practices include importing your data to start managing the data based on Salesforce stages, activities, and emails. In this phase, it’s important to have your managers engaged and using the system’s features such as reports and dashboards, leads, contacts, tasks, and more. A good partner will have your Salesforce set up in about 3 months with training to help your users adapt to the new platform.
  • Phase 2 and 3: Integration of legacy systems. These phases are typically “bolt-on” expansions where you should integrate your accounting system, databases, or in-house systems. Phases 2 and 3 offer you the best way to take advantage of the vertical applications Salesforce has. Best practices include creating a 2-year roadmap that will allow you to plan and track progress as you expand and install different databases.

Phased Approach

1. 1. Map out and Optimize Business Processes
      • Identify all business processes and how they possibly intertwine when mapping out your company’s processes. Interview key stakeholders to make sure nothing is missed. Take this time to review any outdated processes and how they can be improved, both with and without Salesforce.
   2. Create a Salesforce Implementation Plan
      • Salesforce recommends a certified consulting partner for both new and existing customers to help with implementation. An expert knows which features out of the thousands that Salesforce offers will best help your company without wasting any time or money. They work with you to build out a phased implementation approach to ensure maximum success and adoption. At Corrao Group, we’ve been optimizing the business processes of all industries since 2002 and ensuring their successful transition into Salesforce.
   3. Implement Salesforce and Ensure User Adoption
      • Follow your implementation plan, making sure users are aware of what has been set up. Training should be held walking through all users of the new system and how their specific processes are carried out going forward. A learning curve is expected, but your users will start to come up with suggestions on how to improve the system, making it more custom to your business. Once one department has been set up and trained, it’s time to repeat until your implementation plan is complete.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that you need a cloud-based system that is flexible to your ever-changing business processes. If you need help implementing Salesforce, please contact us.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

 

Sources/Photos

• • • Salesforce Photos/Characters

The Salesforce Winter ’22 Release notes are officially here. The release notes were posted on August 18, and the Sandbox preview started on August 27. As we do every year, we have gone through the release notes and have highlighted our eight favorite enhancements. Click here for a deeper dive into new features specifically for Sales Cloud, Pardot, Service Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud.

Einstein Search

At no extra cost, all features of Einstein Search will be enabled by default. Users will get a more intelligent search without giving up the search features they rely on. Einstein Search delivers three main features:

• • Based on a users activity, personalization provides relevant search results.
  • Natural language search allows users to type common phrases and words in their queries to filter their search results.
  • Actionable UI allows your users to perform tasks (Logging a case/Creating Account) from the search box.

Flow Updates

Salesforce added a ton of new flow updates to their flow builder resource. Below are some of the many new flow updates:

• • Call another flow from a record-triggered flow using a subflow element.
  • Send outbound messages with Salesforce flow.
  • Connect a Record-Triggered Flow to an External System using Asynchronous Path.
  • Roll Back pending record changes when a flow element fails at run time.
  • Supercharge scheduled paths with enhancements for minutes, batching, and limits.

New Mobile homepage

The new “Mobile Home” feature is now available to both Android and IOS users. This gives Salesforce mobile users a new home page and the ability to customize the cards that are displayed to accelerate productivity.

Dynamic Interactions

Developers can now use dynamic interactions to construct lightning components that dynamically react to a users activity or another component. In the example below, clicking on a new customer will change the display to show the exact location and data of the customer.

Lightning Page Performance

Salesforce has put a lot of attention on empowering Admins to increase the speed of their Org in the last year. Admins can use the “Analyze Button” on lightning pages to see predicted load times, number of cores, browser speed, and network latency.

Salesforce also added more components to help users improve page performance. Performance Analysis for App Builder now alerts you if a component contains:

• • External CSS
  • Unminified JavaScript
  • A use of lightning:recordEditForm
  • A use of layoutType=”FULL”
  • A use of lightning:tabFocused listeners

New forecast category

Salesforce usually has four types of forecast categories: Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, and Closed. Salesforce is now adding a 5th category named Most Likely.

Dynamic Gauge Charts

Before the update, gauge charts only allowed you to track KPIs based on static numerical goals, but now that number can dynamically respond to your business. In the example below, you can see a filtered gauge chart to only show the revenue of a Singapore subsidiary.

Send list emails your way

You can now send list emails through Gmail, Office 365, or Microsoft Exchange to ensure that emails look manually sent rather than looking like email automation. Recipients are more likely to open an email that appears to be sent directly rather than through automation. List emails are in stored in the user’s sent folder, keeping the send history intact.

If you are interested in learning more about the Salesforce Winter ’22 Release notes, please contact Corrao Group.

