Salesforce Spring ’25 Release Notes for Sales Cloud

The Spring ’25 Release for Sales Cloud is packed with new features to boost team performance and drive revenue growth. Empower reps with personalized coaching through Agentforce Sales Coach, streamline lead qualification with Agentforce SDR, and track account plan progress with enhanced transparency and automation. From improved forecasting to powerful prospecting tools, these updates are designed to help you close more deals faster. See the latest features below!

Coach Sales Reps at Scale with Agentforce Sales Coach

Provide personalized coaching at scale to enhance sales rep’s ability to handle challenging conversations, improve performance, and increase ROI. Sales Coach agent, an Agentforce agent, analyzes sales pitches and role play sessions. It then delivers tailored feedback by using AI and CRM data to help sales reps advance deals more effectively.

Enhance Agentforce Sales Coach Responses with a Data Library

Give Agentforce Sales Coach access to a collection of files, knowledge articles, and other information via a Data Library. Data Libraries allow Agentforce Sales Coach to generate more personalized and reliable responses based on trusted data when conducting role play sessions and generating feedback for sales reps.

Scale Your Sales Funnel with Agentforce SDR

Agentforce SDR (Sales Development Rep) helps sales teams expand their top-of-funnel efforts with an AI agent, qualifying more leads and giving sales reps more time to nurture relationships. The SDR agent sends initial emails, nudges, and responses to interested replies by answering questions, connecting leads to sales reps, and offering to book a meeting.

Monitor Agentforce Sales Coach and SDR Usage with Digital Wallet

You can now monitor your Sales Coach Agent and Agentforce SDR (Sales Development Rep) usage in Digital Wallet, an account management tool for consumption-based features. On the Digital Wallet homepage, the Conversations consumption card summarizes the combined usage of Sales Coach Agent and Agentforce SDR along with ASA Messaging (formerly Agentforce Service Agent – Inbound). Additionally, Digital Wallet’s Consumption Insights page offers a breakdown of your combined Agentforce usage by time period to help you detect trends over time.

View and Assign Permission Sets and Monitor Usage in Sales Cloud Go

With Sales Cloud Go, we show you the exact permission sets and permission set groups for your Sales Cloud feature. Assign access to your users in Sales Cloud Go while setting up a feature. Previously, you searched through long lists to find the permission sets and permission set groups that you needed. You can easily monitor permission set licenses for each feature, tracking both assigned and actively used licenses. You also get options for customizing Lightning pages and email panes.

Track Progress Toward Sales Account Plan Objectives More Easily

Gain immediate insight into the progress your teams make toward achieving your sales account plan’s measurable objectives. Define the objects, fields, and specific conditions that satisfy your goals for long-term account growth, and select the specific records that you want to track activity on. For example, set a goal for your team to achieve a certain dollar amount from closing a specific set of opportunities. Progress is calculated and updated automatically. Standardize account plan tracking across your enterprise by reusing calculation definitions across all your accounts, specifying different target values for different objectives.

Coordinate Your Sales Team’s Activities with More Transparency

Provide accountability and alignment on your sales account team members’ activities. Create sales action plans that specify the tasks and events that you want users to achieve. Associate sales action plans with accounts, cases, campaigns, contacts, contracts, leads, and opportunities. If you use sales account plans, collaborate on the work needed to achieve your measurable goals for long-term account growth by adding sales action plans to each account plan objective’s Strategic Tracker. We delivered this feature thanks to your ideas on IdeaExchange.

Identify Coachable Moments from Recorded Video Calls with Einstein Conversation Insights

Process important meetings that were recorded on a third-party platform by using Einstein Conversation Insights. Upload video call recordings under 2 GB in the MP4 format and get insights, see transcripts, and identify coachable moments surfaced from that meeting.

Find Your Next Customer with Prospecting Center, a new Data Cloud App

To build a healthy revenue pipeline, let Prospecting Center find your next customer by using trusted data and AI. Identify the accounts that are most likely to use the right buyer signals to engage. Use various external and internal signals to calculate Fit, Engagement, and Intent scores, all powered by Data Cloud. Sales reps get powerful insights on time with the Unified Prospecting Center view, so they can spend more time nurturing the prospect and less time navigating.

Improve Pipeline Forecast Visibility with Manager Judgments on Opportunity Splits

Forecast managers can now apply their judgment to a direct subordinate’s opportunity that’s split across multiple owners. Each manager’s judgment on their portion of the opportunity rolls up through their forecast hierarchy, allowing sales and specialist leaders insight into their own forecasts for their areas of the business. Previously, front-line managers could apply judgments only to opportunities that had a single owner. This change applies to opportunity split-based forecast types in user role and territory forecast hierarchies, and it doesn’t include opportunity product splits.

Plan Accurate Quotas That Account for Ramp and Seasonality

Reflect anticipated ramp-up time for new reps and consider the tenure of experienced ones when you plan quotas. And account for seasonal sales patterns and other realities that affect your business in Quota Planning. Then publish ramp- and season-adjusted quotas to active territory-based forecasts in Pipeline Forecasting.

Simplify Activity Tracking and Reimburse for Qualified Travel Distances

Maximize your reps’ time in the field when you simplify activity and distance tracking in Salesforce Maps. Specify distance parameters that qualify for reimbursements and establish an approval process for timesheets.

Use Agentforce with Your Gmail Integration

When your Gmail integration is in the Chrome side panel, you can use Agentforce while working on emails and events.

Prepare for Meetings Without Opening Your Laptop

Seller-Focused Mobile Experience is the latest and best way to turn every lead into a sale from your phone or tablet. In Winter ’24, the Seller-Focused Mobile Experience app became generally available. Now, we’ve redesigned the Events detail page to make your meetings more meaningful. Also, the Ask Einstein field is now the Ask Agentforce field.

