The next release of Salesforce (Spring ’21) is coming soon, jam-packed with new features!
The actual Salesforce release dates depend on your instance location but will be on one of the release weekends: January 15, February 5, or February 12, in 2021. To find the exact date, check the maintenance tab on trust.salesforce.com for your instance.
Together with this new release are the comprehensive Release Notes which provide more details on each new feature. The notes went live on December 21, 2020, and are available here. As always the Salesforce Consultants at KeyNode Solutions picked the top features for you.
Salesforce Meetings
With the majority of meetings taking place virtually at the moment, there is no better time than to take a look at Salesforce Meetings. Announced in September, Meetings is set to supercharge the way sales reps prepare and conduct their engagements with customers. There are a couple of main features that have been highlighted in Spring ’21:
The Meeting Digest screen gives you a summary of any meeting you are attending. Including attendees, any opportunities you are discussing, tasks, activities, and meeting insights, powered by Einstein.
In addition, you have Meeting Studio. This provides a platform to help keep customers and prospects engaged virtually. Allowing smooth transitions between sharing content, as well as a place to take notes, document next steps, and collaborate with their team.
Find Changed Opportunities
Changes to Opportunities can now be highlighted in the list views and Kanban views, allowing you to see at a glance changes to the amount or close dates. Text colors and arrows indicate amounts and close dates that have changed during the last seven days and you can hover over an arrow to get details.
Lightning Email Templates
Salesforce admins and developers can now use Lightning email templates in Salesforce automation, including email alerts, Salesforce Flow, Workflow, Process Builder, Approval Processes, and more. This gives you more HTML features and the new Email Template Builder to design more attractive emails.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring
Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring was made available to the entire Salesforce community with the Winter ’21 release, but you now have the availability to exclude certain records – and ignore fields of your choosing – from the Einstein Opportunity Scoring model. This allows you to fine-tune your scoring model to achieve more accurate scores.
If Einstein opportunity scoring would not work for you before because you had a small data set, it now takes advantage of a global scoring model to allow you to score your opportunities. Once you have enough of your own data it switches the scoring model to use your data. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact one of our San Antonio Salesforce Consultants to learn how we can help!
Salesforce Flow Enhancements
Salesforce Flow, the preferred automation tool for Salesforce has received quite a few enhancements in this release including:
The ability to access the prior value of a record that has triggered the flow. This is a welcome addition, removing one of the obstacles to adopting flow for more automation.
Time-based actions for Salesforce Flow allow actions to be configured to occur in the future. These actions (called scheduled paths) allow part of your automation to be run after the flow is triggered. For example, after an opportunity is created, you may wish to send an email to the sales team and also set a reminder action one week before the opportunity closes. This can all be done in a single flow.
Multi-column layouts for screen flows is a Beta feature that will allow for attractive multi-column flow screens to be built without writing a single line of code. These screens are responsive meaning they will work on mobile devices too. Using the simple drag and drop editor in the Flow Builder, you can configure a page like this:
That will look like this:
Salesforce Lightning Page Performance
In Spring ’21, the Page Analysis feature has been upgraded to show predicted load time, as well as performance breakdown by component on both desktop and mobile pages. This allows admins and developers to analyze and improve the performance of Lightning pages.
Einstein Search
Search personalization with Einstein Search is now generally available. Your search results will take into consideration your recent activity, your geographic location, and your ownership of objects. Einstein search is also available on mobile and the Government Cloud.
Survey Pages Based on Your Data
If you use Salesforce Surveys, you now have the ability to create unique customer journeys by defining which survey page they skip to next based on fields in your Salesforce records. Use associated record merge field variables and participant record merge field variables to define field-level conditions. Use org variables to define conditions based on your org’s information. Use custom variables to define conditions based on values that you define.
In-App Guidance Updates
In-App Guidance allows your admin or developer to create pop-up hints that help the new user to navigate a page. They can also be used when a feature has been changed or a new feature has been introduced.
There have been several updates provided in the Salesforce Spring 21 release including:
- adding images to prompts
- adding a snooze option, allowing users to view the prompts later
- more screen positions to display the prompts
- shareable URLs to access in-app guidance
- rich-text editing in docked prompts
In-App Learning (beta)
If you’ve signed up for a Pre-release Org, you might have noticed a new icon at the top right of your screen, this is the “Guidance Centre” that provides an In-App Learning experience.
The idea behind it is to enhance your internal training programs, by making learning easily assessable to users within Salesforce. The Guidance Centre provides recommended Trailhead modules based on your role, or the page you are currently visiting.
In addition, Admins can create Learning Paths using public Trailhead modules, or myTrailhead modules if you use this product.
Salesforce Reports in Excel XLSX Format
Get report exports in the format you want. When exporting a report, you can select .xlsx, .xls, or .csv as the format. Previously only .xls and .csv were supported.
This is just a snapshot of the many new features available in the Spring ’21 release. The experts at KeyNode Solutions are busy finding more treasures in the 605-page release notes document. Need to find out more or configure some of these features? Drop us a line at hello@keynodesolutions.com or call us at 1-858-215-5371.
KeyNode Solutions is a full-service Salesforce Consulting Partner company. We deliver the solutions to grow your business: implementation, integration, customization, and Salesforce training. Our best-in-class Salesforce managed services for ongoing support available nationwide.
