By Linsey Billings, Business Analyst,
Salesforce Certified Administrator
Salesforce’s Spring ‘17 release includes far too many great features to cover in a reasonably sized blog article, but the Top 5 Features explained here create solutions to common issues for our Manufacturing clients. In some cases, we had custom development planned to solve issues that were resolved with the latest release. Being aware of these new features is a testament to Mountain Point's dedication to staying up to date on the latest features and functionality, and therefore driving value for our customers.
Opportunity Products
Have you ever trained a client on adding multiple products to an opportunity or had to do it yourself? It was quite time consuming, especially if you were trying to make any changes on the spot. Now, Lightning Experience has a great new feature that will calm the clicks of our mouse by enabling us the ability to add up to 50 products to an opportunity at one time and edit up to 200. Sales Reps and Admins everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief!
Orders
Order Management within the Manufacturing vertical is key to managing the Who, What, When, Where…. and How Much around their closed sales. Orders allow manufacturing companies to customize the provisioning of their goods or services based on those fundamental questions. With the new Spring 17 Release, manufacturing companies can now begin to manage their orders in Lightning. Within the Order workspace, you can track which distributor is placing the order, what products need to be delivered, when the order was placed, where the products are getting shipped and billed, and whether there is a contract in place with the distributor that specifies a certain price. One set back for now is that Lightning does not currently allow for creating reduction orders or selecting products to reduce. But, there is always the next Release!
Account Hierarchy
Many manufacturing companies do business with distributors which have multiple ship-to and sold-to subsidiary locations. For these manufacturers, it is important to understand the corporate structure of their distributors in addition to tracking sales for each location which is why the Account Hierarchy feature was so useful. Previously, you were unable to utilize this feature and view the hierarchy of your Accounts unless switching back to Classic, but stress no more… We are now able to visualize the relationships between the corporate and subsidiary accounts directly in Lightning! In addition, we can also customize which columns appear on the Account Hierarchy page. For example, in addition to displaying a particular distributor and all of its subsidiaries, you can also include the custom field that designates whether it's a ship-to versus sold to account. You can also include the location and even the Annual Revenue field to track which locations are performing the best.
Forecast in Lightning
Before, you were limited to managing forecasts only within Salesforce Classic. Now, Collaborative Forecasting is also available in Lightning. Not only is this feature useful for driving your sales reps to close more deals but it also helps with managing ERP. The main features you get with Collaborative Forecast workspace are the summary of sales forecasts, related opportunities, and filtering options based on forecast type, currency, period range, and quota.
Bookmarking Filtered Reports
Reporting is vital to keeping track of the health of your business. Salesforce Reports have given us the visibility into the most critical KPIs around our business helping us answer specific questions such as “How many opportunities are we closing a month above $30,000 which are not existing business?” or “ Who are my top 5 performing Sales Reps in the Southeast territory?” When working with reports, often times we want to see the data from different angles such as how many opportunities were won this month from my marketing campaigns and then how many were won from our trade shows. However, in order to see both sets of data we need to load the report, change the filter, and rerun the report. No more! We can now pass URL parameters to set filter values and create separate bookmarks for the varying data sets. With all this time you will be saving with these new Spring 17 release features , you can clock out a little early. You deserve it!