Sources/Photos 

Salesforce

Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Notes

 

As more companies return to work, SurfaceTrends™ has been helping businesses utilize its Slack component to communicate results of reducing bacteria, viruses, and Covid-19 in their workplace. Slack is the collaboration/messaging app that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done faster. The new solution lives within the Salesforce Work.com platform, leveraging real-time analytics and trends over time to help companies know how effective their cleaning and disinfecting have been. Since 2019, SurfaceTrends™ has been utilized by numerous Coastal Health USA customers in Southern California to help keep their employees and guests safe.

Coastal Health USA has been providing ongoing SurfaceHealth™ Environmental Testing for companies apart of their infection control plan. Using SurfaceTrends™, companies are alerted of hygienic surfaces that are failing cleanliness tests in real-time. Utilizing the Slack component of SurfaceTrends™, automated notifications are sent to the building’s maintenance team, janitorial group, and company executives to take immediate action. SurfaceTrends™ continues to provide companies with real-time reporting on the cleanliness of their facilities’ surfaces through the ongoing pandemic.

If you would like to learn more about SurfaceTrends™, please visit our website.

About Corrao Group

As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every department of your business. They’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. Since 2002, Corrao Group has helped B2B organizations of all sizes successfully optimize their business processes with Salesforce.

About Coastal Health USA

Coastal Health USA was established in 2018 with the mission of bringing Healthcare Infection Control solutions to the masses. Coastal Health USA audits the cleanliness of their customer’s facilities, implements solutions to reduce bacteria, viruses, and COVID-19, and maintains the quality of these solutions over time. With over 15 years of Infection Control experience, their team has successfully implemented washable, antimicrobial, and UVC technology in facilities worldwide.

In part three of our blog series, we discussed selecting and implementing the right CRM. Currently, there are many excellent CRM’s that can manage your business effectively and efficiently. Throughout our 19 years of industry experience, we have found Salesforce to be the clear leader among the current CRM platforms. The Salesforce platform offers limitless flexibility to allow companies to work from anywhere, and an experienced implementation partner can guide your company to optimize your system for your business needs while ensuring user adoption is achieved.

Implementing Salesforce – The Right Way

Companies typically face three big obstacles when implementing Salesforce: implementation, adoption, and platform capabilities. The sheer scope of a Salesforce implementation is tremendous. Implementation starts with mapping out your business processes, determining what needs to be built, configured, or coded, who will need access to data, accounts, record pages, identifying opportunities for automation, and much more. Rather than taking your staff away from their usual tasks to set up, learn, and configure a new system, your implementation partner can have you up and running much faster and provides the training your employees need to succeed.

Experienced Partners Save Salesforce Customers Thousands Yearly

What your business can do with Salesforce is truly limitless. Rushing through an implementation or using templates as a baseline foundation will come back to cause mid to long-term scalability and poor user adoption issues. As Salesforce pushes three major releases a year, it quickly becomes a complex CRM system with hundreds of new features. Great Salesforce Implementation partners have thousands of successful implementations completed that can be leveraged for best practices throughout your implementation and training. These best practices and knowledge can’t be found in online Salesforce training classes. Through our 12 years of experience helping companies implement their Salesforce systems, we’ve found that the best way to maximize your Salesforce investment is with an experienced Salesforce partner.

Implementing Salesforce Since 2008

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

In part two of our latest blog series, we mentioned the importance of ensuring your new business culture supports work from anywhere. The 2020 pandemic accelerated the future of work as the work-from-anywhere mentality has to be considered when deploying a new CRM. Once your new business culture is established, it’s time to select the right CRM based on your business needs and research.

Choosing the Right CRM

When selecting a CRM, it’s critical to choose a platform that can adapt and modify as your business’s needs, products, services, and partnerships evolve. The business processes you currently have in place will change within a year. Having a CRM that is flexible to digital workflow changes will be critical for your business’s success. Secondly, choose a platform that is a leader in CRM with years of experience. It’s essential to make sure your platform has the financial capacity to continue to evolve the products every year. For example, Salesforce has three major releases every year that delivers new innovations across their Customer 360 Platform. Finally, it’s essential to make sure you select a CRM with a secured platform. In today’s world, cyber threats are becoming more and more prominent. You must partner with a company that has a robust, secure, and backed-up platform in case of any cyber-attacks. Through our 13 years of experience, we have found that Salesforce is the clear leader among CRM platforms.

Implementing Salesforce: Leverage a Partner’s Expertise!

Whether you have decided to pick Salesforce as your CRM or are strongly considering doing so, questions that regularly follow are, “Can I self-implement? Why do I need to hire a consultant?” You can self-implement, but it’s not recommended unless you have had years of hands-on experience with that specific solution. Even with experience, implementations are a full-time job that takes months. Having a Salesforce consultant team implementing your platform will provide years of knowledge to ensure that your Org is optimized and performing to its full potential, rather than spending more money to fix potential bugs and issues as they come up.