Discover Untapped Selling Opportunities

Sales teams can use the Account Plan Whitespace Map component to identify potential upsell or cross-sell opportunities more easily. Strategically plan for your next deal by reviewing top-selling products from closed-won opportunities, filtering by amount, count, or quantity, and comparing with related accounts in the account hierarchy.

Enhance Your Sales Strategy by Researching Accounts

Give your sales reps the ability to do external research on companies by using generative AI. Add the Record Research component to an Account or Account Plan page to uncover valuable company insights such as competitive strengths and weaknesses, strategic initiatives, and key performance indicators, all without leaving the Salesforce app. Use this information to develop personalized sales strategies and drive business growth.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Spring ’25 Release Notes for Sales Cloud, 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 1,250+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,500+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Top Takeaways from Dreamforce 2024

Dreamforce 2024, the world’s largest software conference, delivered new innovations that are set to transform industries. Highlights include the launch of Agentforce, Salesforce’s autonomous AI suite, and major updates to Data Cloud and the Customer 360 platform. Powerful Retail & Consumer Goods sessions with McKee Foods, Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC), and Dole Fresh Fruit showcased how Consumer Goods Cloud is helping businesses optimize processes, strengthen relationships, and drive growth. Here are the top takeaways from Dreamforce 2024!

Agentforce

The biggest news coming from Dreamforce 2024 was, of course, Agentforce. Salesforce’s new Agentforce suite represents a major leap in the AI landscape, with CEO Marc Benioff claiming, “The Agentforce platform represented the third wave of the AI revolution.” The autonomous AI agents are designed to handle tasks independently across sales, marketing, service, consumer goods, commerce, and more. Unlike traditional chatbots or copilots, Agentforce analyzes data, makes decisions, and takes action autonomously. This significant breakthrough allows organizations to quickly scale their workforce, responding to business demands in real-time without requiring human input.

The true power of Agentforce is its ability to operate accurately and efficiently by integrating deeply with Salesforce’s Data Cloud. Whether resolving customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, or optimizing marketing campaigns, these agents can perform tasks that free up human employees to focus on more strategic and high-level activities. This will increase productivity and customer satisfaction, making Agentforce a game changer in AI.

With its bold vision of empowering one billion agents by 2025, Salesforce is not just advancing AI technology but redefining what’s possible in the workplace. As Marc Benioff says, “This is the biggest and most exciting piece of technology we have ever worked on, and we are just starting.” For businesses across industries, Agentforce offers the opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve customer relationships, and drive growth—all with a few clicks and without the complexity of traditional AI implementations.

Consumer Goods Cloud Customer Success Stories

Three leading consumer goods companies took the stage to share how they harness the power of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud to transform their businesses.

Jack Corrao, Managing Partner of Corrao Group, highlighted McKee Foods’ success in optimizing trade promotions using Salesforce Trade Promotion Management. With trade spending being one of the biggest challenges in the Consumer Package Goods (CPG) industry, McKee Foods has found that the right tools can make a significant difference. By leveraging TPM, they have been able to navigate the complexities of trade promotions, maximize ROI, and enhance their overall business performance.

Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) showcased how they use Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud and Data Cloud to unify B2B and B2C data on a single platform. The session focused on how integrated planning and new data sources are helping RNDC make smarter, more profitable decisions, ultimately transforming their route-to-market strategy.

Dole Fresh Fruit shared its success story of improving planning and forecasting with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud Customer Planning & Forecasting (CPF). By utilizing Salesforce’s CPF capabilities, Dole has strengthened their relationships with retailers and boosted revenue through more accurate forecasts. Salesforce CPF has set a new standard for driving business growth and enhancing retailer partnerships.

All three of these sessions highlighted the transformative impact that Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud has across the consumer goods industry, empowering companies to make data-driven decisions, optimize processes, and achieve greater success. Corrao Group has been proud to partner with McKee Foods, RNDC, and Dole Fresh Fruit to ensure a seamless rollout and successful adoption of these cutting-edge solutions.

Data Cloud

Salesforce’s Data Cloud continues to show impressive growth and innovation, with a 130% year-over-year increase in customers and the capacity to process over 2.3 quadrillion records per quarter. Salesforce’s Data Cloud, the foundation of the Salesforce Platform, and Agentforce continue to drive innovation in unifying customer and business data to deliver personalized, contextually relevant experiences across Customer 360 applications, Flows, Analytics, and Agentforce. “In this new era of AI and Agents, customer data and metadata are the new gold for the enterprise,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM for Data Cloud at Salesforce. At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce introduced several key innovations that enhance Data Cloud’s capabilities, cementing its role as the heartbeat of Salesforce’s AI ecosystem.

One of the most notable additions is Data Cloud’s support for unstructured data, which can natively process audio and video content such as customer calls or webinars. This opens up new opportunities for deeper customer insights and enhances the accuracy of Agentforce’s agents. Data Cloud also features a standardized semantic data model, allowing AI and human users to interpret and use data consistently. With improved search capabilities, Data Cloud enables a quicker discovery of relevant information. Real-time data activations also enhance the ability to instantly respond to changing customer needs, providing organizations with more dynamic and timely customer interactions.

Finally, Salesforce has strengthened Data Cloud’s data security and governance features. New policy-based governance allows organizations to maintain strict control over how sensitive data is shared with AI agents. These innovations, combined with Data Cloud’s role as the foundation for Agentforce, enable businesses to harness the power of AI while safeguarding their crucial data and operations.

Customer 360 Platform Innovations

Salesforce unveiled a range of exciting new innovations within its Customer 360 platform, further enhancing AI-powered, personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. These innovations leverage shared data and services to deliver a seamless customer experience while integrating powerful analytics and collaboration tools such as Tableau and Slack. Built on the Salesforce Platform, Customer 360 ensures that every touchpoint is connected, enabling businesses to deliver customer interactions that are both efficient and impactful.

