We’ve attended the webinars, read through the release notes, and used the features. With our customers in mind, we trained our team on these new features to improve our Salesforce consulting services. In addition to the full Salesforce Winter ’20 release notes found at the bottom of the blog, here are some of our favorites.

Sales Cloud 

Einstein: Forecasting Enhancements

• Description: Einstein forecasting allows users to conduct quarterly forecasting along with monthly forecasting.
• Benefits: Receive better insights from AI to make better business decisions concerning the stages of your deals.

Sales Cadence Branching

• Description: Branching, which looks and feels identical to the branching in Pardot’s Engagement Studio, allows you to create two different next best steps for your sales representatives.
• Benefits: Sales Cadence Branching saves your sales reps time and moves their lead or contact to the next best step, whether that’s through an email or call.

Service Cloud 

Einstein Case Routing

• Description: Einstein Case Routing automatically classifies and routes support cases based on a range of criteria including qualifications, areas of expertise, and historical success rates.
• Benefits: Service Agents don’t have to manually review cases and have more time to help customers.

Lightning Knowledge Enhancements

• Description: Users now have the ability to send knowledge articles on any platform in real-time.
• Benefits: Share a Knowledge Article with customers in conversations or with social posts when they are having issues.

Pardot 

Snippets

• Description: Creating snippets in Pardot allow companies who host webinars or other recurring events to reuse content without having to update the email and email templates themselves.
• Benefits: Save your users more time and increase productivity with the ability to reuse content.

Marketing Cloud 

Einstein Send Time Optimization

• Description: Use Journey Builder activity to find the best time for each individual email subscriber based on their history of engagement.
• Benefits: Helps improve your open rates by making sure your emails are sent at the most relevant time for your customers, leads, or contacts.

Platform, Productivity, and Integration 

Real-Time Event Monitoring

• Description: Use real-time event monitoring to detect and prevent risky events in Salesforce.
• Benefits: Get greater insights into security concerns, performance metrics, and system usage.

New Salesforce Mobile App

• Description: Rebuilt to bring a brand new experience. Completely personalized navigation allows users to customize their app to their own personal needs.
• Benefits: Lightning helps unify the Salesforce desktop and mobile experience with power navigation and AI-powered out-of-the-box functionality that improves productivity.

Salesforce Data Integration Enhancements

• Description: Users will be able to easily embed Salesforce reports and list views in Quip. Log calls in Quip and sync them back to Salesforce without having to leave Quip.
• Benefits: Increase user’s productivity by getting all your work done in Quip.

Einstein Analytics 

Einstein Discovery: Automated Story Creation

• Description: Create a story by selecting a data set in which Einstein Discovery intelligently determines which metrics to optimize and which fields to analyze to give you insights about your data.
• Benefits: Einstein Discovery does all the work for you, which frees up more of your time to work on other tasks while getting the best trends and insights into the data you want to see.

Einstein Analytics in the New Salesforce Mobile App

• Description: Access all your important data through search, favorites, chatter, and embedded dashboards.
• Benefit: Have to work on the go? No problem. Salesforce’s new mobile app mixed with Einstein Analytics allows users to stay on the go while being able to harness the same power of Salesforce on a desktop.

The Salesforce Winter 20’ Release Notes does bring exciting new features for Salesforce employees and customers. However, customers still using classic will not be able to use these features.

Lightning does need to be activated to maximize the Winter Release Notes. Lightning will be enabled for all users coming this January. It’s important that you start thinking about making the transition if you haven’t yet. We have the tools and knowledge to help you with your transition.

Sources

https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/winter-20-release-highlights

All Images and logos from Salesforce 

Going through every little detail of the Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes can be very time-consuming. We’ve decided to highlight the most popular features that have been circulating with a description and a benefit for each new release.

It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic.

