Salesforce Spring ’19 Release Highlights: Salesforce Essentials

It’s new calendar season! The Earth has completed another long lap of the sun, the holiday haze is gradually lifting, and there’s only three hundred and sixty-four more days until we’re back in the roarin’ 20's!

But 2019’s not going to slip by quietly, we’ve already got a bunch of reasons to mark up that brand new puppy calendar — the Spring ’19 Release is on the way!

Pumped full of helpful new features, reimagined flexibility, and optimized processes, the new release aims to improve every aspect of your customer (and user) relationships. The release notes are live, the release dates are rapidly approaching, and we’ll help you make heads and tails out of all the commotion with another series of release highlights!

In today’s post we’ll run through one of the biggest improvements for SMBs: Salesforce Essentials!

Sales and Service, Together

First up, if you’re a small business using the Essentials-tier platform, in 2019 your bag of tricks is getting twice as versatile. With the Spring ’19 Release, Salesforce is combining Sales Essentials and Service Essentials into one new product: Salesforce Essentials!

And that change comes just in time for small businesses. As markets continue to evolve in the 21st century and new metrics rise to the forefront of manager’s minds, customer satisfaction and customer experience are more important than ever. In 2019, your support staff is a part of your sales process, your marketing and sales efforts need to be aligned like never before, and your customers expect (and deserve) knowledgable, personalized service in every interaction with your company. Managing that 360-degree customer care and aligning goals, efforts, and activities across teams can be difficult, especially with the rest of your business to run. That’s why combining Sales and Service Essentials is such a boon for small businesses!

Now you can seamlessly mesh your sales and support efforts. Follow your customers for the whole lifetime of your relationship and give them the personalized care that they deserve, whether you’re putting a new deal together or managing their support requests.

It’s truly a “2 great tastes, taste great together” moment and will empower small businesses to compete with enterprise-level operations, all without raising your licensing costs!

Add or Reduce Users on the Fly

Growing your business should be a cause for celebration, not headaches. With training, paperwork, payroll updates, hardware-needs, etc… anything that streamlines the onboarding process is a blessing. And, with the Spring ’19 Release, Salesforce Essentials admins will be able to update their users on the fly!

No more phone or email tag with “licensing teams”, no more “you might just have to wait a week before we get you really up and running”, you’ll be able to add, remove, and adjust your users and licenses right from inside your Salesforce org.

That newfound functionality will also allow SMBs to embrace concurrent enrollment (a topic we’ve touched on before) for those high-user, low-frequency use-cases like updating emergency contacts or adding a new child to a benefits package, without needing to jack up your license count (and your monthly cost).

In short, the Spring ’19 Release is set to make Salesforce Essentials much more flexible, agile, and responsive — the same traits that help SMBs thrive in the marketplace.

Manage Users’ Info and Permissions

Tying into the above, the Spring ’19 update to Salesforce Essentials will also empower admins to manage all of their users’ info and permissions right from the Users page under Setup. You’ll be able to view and update user information, reset passwords, and assign profiles and permission sets across your whole org.

Again, the aim is to empower SMBs, who probably don’t have an exclusive, full-time Salesforce Admin on staff, to be able to easily stay flexible and competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.

Manage Your Sales Funnel, Your Way

Salesforce’s real magic is in the metrics. The visibility and tracking that organizations get into their operations is invaluable for forecasting, planning, and staying competitive year after year. Ask most C-Suite execs for their favorite dashboard (the at-a-glance graphs made up of your most relevant reports) and they’ll tell you it’s their sales pipeline.

Salesforce revolutionized the way organizations track potential deals, new customers, and the entire sale cycle, from “fresh lead” to “deal closed — won”. And unmatched configurability has meant that the same underlying structure can be effectively wielded by international mega-corps selling services, to local artists selling their wares, to professional sports orgs selling tickets, advertising, and fan experiences.

With the Spring ’19 Release, even more of that flexibility is coming to Salesforce Essentials, now you’ll have complete control over the configuration of your sales funnel, from lead to close.

Create lead stages that match your marketing and outreach process and, once you’ve got a prospect engaged, move them into the opportunity pipeline which can, again, directly mirror your sales flow and assign probabilities based on your expectations and historical successes. From there, predicting your monthly, quarterly, and annual expected revenue is a breeze — something that’s historically been hard to quantify for SMBs who rarely have a dedicated business analyst. It provides insight into the effectiveness of your processes, your predictions, and the economic health of your business. All without writing a single line of code.

Easy “Call Center” Set-Up

For businesses, big and small, a surprising amount of work still takes place over the phone. Sure, nowadays those calls are more commonly traversing data lines than the old copper telephone wires, but the connection is the same and there’s still no match for direct, instantaneous conversation and communication. The only drawback to non-digitized communication tends to be work duplication.

Taking a call, taking notes while you chat, scheduling your follow-ups is almost instinctual — but the workflow begins to slow down when you have to then “log” that call, re-type your notes in another system, add the follow-up to your calendar in yet another app, etc… And that’s what makes the new Voice Support Setup Flow for Essentials so exciting!

With an easy to follow guide, Salesforce will now walk clients through integrating their third-party phone provider with their Salesforce org. Automagically assign who will receive which calls, log them in the system with the push of a button, update notes, scheduling, and any additional information, all in one place so that those 5-minute calls don’t take 10 minutes of effort. Because you’ve got work to do, other calls to make, and wasting time maintaining mismatched systems is nobody’s idea of a fun workday.

In-App Help

Last but not least, the Spring ’19 Release for Essentials will roll out a brand new way to find the answers you need without all the extra tabs, windows, and clicking back and forth between your work, your org, and Google.

With in-app help, you’ll be able to pull up support queries, access guides and FAQs, and see recommended best practices, all without losing your place in Salesforce! If you need additional help, Salesforce Essentials coaches will also be deployed to resolve logged cases, so even if you’re encountering something nobody’s had to figure out before, you’ll have support when you need it.

And, as always, MK Partners is here to help too. If you have questions about configuration, customization, or you’re just trying to figure out how your company could benefit from Salesforce — drop us a line and we’ll happily share our experiences helping similar businesses find, develop, and implement the best solution for their needs.

Stay tuned here in the coming weeks for more Spring ’19 Release highlights and a glimpse of all the cool new features and functionality rolling out across the platform.

Until then, keep working smart, hard, and happy — and we’ll see you in the cloud!