Among the standout innovations announced is Tableau Einstein, which opens up the power of business intelligence (BI) and analytics to everyone who wants to make data-driven work scalable, efficient, and more valuable. By bringing data and insights across workflows in Customer 360 apps, Agentforce, Pulse, and Slack, teams can make data-driven decisions faster and more effectively. Slack has also introduced a new user interface for agents, enabling users to interact directly with data, surface insights, and collaborate in real-time. This includes an integration with Agentforce agents, making it easier for teams to stay aligned and move work forward by connecting Salesforce CRM records with Slack channels. (More updates on Slack are below).

Salesforce has also enhanced its core products with AI innovations. Sales Cloud now features Agentforce SDR and Sales Coach and capabilities like account planning, forecasting, and compensation management. Similarly, Service Cloud’s new features provide service agents with step-by-step resolution plans, sentiment tracking, and AI-based recommendations to improve the customer experience. Agentforce’s Service Agent can autonomously handle customer cases 24/7, seamlessly escalating problematic cases to human representatives when needed. These innovations and the introduction of Agentforce agents tailored for commerce, field service, and marketing demonstrate Salesforce’s commitment to transforming every role and workflow across industries with AI.

Slack Innovations

Salesforce announced a new series of Slack innovations, transforming the platform into an agent-powered work operating system that unifies company knowledge, data, agents, apps, and automation in one seamless interface. Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, mentioned, “We’ve moved beyond collaboration; every day, millions of teams are leveraging purpose-built AI, with customer data, automation, and now agents seamlessly integrated into the flow of work. This isn’t just about getting work done. It’s about unlocking new productivity levels to drive results and move business forward for every team and department.”

With an Agentforce integration, teams can now collaborate with AI-powered agents directly in Slack to surface insights, automate tasks, and access customer data from Salesforce. Additionally, third-party AI agents from partners like Adobe and Anthropic can be deployed securely within Slack, allowing users to work smarter and faster. New features like Slack AI huddle notes, automated workflows, and enhanced search capabilities further streamline productivity, while Salesforce channels bridge CRM data and Slack conversations to keep teams aligned. These innovations position Slack as a central hub for boosting department efficiency and collaboration.

Free AI-Training

Salesforce has announced a major initiative to offer free hands-on AI courses and certifications through 2025, investing over $50 million to help bridge the growing AI skills gap. Salesforce will provide premium AI training through Trailhead, making AI education accessible to everyone. Additionally, Salesforce plans to open AI centers at its San Francisco headquarters and global offices, providing community and employee training spaces. This initiative reflects Salesforce’s commitment to preparing the workforce for the future of AI, equipping individuals with the tools and skills needed to succeed in an AI-driven world.

Dreamforce 2024 Conclusion

Mark it down as another successful Dreamforce event by Salesforce. We want to give a big shout and thank you to Salesforce as they put on an extraordinary event that featured some incredible guest speakers. The energy around San Francisco was electric as attendees gathered to witness and learn what new features Salesforce would release next. We are already getting excited for Dreamforce 2025!

If you would like to learn more about any of the new features from Dreamforce 2024 and how it can relate to your business, please contact us.

About Corrao Group

Corrao Group is a top Salesforce consulting partner in the retail, consumer goods, and professional service industries. Since 2002, we have helped organizations of all sizes and industries optimize and streamline their business processes with Salesforce. Our mission is to flawlessly translate your business processes into Salesforce, promoting successful integration and widespread user adoption.

Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes: Sales Cloud

The latest Salesforce Winter ’25 Sales Release Notes for Sales Cloud bring powerful enhancements to boost your sales team’s productivity and effectiveness. From expanding the availability of Seller Home across more apps to optimizing strategic planning with Account Plans, these updates offer a range of new features designed to streamline operations and drive success. With improvements in collaboration, forecasting, and prospecting, sales teams can now work more efficiently, leverage data-driven insights, and close deals faster. Explore these innovations and discover how they can transform your sales processes and outcomes.

Show Sales Reps Seller Home in More Places

Give sales users an overview of their opportunities, accounts, leads, and contacts, along with their day’s agenda in any standard or custom Salesforce app. Apply the Seller Home template as the default home page for the app in Lightning App Builder. Sales team members can start their day with a complete view of their business. Previously, Seller Home was only available in a few standard apps.

Increase Sales Team Collaboration by Assigning Opportunity Splits to Territories

To see how territories contribute to overall sales, sales teams can now assign opportunity splits and opportunity product splits to territories. Previously, splits could be associated only with the parent opportunity’s territory. This change allows sales teams to get reports that show territories’ contributions to closing deals using splits data. Teams can also forecast based on splits amounts across territories.

Optimize Your Strategic Planning with Account Plans

Nurture existing relationships and grow key accounts strategically with Account Plans. You can research and analyze accounts, set objectives with actionable metrics, and keep tabs on growth and development, all from one repository within Salesforce.

Review and Update Settings to Capture Leads from LinkedIn (Release Update)

If you’re syncing leads from LinkedIn Lead Forms to Salesforce, you must manually disconnect your LinkedIn account, reconfigure the feature by enabling a new setting, and then reconnect your account. Otherwise, LinkedIn leads will stop syncing when LinkedIn retires their legacy Ads Lead Sync APIs on December 16, 2024. This update is available starting in Winter ’25.

Access All Your Conversation Data with Conversation Hub

Use Conversation Hub to get a comprehensive view of your sales teams’ conversation data in a revamped user interface. The personalized landing page shows relevant metrics, recent conversations, and top signals if you’re using Einstein for Sales. You can also filter for relevant conversations from a new Conversations tab.

Do More with Sales Signals

Sales managers and their teams can access more features from Sales Signals, including more relevant metrics, key themes, and featured mentions. The Signals page is revamped to match the updated ECI interface. Topic details pages also offer more metrics and relevant data.