Sales Cloud

Pardot Einstein Campaign Insights

• Description: Einstein currently gives you essential statistics and insights on how your campaigns are executing. You can discover more insights from Einstein for other marketing assets like prospect details, list emails, engagement, and marketing forms. Linking Pardot with Salesforce will enable you to keep every one of your records in a single spot.
• Benefits: Helps marketers analyze buyer behavior, dissect data, and find similarities of what your prospects share to maximize your campaign effectiveness.

Einstein Activity Metrics

• Description: When you click on an Opportunity, you can now view the last email date and the Einstein score of the Opportunity. In the reports tab, you can see who has been active and who needs your recognition.
• Benefits: Activity metrics in Sales Cloud makes it easy to get a complete view of all activity so that your sales team can know how to prioritize their time with their customers and prospects.

Einstein Pricing Guidance

• Description: When Sales reps add a product with pricing guidance to their quote, they can view the suggested target, norm, and floor discount amounts. If the representative chooses the target price, Salesforce CPQ applies the fitting discount to the quote line.
• Benefits: Helps your sales team close deals by providing them with pricing guidance based on historical deals and product pricing trends.

Salesforce Milestone Confetti Celebration

• Description: Sales will drop virtual confetti across the screen when reps reach a certain milestone.
• Benefits: A fun feature released by Salesforce to help your team celebrate success.

Visit our Sales Cloud services page to learn how we can optimize your sales processes.

Service Cloud

Field Service Lightning: Dispatch Console Enhancements 

• Description: Schedule a service appointment by dragging it from the map onto a service resource’s schedule in the Gantt.
• Benefits: Faster schedule and dispatch jobs right on the map and view long-cycle jobs by month directly on the Gantt.

Marco Enhancements

• Description: Be more productive with smart macros in Lightning Experience that include conditional instructions.
• Benefits: Increase employee productivity by automating routine tasks based on a set of conditions and criteria. Adding expressions into the builder will help specify steps, timing, and streamline macros.

Digital Engagement: Agent-Initiated Messaging

• Description: When an issue needs additional examination, agents can leave the messaging conversation to find the solution. Then, return to restart the conversation. Agents can now connect with customers via SMS.
• Benefits: Resolve customer problems faster than ever. Replies become automatically routed back to the same agent every time.

Visit our Service Cloud services page to see how we can hep improve your service department.

Marketing Cloud 

Marketing Cloud Integration with Google Analytics 360 Enhancements

• Description: Create IDs between Google Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud for a single user. By linking these two IDs, you can build audiences based on Google Analytics data for web and mobile app activity, email engagement, and offline behavior.
• Benefits: Capture the customer’s behavior and actions like goal non-completes, page exits, browse abandons, and search abandons.

Advertising Studio Integration with Google Customer Match

• Description: Users can now match their data to Google with more than just email. Now you match mobile ID, phone number, address, and user ID.
• Benefits: Increasing match rates, and make your marketing work for you. With more attributes added, customers have an increased chance at achieving higher match rates, and ultimately, a greater return on ad spend.

Einstein Engagement Frequency

• Description: Maximize customer engagement by pinpointing the right number of emails to send over a time frame. If you send too many emails, you can risk wearing down the customer. Send too few, and you might miss out on a sales opportunity.
• Benefits: Einstein Engagement Frequency addresses these concerns by discovering the best email frequency range to meet your goals with your customers or subscribers.

Visit our Salesforce Marketing cloud services page to learn how we can help customize your marketing content for your clients.

Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes in Conclusion

The Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes does bring exciting new features for Salesforce employees and customers. However, for the customers that are still using classic could be in trouble.

Lightning does need to be activated to maximize the Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes. Lightning will be enabled for all users coming this October. In addition, we do offer services to help you with your transition.

Sources

Salesforce.com

Salesforce release notes

Salesforce release notes images

It’s well known that 87% of B2B marketers agree that ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other method (ITSMA). The next question everyone asks is, “where should I start?” ABM for beginners is a complex strategy, and newcomers can quickly become intimidated by the time and effort it takes to run. The truth is, even a company with 10 employees can successfully execute an ABM strategy. All it takes is knowing how to start correctly with a solid foundation. Businesses just don’t start ABM with 200 accounts on day one; they start out with a few accounts, show ROI and success, correct themselves, and continue to scale. ABM for beginners starts with building the right team.

