Your Salesforce CRM is one of the most important investments you can make into your sales teams’ success, your company’s productivity, and your long-term growth. And yet, so many of the clients that come to us are running their lead management activities through outdated and under-optimized Salesforce software.
Whether they’re using Salesforce Classic instead of making the switch to Salesforce Lightning, or just missing out on enhancements to their platform and mobile apps, these clients aren’t fully leveraging the tools they have—and truthfully, they’re paying for it.
We know staying on top of every features release and every new rollout can feel like a full-time job in itself. Especially if implementing these new features means retraining your sales team. But Salesforce is the #1 customer relationship management tool on the market for a reason. And while it is a big investment—of both your time and finances—there’s no better system you can use to maximize sales performance, securely manage customer data, and keep your sales pipeline stocked.
Before we get into where to find you can find the new feature release documents and useful training resources, it’s worth mentioning:
If you partner with a Salesforce consulting and implementation firm like Arketek, you’ve got a whole team of on-demand analysts, strategists, and trainers who know your business objectives and sales cycle inside and out. We can help you review new rollouts, audit your workflows, and integrate the features that make sense—all while automating and optimizing every step of your sales process. Reach out to our team to start that conversation.
What Salesforce features are available to you?
Salesforce spends tens of millions of dollars every year on researching and developing the best customer relationship management tools on the market. While some of that real time data goes into building new tools, much of it is used to roll out new Salesforce features and opportunity management optimizations for the products your sales and marketing teams are already using.
Salesforce typically rolls out new features for its current tools through three scheduled releases a year, usually in the spring, summer, and winter.
Each release includes new optimizations, enhancements to existing functionalities, and bug fixes. What’s most helpful is that Salesforce provides detailed release notes before these upgrades go live, so you have the opportunity to review the changes and how they may impact or benefit your Salesforce CRM before they’re officially out.
Salesforce also gives users access to a kind of “sandbox” CRM tool you can use to test out the new features before they’re fully released, which can smooth out your team’s transition.
What kind of features are released each year?
These seasonal releases include a range of features aimed at improving the functionality and user experience of your Salesforce CRM software, the Salesforce mobile app, and many popular Salesforce products. These features cater to different aspects of the business process, including sales, service, marketing, and more.
Here are some of the CRM upgrades and new features you can expect to see in each release:
Interface improvements
Salesforce frequently updates its user interface on both the CRM app and the Salesforce mobile app, to make them more intuitive and user-friendly. These updates mainly impact navigation, customization options, and accessibility features.
Automation and artificial intelligence
Salesforce invests heavily in automation and artificial intelligence-powered solutions that improve sales forecasting, simplify complex sales processes, and make lead management practically hands-free. You’ll often see this type of upgrade roll out across all four major product lines: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud.
New integration capabilities
One of the best benefits of the Salesforce CRM app is its ability to integrate with hundreds of other systems and software. And with each release, the number of smooth integrations available continues to increase. You’ll see these upgrades include better API support, new connectors for popular external products, and enhancements to common integrations, like Hubspot, Slack, or email integration.
Stronger analytics and reporting
Salesforce frequently releases new analytics tools to monitor customer data metrics, sales forecasting, market trends, marketing campaigns, and more. These features may include dashboard enhancements or the availability of better reporting processes.
Security features
Data security is a major concern for all CRM platforms, especially as widespread data breaches become more common. With each seasonal release, Salesforce often upgrades a range of security features aimed at improving data protection, compliance with new regulations, and better access controls.
This is just a small sample of the releases we see most commonly, but it’s far from exhaustive. The point is, every release includes important updates and actionable insights that can help you improve every area of business, from customer engagement and sales performance, to forecasting and marketing.
Get release-ready with this resource
With so many new features rolling out every year, it’s easy to fall behind on what your Salesforce CRM can do. That’s why Salesforce keeps an archive of every set of release notes here in this help article. (You may want to bookmark this link for quick reference.)
Even if your team usually stays on top of the latest changes, a scan through the past two or three sets of notes related to the Salesforce products you have may help you catch essential information on a feature or functionality you overlooked—one that can make a noticeable difference in your contact management, CRM data quality, or sales performance.
Curious what key Salesforce features you’re underutilizing?
If it’s been a while since your last business process review—or if you’ve never audited your sales process—let’s have a conversation about what your business needs to streamline operations and give your sales reps more opportunities to close the deal.
Consider us your on-demand Salesforce CRM support team
If we haven’t had the chance to connect yet, we’re Arketek—a growing team of highly trained developers, strategists, analysts, project managers, and problem solvers.
We know Salesforce CRM systems inside and out, but we don’t stop there. If there’s a system that boosts customer satisfaction, drives customer engagement, smooths out business processes, or makes lead management the easiest task on your to-do list, we’ve handled it—and we’ve got 2,000+ successful implementations to prove it.
Our best partnerships start with a deep dive into your Salesforce CRM, where we’ll look for ways to automate and optimize your business processes. With your goals clear and the plan in place, we’ll get to work building, implementing, integrating, and deploying your custom solution. Once our work is done, we’ll even train your trainers so every gain sticks.
When you’re ready to take a next step:
Book a no-pressure discovery call with our team.
We’ll talk about your business processes, your Salesforce CRM, your sales team, and your customer base—and how we can help you optimize each.