Find Your Next Customer with Prospecting Center, a new Data Cloud App

To build a healthy revenue pipeline, let Prospecting Center find your next customer by using trusted data and AI. Identify the accounts that are most likely to use the right buyer signals to engage. Use various external and internal signals to calculate Fit, Engagement, and Intent scores, all powered by Data Cloud. Sales reps get powerful insights on time with the Unified Prospecting Center view, so they can spend more time nurturing the prospect and less time navigating.

Capture Forecasts at a Point in Time with Forecast Submissions

Forecast submissions are a sales rep’s or sales manager’s best estimate of the revenue or quantities that they expect to close during the forecast period. Typically required weekly, the submission takes a snapshot of the forecast at the time the submission is made. As management reviews forecast rollups, they can compare the current forecast against the submitted forecast numbers and quota and know that the forecast is up to date. Any differences better inform the forecast for the entire sales team and the business.

Improve Sales Forecast Accuracy with Manager Judgment Enhancements

To guide more accurate forecast assessments, sales leaders now see Manager Judgment values rolled up for all forecast managers beneath them in the forecast hierarchy. Previously, judgment values rolled up only to the immediate manager in the hierarchy. Plus, judgment values are now available in reports and dashboards, allowing sales teams to reconcile forecasts against judgment amounts and to identify opportunities that are at risk.

Close Date Predictions Is Being Retired

Close Date Predictions, a feature of Einstein Deal Insights in Pipeline Inspection, is being retired as of Spring ’25. The best replacement for Close Date Predictions is Einstein Opportunity Scoring, which gives robust predictions of an opportunity’s likelihood of closing. You can continue using all other features of Einstein Deal Insights in Pipeline Inspection, such as insights from calls, emails, and service cases.

Get Timely and Contextual Feedback on Your Terms

Einstein Coach is now available outside of a sales program. In a new tile in the Guidance Center, users can receive feedback on their sales pitches at their convenience and practice as many times as necessary until they feel confident about their pitch. Einstein Coach in the Guidance Center accesses product CRM Data, providing users with even more detailed, actionable, and personalized feedback.

Plan Quotas from Territory Alignments

Create quota plans fast when you incorporate stamped territory hierarchy, owner, and attribute data from alignments that you create in Territory Planning. Analysts plan quotas from stamped alignments within Sales Planning segments.

Salesforce for Outlook Is Being Retired in December 2027

Full product retirement for Salesforce for Outlook is scheduled for December 2027. For the latest integration with Microsoft Outlook, we recommend moving to our next-generation products, the Outlook integration and Einstein Activity Capture. These products replace Salesforce for Outlook features and give users new capabilities. We continue to introduce enhancements for these products every release.

Close Deals Faster with a Seller-Focused Mobile App (Generally Available)

The Seller-Focused Mobile Experience app helps you easily view and update accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities while on the go. Keep deals on track by quickly finding the information that you need, making calls, sending emails, and seeing and acting on upcoming tasks and events in the activity timeline. And let Einstein Copilot make all of that work even easier.

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 1,200+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,400+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

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Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes: Sales Cloud

Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes: Einstein Generative AI

Experience the future of Generative AI-powered interactions with the arrival of the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes. From enriching product fields in commerce stores to providing AI-generated briefs for mobile workers, Einstein Generative AI ushers in a range of enhancements designed to revolutionize the way you do business. Learn more as we explore the transformative release of Einstein Generative AI.

Enhance Product Fields in Commerce Stores with Einstein Generative AI

Generate product text fields for multiple products in one step with Einstein Generative AI. Einstein uses your instructions and any linked reference fields to generate revised product text for the selected products. Product fields generated by Einstein support instructions in English only. You can generate product fields in languages in your B2B or B2C store Then, review the generated text and accept or discard the changes. You need the Einstein Generative AI license to use Einstein Generative AI. Contact your account executive for more information.

Show Frequently Bought Items to Customers

Increase average order value by recommending frequently bought items to customers. Add the Einstein Frequently Bought component to the product detail page to market similar items. Recommendations are generated based on shopper interactions with the storefront.

Get Your Mobile Workers Up to Speed with Mobile Work Briefing

Show mobile workers an AI-generated brief that tells them everything they need to know about their upcoming work orders. Previously, workers had to switch between the work order’s tabs to find the relevant information.

Create Call Summaries Powered by Einstein GPT

Want to harness the power of generative AI to create a snapshot of everything your teams need to know about a customer call? Einstein Conversation Insights users can create generative call summaries on voice and video calls. Powered by Einstein GPT, the new Summary tab on call records allows users to create editable summaries that include next steps and customer feedback, and share summaries for easier team collaborations in the flow of work.

Personalize Sales Emails with Einstein GPT for Sales

Sales Emails empowers busy sales reps to move quickly and expand deals through personalized and informed email content that buyers love. Einstein GPT uses your sales data to generate personalized emails for contacts and leads, a method known as grounding. Sales reps can draft common emails, like a follow-up or a meeting invite, by choosing from the preset email prompt types.

Optimize Agent Productivity and Response Quality with Einstein Service Replies (Generally Available)

Get real-time response recommendations for your agents. Now generally available, Einstein Generative AI follows a chat conversation as it unfolds, then drafts and recommends fluent, courteous, and relevant, replies for your agents to review, edit and post.

Close Cases Faster with Einstein Generative AI Work Summaries (Generally Available)

Save agents time with AI-generated case summaries, now generally available. Based on a Chat conversation between an agent and customer, Einstein predicts and fills a summary, issue, and resolution. Agents can then review, edit, and save these summaries.

Get Service Insights and Build Bot Intents with Einstein Conversation Mining (Generally Available)

Use Einstein Conversation Mining, now generally available, to transform conversation data into service insights and build bot intents. Einstein Conversation Mining replaces time-consuming transcript analysis that otherwise takes weeks.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes for Einstein GPT, please contact us.