1. Form the Team

An ABM strategy is only as great as the team that develops it. It’s pivotal that ABM teams are built correctly with the right people. They will be responsible for defining the goals and KPIs, developing the strategy, and executing to produce results. There is no magic number for the right team as it varies based on the company’s size. Recommended team members include the heads of Sales and Marketing, including those involved with content strategy, technology management, and media managers. Once the team is assembled, it’s time to decide on who your customers will be with your ABM strategy.

2. Identify Target Accounts

With hundreds and even thousands of accounts on file, is there a trick to pinpointing the ones that would provide the highest chance of ROI? There is, creating your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a description of a company that is the perfect fit for your solution. Criteria can include industry, budget, employee headcount, the technology they use, etc. Based on how many criteria a company meets, they should be segmented or tiered. Those that meet more criteria of the ICP should produce the most ROI, so they should be tiered higher and given more attention and resources. For example, if your solution is perfect for a company in the manufacturing industry with a budget of $30k, has 400 employees whom all use Gmail, that would be a Tier 1 client. If an account comes in that meets only one out of eight potential criteria, they would be a tier 3 client. Once some tier 1 accounts are segmented, we can then target and message the decision-making contacts at the account.

3. Highlight Decision-Makers

Finding out those who will ultimately say yes or no to your solution at a company will help your team market to them, swaying them to say yes. These decision-makers usually are c-level, but it’s also important to find out those who may not be in the c-suite but still have a major influence on this decision. Finding out who these contacts are can be done through interactions with the company as well as conducting research. The value here is having the confidence that you know who you’re speaking to will ultimately be the ones making the decision on your solution. A buyer persona should be filled out for each decision-maker, and include info on their daily activities and pain points. Knowing about your buyers’ pain points will help marketing create their content, and help sales with their outreach since they’ll know what pains to address. Having these contacts highlighted will help you in the next step when you create custom content for each decision-maker.

4. Design Outreach Plan

In traditional marketing, the same content is usually blasted out to everyone in all types of roles. ABM is about sending custom content about how your solution(s) will help the recipient in their specific role. This requires research to be done on what challenges they face daily, and how your offering will solve it. For example, a VP of Marketing at a tier 1 account will receive content from your company on how your solution will help produce more quality leads because it is a pain point for them. This can be time-consuming, but well worth the investment. Once the content is finalized, incorporating it into the larger outreach plan will help paint the larger picture for everyone. You’ll designate who will receive content and when, when a call from sales will go out, when they will see an ad about your solution, etc.

5. Expand Accounts, ROI Reporting

ABM requires an abundance of research, but the time and resources is well worth the investment. Due to all the research your company will do, they can find additional ways that your solution(s) can help a customer that would have never been found through traditional marketing. This stops the one-and-done projects and allows a longer engagement and more success for both your company and the customer. After ABM has been running for some time, it’s time to report on your success, did ABM work for your company? ABM reporting can be one of the more difficult efforts to track unless you have the right technology. It’s not recommended to track efforts manually as it would be too time-consuming, and not scalable. Our recommended tool is Salesforce’s Einstein B2B Marketing Analytics as it helps see top-level KPIs, identifies top-engaging accounts, see current stages, and much more.

ABM for Beginners: Final Thoughts

Account-Based Marketing will take time to show revenue due to the deals typically being larger in size. With ABM’s marketing efforts generating 200% more revenue than others, it’s well worth it (Flip My Funnel). In addition to having a great strategy, the technology used is also an important factor. Tried and true for both ourselves and our customers, the Salesforce platform has all the tools and connections to accomplish your ABM campaigns. Corrao Group offers services that both help set up your system for ABM training and campaigns, as well as execute and run it for your organization. If you’d like to download our full Account-Based Marketing Guide for B2B Marketers, please fill out the form below.