The next question that comes up is, “How do I choose the right partner?” The right Salesforce implementation partner should have a list of different criteria that must be met before partnering with them. For example, review the record of successful implementations and online reviews from customers. Do they use the Salesforce platform for their own business? Do they implement the Salesforce products I’m using? At the end of the day, it’s important to partner with a company invested in your vision. A Salesforce implementation will be the foundation of how your business will run.

If you are interested in learning more about Implementing Salesforce, please visit our website for a FREE consultation.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

In part one of our latest blog series, we mentioned the need for businesses to move to a cloud-based system. Once your company has decided to move in that direction, it’s now time to develop a new culture for your staff. It’s essential to have an internal team committed to evolving their processes as a business with your new CRM technology.

Defining Goals/KPI’s

In every business, there are certain goals or KPI’s that are established to track your success. A public company’s goal may be more focused on shareholders, while a private company could solely focus on revenue. Regardless, you should have 3-5 KPIs that you are tracking year in and year out to measure performance.

If your company has a revenue goal, sales and marketing should be focused on achieving that mutual goal. If it’s a customer satisfaction goal, sales and your customer service team should be focused on getting perfect customer CSAT scores. It’s vital to have your KPIs established because if not, it becomes hard to measure whether or not your company has succeeded or failed in reaching those metrics. Especially in the work-from-anywhere world, it becomes crucial that you have analytical data that can easily define your success or lack of success.

Mapping Out your Business Processes

Once you have agreed as an executive team to move to an all cloud-based system, it’s essential to have all your business units map out plans of how they will support the company’s KPIs. A CRM system alone will not magically streamline your business processes from the start. Being able to define your entire Business Process Optimization (BPOs) on paper is critical. You have to clearly articulate the journey you would want a prospect, customer, or support customer to go through. A CRM will allow you to achieve your goals, but you first have to become your own business’s subject matter expert. Once you feel like you have your hands around your perfect business processes, it’s time to start looking at budgets, guidelines, and what CRM is right for you.

Picking your CRM

If your company hit a speed bump during the pandemic, you could get back on track to become even more efficient with a CRM system like Salesforce. Choosing a CRM system is as essential as picking your financial package. Your business will have to be prepared to put the time in up front to ensure everyone is bought into this new culture. Moving to a CRM will result in a much more collaborative and connected culture, especially in the work from anywhere world.

If you are interested in discussing more about moving to a CRM or setting up your new business culture, please visit our website for a free consultation.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

One crucial lesson the pandemic has taught most business owners is that you can’t rely on people working in the same physical building anymore as working from home has become the new norm for most companies. With this new reality, it’s time for companies to reevaluate how they are running their business. The days of tracking leads and customers in spreadsheets are gone. Whether you are using a legacy system or current cloud-based apps, it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack.

Moving to a Cloud-Based System

Currently, there are a great number of companies still managing their business on spreadsheets. As we’ve entered the all-digital working world, spreadsheets do not allow your company to be quick, nimble, and work from anywhere. Additionally, running your business on spreadsheets doesn’t allow you to keep up with your ever-changing BPO’s as the spreadsheets data can become obsolete the next day. Not having full or real-time visibility into your data can become arduous if your data is siloed across multiple spreadsheets or systems.

As a business owner, moving to a cloud-based system from spreadsheets or old proprietary systems may bring some fears and doubts. Some common questions and thoughts we get from business owners thinking about moving to a cloud-based system are:

• • Will a cloud-based system make my business more efficient?
  • Will I be able to onboard people more efficiently? (Pain point during the pandemic)
  • How do I control my costs?
  • Is the work from home/anywhere the new norm?

Many business owners balk at the idea of moving to a cloud-based system because it is the fear of the unknown as they do not know what cloud-based systems can do. A cloud-based system allows your company and employees to work in real-time and connect with customers from anywhere in the world.

Cloud-Based System Benefits

According to a Deloitte survey of more than 500 IT leaders and executives, the number one reason for companies migrating to a cloud-based system was security and data protection, data modernization, and cost/performance of IT operations. There is a misnomer with CRM’s that they are just pipeline and contact management, which is not the case at all. Cloud-based systems allow for companies to have more connectivity and accessibility, increased collaboration, and improved efficiency. With a centralized location for all your data, your entire company can track and keep up with your customer’s entire journey. More benefits of having a CRM include:

• • Customer Visualization
  • Opportunity Tracking
  • Organization of Data
  • Automation Benefits
  • Easy Customization
  • Sales Forecasting
  • Increased Engagement
  • Better Customer Service
  • Seamless Outbound Marketing

Some of the best CRM’s in 2021 include Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle CX Cloud, and Hubspot. If you are thinking about moving to a cloud-based system and would like to learn more, please call us for a free consultation.

Corrao Group is here to help

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes successfully optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every department of your business. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!