About Corrao Group

For two decades, Corrao Group has stood as a pillar of expertise, assisting B2B organizations across various industries and sizes in implementing and optimizing their business processes through Salesforce and integrated third-party applications. With an unwavering dedication spanning 21 years, we have cultivated a deep knowledge and understanding of Salesforce as power users ourselves. This recognition of Salesforce’s flexibility empowers us to cater to various departments’ needs, ensuring seamless alignment. Our mission is to seamlessly translate your business processes into Salesforce, promoting not only successful integration but also widespread user adoption.

Sources

Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes Einstein Generative AI

Sell Smarter and Faster with Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, designed to help companies sell smarter and faster by optimizing their business and sales process. When implemented correctly, Sales Cloud can put you in control of your sales process to boost productivity, increase efficiency, speed up timelines, and streamline your entire business. Additionally, Sales Cloud provides a centralized database for sales information, allowing sales teams to collaborate and engage with their customers. With Salesforce’s cloud-based technology, your team can access key data and information to be productive and effective in the field.

Here’s how Salesforce Sales Cloud can help your business today:

    • Lead & Opportunity Management: Sales Cloud helps businesses manage and track their leads and opportunities, enabling them to prioritize and follow up on the most promising opportunities. With features like lead routing, lead scoring, and forecasting, Sales Cloud helps sales teams stay organized and focused on the right deals.
    • Task Automation: Speed up your sales process by having Salesforce automatically create tasks required for the next stage in your business process/sales cycle.
    • Workflow Development: Simplify and speed up your business processes through automation technology. Set up repeat task reminders or alerts when certain thresholds are reached and when deals progress down the pipeline.
    • Project Tracking: Collaborate in real-time, all the time. Immediately check into the live status of a project, email interactions, customers’ company info, and next steps from one single source of truth.
    • Advanced Quote Generation: Eliminate manual input and expensive errors to accelerate deal velocity, speed up payment collection, and improve cash flow with Salesforce CPQ.
    • Sales Pipeline Analytics: Ensure sales reach their goals via a real-time analytics dashboard of pipeline reports per team, service, conversion rate, average sales cycle, and more. These tools include performance metrics, pipeline analysis, and forecasting, enabling sales teams to make data-driven decisions and optimize their selling strategies.
    • Collaboration & Communication: Sales Cloud offers a range of tools for improving collaboration and communication within sales teams, including chat, email, and document sharing. These tools help teams work together more efficiently and effectively, enabling them to close deals faster.
    • Customization and Integration: Sales Cloud offers a range of customization and integration options, enabling businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs and goals. With integrations to other Salesforce products, such as MCAE (Pardot) and Service Cloud, businesses can get a complete view of the customer journey and deliver personalized, seamless experiences.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Experience by Corrao Group

Whether you’re looking to understand your customers better or automate manual tasks, Sales Cloud has everything you need to boost productivity and increase efficiency. Investing in Salesforce Sales Cloud can also help companies stay ahead of the competition by leveraging 3 Salesforce releases per year to drive growth and achieve their goals. Make the switch today and see the difference that a powerful sales platform like Salesforce can make for your business. Learn more about Salesforce’s Sales Cloud.

Investment Protection With Salesforce Sales Cloud

Right now is the perfect time to make a digital transformation from homegrown systems or spreadsheets to Salesforce Sales Cloud. Investing in the right technology can save your company time and money in the short and long term. According to MuleSoft, the average enterprise company uses 976 applications. Consolidating numerous systems into one single source of truth will help simplify, streamline, and automate complex processes to become more efficient.

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 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

WFH? Invest in Salesforce

Successfully running a company from home requires the right culture, employees, procedures, and maybe most importantly, technology. Some businesses who haven’t invested in a cloud-computing software such as Salesforce have been having a hard time adjusting to working from home. Salesforce is a cloud-based software that provides customer relationship management (CRM) and a suite of apps that go along with sales, service, marketing automation, and more. Salesforce becomes your central location to store all your important data, accounts, and deals. With a newly designed mobile app, take work on the go and be just as productive as you were on your computer. This allows businesses to run their entire company within Salesforce, supporting all departments with real-time data.

Managing Your Sales Pipeline with Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is a customer relationship platform (CRM) designed to support sales and marketing by bringing all your customer data into one central location. Leverage Sales Cloud to manage and automate day-to-day sales activities including lead assignments, quote generation, forecasting, Einstein Analytics, and more. Additionally, your sales staff will have full visibility into every deal, account, opportunity, customer, and lost deals. Sales Cloud workflows and task automation help you create tasks and a process to help speed up your sales cycle. When implemented correctly, Sales Cloud helps save you time and builds long-lasting customers.

Servicing Your Customers with Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer relationship service platform designed to help you manage customer support issues quicker and increase first-visit resolution. With historical data on every customer interaction, your team can personalize your service based on their problems and history. Additionally, Service Cloud offers a multitude of tools to help you meet the needs of your customers. Some extensions for Service Cloud include: Field Service Lightning (FSL), Knowledge Base, Web2Case, Email2Case, and Customer Analytics. When implemented correctly, Service Cloud can improve customer communication, enable team collaboration, and give you full visibility into the health of your customer base.

Automated Lead Nurturing with Pardot

Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help companies engage leads and customers, support sales with qualified leads, and grow relationships. According to Salesforce, “Customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37%” with Pardot (Pardot.com). Pardot gives you the ability to personalize your customer’s journey wit automated campaigns, targeted messaging, and predictive intelligence. Additionally, design and create email templates, content, landing pages, and more inside of Pardot. If you would like to learn more about Pardot, please visit our blog.

