The 7 Best Salesforce Winter ‘21 Release Features

The Salesforce Winter ‘21 release was delivered in October 2020 (yeah, we don’t get it either – just another example of northern hemisphere elitism) and came packed with great features. We’ve collated our seven favourite features from the release but check out the Release Notes for a full breakdown.

As expected, almost all of the new improvements are for the Lightning user interface so for any business still using the Classic UI, it’s probably time to abandon ship and upgrade to Lightning. So, without further adieu, here are the top features for business users and admins.

The Best Features For Business Users

Einstein Search

Einstein is Salesforce’s artificial intelligence layer that has applications in lead and opportunity scoring as well as your Salesforce search bar. There’s a good reason Google is the largest company in the world – it organises the world’s information and this is exactly what Einstein search does for your Salesforce data. With each release, Einstein search gets better and better so if you haven’t already enabled it, now is the time.

There are a few setup steps to follow so if you’re a little unsure, reach out to your Salesforce Partner. As of Salesforce Winter ‘21, you can now enable Einstein search in Professional edition so even more customers can experience the benefits. Not only that, you can enable search personalisations for multiple objects so you’ll always find the data you’re looking for.

Einstein Lead and Opportunity Scoring

Continuing with the Einstein features, Einstein opportunity scoring is now free to all Salesforce customers. What was once a paid feature has now been released for all to enjoy. For those that don’t know, Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring uses artificial intelligence to find commonalities in the opportunities that you won and makes predictions on how likely you are to win each deal. This release also came with a few updates: users can now exclude certain records from the scoring model as well as teaching it to ignore certain fields.

There have been some changes to Einstein lead scoring as well. Although it's not free just yet, it used to require 1,000 new leads and 120 lead conversions before it had enough historical data to make meaningful predictions, however you can now turn it on instantly! Presumably Einstein is getting smarter from the aggregated data of all Salesforce users which is hugely powerful.

Salesforce Anywhere

Finally, Salesforce has brought us the future of collaboration, Salesforce Anywhere. While Salesforce Chatter is a great tool for contextual, text-based conversations, Salesforce Anywhere takes that to a whole new level. It’s great to see Salesforce reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic in a practical and helpful way. Salesforce Anywhere allows users to direct message and video chat, right from Salesforce but that’s not all. Like Chatter, these conversations are centred around Salesforce records or even specific Salesforce fields.

As Bret Taylor, President and COO of Salesforce said:

So many companies use Google Hangouts, Slack or worse still… emails to communicate internally. Finally, we can direct message or video chat our colleagues from the same tab we are working in.

Email Template Builder Enhancements

I’ve always loved WYSIWYG (pronounced: wizzy wig, stands for: what you see is what you get), I love using it and I love saying it. It was a game changer in HTML webpages and it’s going to make your life so much easier again. Salesforce has released a WYSIWYG email template editor that combines the simplicity of WYSIWYG with it’s familiar Lightning App Builder framework to deliver an elegantly simple email builder experience.

If you’re not using email templates in your organisation you need to start. They save time writing repetitive emails, reduce manual error and ensure consistent communications and messaging. Pro tip: if you’re like me and don’t like the “soulless corporation’ feel that email templates might evoke, make sure you educate your users to include a personal paragraph in each email. That way you build rapport with the recipient but still get increased efficiency and consistent communication. Wizzy wig.

The Best Features For Salesforce Admins

Flows Become Awesome

As if flows weren’t useful enough, this update has just upped the ante once again. This is where the true power of Salesforce lies, its automation tools and of the automation tools, flows reigns supreme. Here are just a few of the enhancements to flows:

• Flows can now handle deletions
• Autolayouts have been enabled, just like Pardot’s Engagement Program Builder
• You can now debug as a specific user for easier troubleshooting
• Trigger flows can be run every time or when a record meets specific criteria, just like Process Builder

Flows can be complex, so if you need some help with automation, reach out to your Salesforce Partner. We can build flows to meet your business use case or for the more savvy admin, we can train you up to build your own.

Optimise Page Performance

A frequently heard gripe with the Lightning user interface is it doesn’t really live up to its name, especially in the early days. If some of your pages aren’t loading like lightning, you’re not alone. This is partly because Salesforce is packing so many useful elements onto each page but also because your pages may not be optimised. While Lightning load speeds have certainly improved over the years, Salesforce has now released an analysis tool for Lightning pages that allows you to identify which components are contributing to load speeds. Salesforce suggests recommendations for improvement so you can keep your users happy.

Auto Add Fields to Custom Report Types

I know most people will read this paragraph and think nothing of it, last on list, who cares. There is, however, a small group of admins that will be smiling ear to ear right now. How many times have you added a bunch of fields to a custom object to only later realise they are not available on reports. It doesn’t seem like much but let me tell you, the pain is real for many of us in Adminland. Thank you Salesforce for listening to our cries and allow us to auto add custom fields to custom report types (CRT). No longer will I be halfway through building a report only to have to discard it to update the CRT, the future is now.

Summary

This is just a snippet of the new features and enhancements in the Salesforce Winter ‘21 release. If any of these have piqued your interest or you’d like to implement some of these new features, reach out to your Salesforce Partner or contact us directly.