A Complete 360-View for Manufacturers with Manufacturing Cloud

Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers full visibility into their entire business operations. Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. New features such as sales agreements gives manufacturers insights into committed and actual order volumes, performance against the forecast, and other time-phased metrics. Forecasting gives manufactures the ability to take control of their business with smarter business decisions based on analytics. If you would like to learn more about Manufacturing Cloud, please read the blogs below:

Virtual Collaboration with Quip

Quip provides your team with a messaging collaboration platform that helps transform productivity and resolves issues faster. Provide your team with the ability to create, discuss, and work faster with real-time documents, spreadsheets, and data that connects inside of Salesforce. With full integration, your employees will no longer have to work together in multiple systems. Quip becomes your central location to collaborate with other employees on deals, documents, and more. Furthermore, Quip has a mobile app to view, update, and work on the road.

Maximize your Salesforce Investment

Since 2002, our Salesforce experience has benefited thousands of clients and projects. We understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is and how it supports every department in your business. The key to maximizing your Salesforce investment is to implementing the platform company-wide. If your business is struggling to work from home without a cloud-based technology, it’s time to invest in a technology like Salesforce.

Why Salesforce Is the Ultimate Work From Home (WFH) Platform

When it comes to working, there’s nothing more relaxing than responding to emails, making phone calls, and reviewing reports all from the comfort of your home. Being a stay-at-home employee has its benefits, such as having more control over your schedule, fewer distractions and more productivity, and everyone’s favorite reason, no time spent in traffic! Working on the Salesforce platform since 2008 ourselves, we know how relaxing it is to work from home. There’s almost nothing you can’t do from home while working on Salesforce. You’re still working, but it’s tasks from the comfort of your own home without any office distractions. Here are a few benefits from working from home across Management, Marketing, Development, and Sales.

Management

Our Managing Partner, Jack Corrao, started by saying, “People working in the office is nice, but it’s not necessary in a lot of businesses. Many of my employees could work from home because Salesforce is a cloud-based system. No servers required, which means if something happens in the office, like the internet goes down, you can just head home and work. We think soon all businesses will have to evolve with the coming times, that means moving away from their multiple systems for each department and onto a software like Salesforce, which supports: Human Resources, Marketing, Sales, Support, Operational Linguistics with each having a customizable cloud.“ He finished off by saying this, “You shouldn’t be handcuffed to your building, having freedom will make you a better and harder worker.“

Salesforce allows managers to track and display all their KPIs within Dashboards. With the company updating Salesforce in real-time, reports aren’t only ready at the end of the day, or week – they’re available 24/7 with live stats. All the information and conversations regarding projects are tracked and recorded within Salesforce.

working from home with coffee and a laptop

Marketing

Our Marketing Specialist and Social Media Manager John Carroll said, “If everyone had to work from home tomorrow, we would still be a functional and successful company. We all have access to the same data in real-time, so we don’t have to wait for reports, documents, or files from co-workers.” He also brought up this tweet from Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, who said, “While we are all working from home during this time, we are using quip to help other remote teams across the globe collaborate.” He is talking about the documentation software, Quip, where documents, spreadsheets, slides, and chat are all combined and connected to Salesforce records. At Corrao Group, we use Quip to communicate with each other, even if it’s a few desks away or from one of our remote offices such as Seattle or Canada. 

We can create a campaign asset inventory for emails, landing pages, and more within Quip, where our entire team can collaborate in real-time, anytime. Quip should be in the everyday marketer’s toolbox, especially those already on the Salesforce platform. Fields in Salesforce can map to information in Quip, so when users update one piece of info, the other connected piece is automatically updated so there’s no discrepancy. It’s perfect for working from home because all the content is live, and team members can get notified when updates or tasks are assigned. 

Sales

“With Salesforce, working from home is as easy as it gets”, Ellis Davis, Sales Operations at Corrao Group. All the information and tasks are inside Salesforce so forgetting any notes at the office are a thing of the past. It’s all inside of Salesforce and easy for the whole company to access in real-time. With Chatter being the main communication on projects, she and everyone else can jump into the conversation and catch up or give updates with everything being in one place. “We’ve always known how to work from home because we’ve always had Salesforce, so it’s easy to hop on during a weekend and home and work like you were in the office”, she ended with. Tyler Keil, Sales Operations, has always lived by the phrase, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.” All notes are put into Salesforce and associated with the appropriate location, whether that’s a Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity record, or something else. Having instant alerts when someone updates one of your records or tasks that you’re working on helps speed up everyday processes while working from home. “Salesforce is much more than a virtual Rolodex, it tracks conversations, the entire pipeline, historic deals and much, much more.”

When working from home, sales reps can’t quickly ask if a co-worker spoke with, or emailed a new lead. With Salesforce, all calls and emails are logged right on the contact record as they happen, so there’s no confusion. This way, reps can catch up if they need to without having to wait for someone to explain the updates themselves. Salesforce eliminates the need for unnecessary meetings and allows users to continue being productive at home.

Salesforce - the ultimate work from home platform

Salesforce: The Ultimate Work From Home Platform

We’ve had the ability to offer the option for our employees to work from home since we started using cloud-based solutions in 2002. Since then, we’ve adjusted and created an infrastructure within Salesforce so our team can work from home and not skip a beat. While Salesforce isn’t required in order to run a business from home, it can incredibly boost the progress and success of each department, all while making your employees’ jobs easier. We understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is and how it supports every department in your business. If you’re struggling to run your company from home, please email us at wfh@corraogroup.com. We can jump on a call to discuss your current and projected business situations and suggest assistance.

Dreamforce 2019: Top 5 Announcements

Dreamforce, the world’s largest software conference, had another fantastic event filled with incredible speakers, new features, and lots of customer success stories. The four-day event held the attention of the business world as Salesforce hosted more than 170,000 attendees and over 13 million online viewers. Dreamforce 2019 brought together thought leaders, industry pioneers, and Trailblazers from all over the world. With over 2,700 sessions, the Corrao Group team was active to ensure we captured the important announcements and partnerships. Here are our top 5 takeaways from Dreamforce 2019.

1. Apple Partnership

Continuing their ongoing partnership with Apple has given Salesforce an all-new mobile app that is both conversational and smart. In addition, Apple has helped Salesforce with the ability to build mobile apps tailored to address unique user needs, and the ability to learn on the go with the new app Trailhead GO. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, joined Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, for a fireside chat where they both expressed the future of productivity is mobile. Benioff told Cook during the conversation that he runs his $143 billion company from an iPhone, “I don’t even own a computer anymore. The phone has become an extension of my office. Where ever I am, if I have a phone, I can work.”

The fireside chat involved some exciting dialogue between the two business leaders as they discussed the future of productivity on a mobile device, artificial intelligence, Steve Jobs, values, and more. Benioff asked Cook the most important value in his life, in which Cook answered, “In my upper thirties, it became clear to me that we’re almost searching your whole lifetime for your purpose. I’m sure some people in the audience have done this too… and, you are almost convinced early in life about your purpose in life is this and that… but it keeps changing as you move ahead in life. Soon you realize that the purpose of life is to help somebody else. That is the sole reason that we’re here. Life gets so much simpler once you get that in your head…That’s my North Star.”

We are excited to see the partnership that will unfold over the next couple of years between Apple and Salesforce. Cook believes there is a tremendous growth trajectory for enterprise apps specifically built for the Apple and Salesforce partnership to help users improve productivity. We will have to wait and see what Salesforce and Apple do next; for now, we have a new Salesforce Mobile App that can host your entire business on a mobile device that is conversational, and smart.

dreamforce 2019 fireside chat
Tim Cook with Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2019

2. AWS Partnership

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced an expansion of their global strategic partnership with Salesforce, the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Salesforce introduced their new Einstein Voice, which seamlessly integrates with Amazon Connect to provide service agents with a complete set of tools to deliver the best quality service to their customers. Salesforce is offering AWS content available on Trailhead to train anyone who wants to become proficient in the cloud.

The biggest headline from all of Dreamforce 2019 was Salesforce releasing its new  Einstein Voice. Delivering excellent customer service over the phone is still a challenge for many companies, and that is where the new Service Cloud Voice can help out. Einstein Voice offers AI-driven insights on a call with a customer, integrates calls easily, and can boost productivity by closing cases faster with insights from Einstein. If your company is off business hours, let Einstein answer the phone for you to help quickly solve customer issues. Service Cloud Voice-enabled State Farm to provide a faster resolution for customers – 31% times faster.

The release of Einstein Voice will help service workers improve customer relationships. Having the ability to see real-time insights into what could potentially help solve customer issues faster is effective and exciting. Corrao Group is interested in how Einstein Voice will affect the field service workers. Could Einstein Voice help service technicians who are not hands-free report issues faster with the ability to speak directly to Einstein? We will have to wait and see for that answer. For now, the ability to have Einstein Voice will be beneficial to all service teams.

Einstein voice talking at Dreamforce
A Preview Shown of Einstein Voice at Dreamforce

3. Einstein Call Coaching

Einstein’s Call Coaching uses AI technology to analyze audio clips and present insights for your sales reps. It can help your sales manager understand what’s going on in the customer calls. Einstein Call Coaching empowers insides sales teams with management-level visibility into critical moments during a call, conversation trends, and a conversation library, which highlights the team’s best examples of successful calls. Einstein uses this information and gives insights to help your sales rep performance.

Sales Managers can utilize Einstein Call Coaching to give sales reps the information they need to become top performers, or informed decision-makers at the company. Sales managers have analysis and visibility into every single call with insights from Einstein. Insights for sales managers and reps can range from trends such as which competitors are being mentioned in conversation, how are we positioning different products, and how are we handling objections. We are interested to learn more information about Einstein Call Coaching as it is only still being piloted with a rollout plan to be made available to users in June 2020.

Call Coaching at Dreamforce 2019
Einstein Call Coaching Dashboard

4. Salesforce 360 Truth

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, announced Customer 360 Truth, “a new set of data and identity services that enable companies to build a single source of truth across all of their customer relationships” (Salesforce). “Now, this is a computer science holy grail that we’ve been trying to put together for a long time,” added Benioff, the founder of Salesforce. Salesforce 360 Truth aims to let Salesforce users and clients achieve a clear understanding of their customers by managing data and prior interactions all in one single source of truth. In addition, Einstein can be paired with 360 truth, and can help “guide you and help you run your business and connect with your customers in a whole new way,” Benioff said.

Single source of truth at Dreamforce 2019

We’ve always believed that having a single source of truth is crucial to have an optimized Salesforce instance. Corrao Group lives by the motto, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.” Housing all your data in one system will improve your ability to have a clearer picture of customer data, reports, and more. Salesforce 360 Truth will help businesses provide better customer service, predict sales opportunities, and create a personalized marketing journey, all with the help of Einstein insights and recommendations.

5. Salesforce Mobile and Trailhead GO

A fully redesigned CRM app, Salesforce will add Einstein AI, analytics, and integration with iOS features such as Siri and Face ID to their new mobile app. In the mobile app, Siri and Einstein’s voice assistant can add tasks, update CRM records, and take notes. The new designed CRM app is all apart of Salesforce’s plan of moving the Customer 360 Platform onto the mobile device. In addition to the new CRM app, Salesforce is also launching a learning app called Trailhead GO with exclusive features and more than 700 training models available to Apple’s iOS and iPadOS. The release of the new mobile app and Trailhead GO signals a new era for productivity as Benioff believes the future of productivity involves a mobile device rather than a desktop or laptop.

Salesforce creating the new Salesforce app to boost productivity will undoubtedly help your mobile workforce. Your marketing, sales, and service teams can work on the go and use the CRM app as if they are on a desktop or laptop device. Einstein being integrated with the Salesforce app will have a profound impact. Bret Taylor, Chief Product Officer of Salesforce, explained, “With Salesforce Mobile, Salesforce and Apple are empowering sales, service and marketing professionals on the go to deliver game-changing customer experiences, powered by AI.” Salesforce creating Trailhead GO is also a significant accomplishment as users will be able to learn on the go anytime and anywhere. Marc Benioff and Tim Cook both believe that the future of productivity is using mobile devices, and Salesforce has created two powerful apps for trailblazers to work and learn wherever they are.

Salesforce and Apple Partnership at Dreamforce 2019
Announcing a New Global Partnership

Dreamforce 2019 Conclusion

Mark it down as another successful Dreamforce event by Salesforce. We want to give a big shout and thank you to Salesforce as they put on an extraordinary event that featured some incredible guest speakers like Barack Obama, Emilia Clarke, Tim Cook, and Stephen Curry. The energy around the city of San Francisco was electric, as more than 170,000 attendees gathered to witness and learn what new features Salesforce will release next. We are already getting excited for Dreamforce 2020!

If you would like to learn more about any of the new features from Dreamforce 2019 and how it can relate to your business, please contact us.

The Importance of Manufacturing Cloud

The release of Manufacturing Cloud is a fantastic accomplishment for Salesforce. Manufacturing Cloud takes the current pain points of the industry and turns them into an experience that is flexible in reacting to the customer’s ever-changing demands. In this blog, we are going to share with you the importance of Salesforce’s latest release.

Forecasting

Salesforce knows that the manufacturing industry contains more than just customers. Suppliers, contractors, dealers, service technicians, distributors, and internal warehouse and factory all play a crucial role in the development of your product and the experiences of your customers. Manufacturing Cloud helps users collaborate in real-time across the ecosystem to ensure your forecasts are accurate and updates to your schedules are automatically communicated to warehouse and purchasing departments.

According to Salesforce, “Manufacturers need a clear understanding of all past shipments, current production plans, and future production forecasts.” Forecasting in Manufacturing Cloud is all about taking control and allowing flexible releases to your customers’ needs. Manufacturers often have very different sales and forecasting processes that your supply and chain teams must know when to deliver new items. Manufacturing Cloud gives users the upfront awareness of what you think you’re going to sell, and when you are going to sell it. Having critical insights into the timing of selling your product will make every part of your business sufficient.

Forecasting in Salesforce isn’t just about how you’re going to sell your product on your unique timeline. It’s about knowing how you need to staff your factory: Do I need a second shift, or can I get by with the first shift? Manufacturers always have absurd spikes where their employees are forced to work long hours to get their product out. Forecasting in Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers an overview of all their businesses, allowing them to take control and make smarter decisions.

ipad_forklift_v2

Partner Collaboration

Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. For example, the Partner Community allows your vendors and partners to see and engage in real-time updates to your sales forecasts. Additionally, analytics will be tied directly to order data with additional information into the territory, customer, agreement, product line, or product performance. Improving inventory management allows manufacturers the chance to analyze their customer data, and gain insights into every product and territory performance.

A New Era

Manufacturers for far too long have used old proprietary systems that have never been scaled. In addition, these systems are not cloud friendly. Salesforce being able to tie manufacturing into the leader of the cloud is a big deal. The era of using and exporting spreadsheets or pivot tables is over. A new era is emerging for manufacturing, and it allows manufacturers to have complete control over the ability to operate their business in a much more profitable point of view.

Our experience with manufacturing dates back to our Managing Partner, Jack Corrao. Jack has developed numerous operational infrastructures to support hardware and software companies to deliver the best in breed solutions. As our #1 vertical, we are here to help you integrate and train you on best practices involving Manufacturing Cloud.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be releasing a new blog related to Salesforce’s new Cloud. We’ll cover manufacturing pain points Salesforce solved, our favorite features, and how to integrate Manufacturing Cloud. If you would like to learn more, please contact us.

Sources

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/09/introducing-manufacturing-cloud.html

All Photos can be found here: https://www.salesforce.com/products/manufacturing-cloud/overview/

Salesforce Releases Manufacturing Cloud

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, recently announced a specialized solution for the manufacturing industry: Manufacturing Cloud. Manufacturers will now have the ability to streamline their entire business in one single platform.

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, recently announced a specialized solution for the manufacturing industry: Manufacturing Cloud. Manufacturers will now have the ability to streamline their entire business in one single platform.

As a long-time manufacturing-focused partner, Corrao Group attended a Salesforce partner webinar: Manufacturing Cloud: Business / Go-to-Market on October 18th. We were blown away by the presentation and believe it will provide extreme value for our customers.

Manufacturers often have complex physical processes that are hard to modify quickly and efficiently to meet the customers changing demands. In order to know the customer’s feedback in real-time, your operation teams have to be aligned with Sales representatives to have one single source of truth. Manufacturing Cloud will, “Deliver a new level of business visibility and collaboration between the sales and operations organizations of a manufacturing company to give a more predictive and transparent business” (Salesforce).

New manufacturing specific tools and enhancements released by Salesforce includes:

  • Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing
  • Sales Agreements
  • Account-Based Forecasting
  • Mulesoft Anypoint Platform
  • Connected Sales and Distributions
  • Intelligent Service and Field Service
  • Personalized B2B and B2C Marketing
  • Real-time Business Insights
  • Channel Partner Management
  • Real-time Collaboration

Corrao Group’s experience and discipline with manufacturing dates back to 1982 with our Managing Partner. Jack Corrao has developed numerous operational infrastructures to support hardware and software companies to deliver the best in breed solutions. Since 2008, Corrao Group has been helping manufacturers utilize Salesforce to create an automated closed-loop system for channel-centric manufacturing.

As Dreamforce 2019 approaches, Corrao Group is excited to learn even more about the capabilities of Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud. We will be in attendance to meet with our customers and prospects in regards to the new releases.

To learn more information about Dreamforce 2019, please visit https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/.

Exciting times are coming for the Manufacturing industry!

References

https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2019/09/191609-vr/

https://www.salesforce.com/products/manufacturing-cloud/overview/