As we step into the much-awaited 2021, we are all filled up with hopes of a better year. Well, Salesforce has made its contribution to this by coming up with some awesome new features as part of the Salesforce Spring ’21 release, thereby fulfilling the promise to make our lives better. Although a big part of the world was at standstill, Salesforce was continuously striving to achieve its goal of continuous improvement and innovation and came up with the Salesforce Spring ’21 release on schedule.

Here are a few features which look fascinating to us and we are sure they will end up making 2021 a better year for those using Salesforce:

Enhanced Opportunity Products in Salesforce Spring ’21 release

Salesforce has now enabled users to leverage more out of the opportunity products object by allowing them to create relationships on this object. Yes, this has finally come true. Now you can track your orders in a better fashion by relating more details to the opportunity product object like locations, models, etc using relationships with standard or custom objects.

Manual Sharing on Lightning Records

This is again one of the long-awaited features for Salesforce Lightning users. Most of you might have used this already in the Salesforce Classic, but now it’s been made available in Lightning too. With this feature now enabled in Lightning, users can share a record with a user or a group of users in just a few clicks.

After this update, Salesforce pundits are now stating that Lightning has finally caught up with Classic in terms of features.

Release Notes Now Available on Salesforce Help

Salesforce Release Notes will now be available in Salesforce Help pages thereby making it easier to search and relate to various features on the help portal. This will help in an improved UI/UX for the end-users and will make training and change enablement an easier task for trainers.

Lightning Page Performance Analyzer in Salesforce Spring ’21 release

Lightning Page Performance Analysis enables you to track the performance of your lightning page in real-time. It gives you details about the page load time which includes the real page load time as well as the predicted page load time. This feature gives you the ability to track page load times on both desktop and mobile devices. It also breaks down the performance by different components, making it easier to understand where you can easily achieve additional performance gains.

Enhanced Lightning Flows

Salesforce has improved the lightning flows with new features and has changed the name to Salesforce Flows. You can now also embed a Lightning Scheduler workflow into another flow. This capability will help a lot in cases where the customers need interconnected flows that get triggered from within flows.

Salesforce Meetings

Salesforce Meetings is the latest addition which will play an important role in improving the meeting experience for all users. With Salesforce Meetings, users are enabled with an end-to-end virtual meeting experience without the need to leave the Salesforce platform. In addition to the ability to create and schedule meetings, Salesforce Meetings provides users with insights on participants and meeting related details using the “Meeting Digest” feature. To top it up, the unique feature of “Meeting Studio” lets users set video calls and screen sharing on the same window. 

Although these features are not released yet, these are expected to be the game changers for Salesforce end users as they will be able to organize and track conversations within Salesforce with much more ease.

You can explore more about Salesforce meetings by visiting the Salesforce Meetings page in release notes.

Call Coaching Enhancements

Call coaching was available for voice calls so far within the high-velocity sales add-on offering from Salesforce. With the upcoming Salesforce Spring ’21 release, the call coaching functionality will be available for video calls too. Being able to provide insights for both audio and video calls, it will make the lives of sales users a bit easier.

With call coaching now extended to video calls, users will now be able to gather insights and recommendations from video calls directly in Salesforce and will be able to exercise all features currently available for voice call coachings like record sharing, call collections, or Chatter access from the call coaching dashboard.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring Improvements

Einstein Opportunity Scoring is one of the most popular features since its release and has been used extensively by Salesforce users. However, it was not always feasible to use for smaller companies as not all clients were able to provide enough data in Salesforce for Einstein to come up with opportunity scores.

Salesforce will now be introducing a global scoring model that uses anonymous aggregated data which will enable even smaller businesses with lesser data to leverage the Opportunity Scoring model for their businesses. With the introduction of these global models in Salesforce Spring ’21 release, now everybody will be able to receive highly accurate opportunity scores even with a lesser amount of data available.

Improved Email Experience in Salesforce Spring ’21 release

Salesforce email experience has always been a critical requirement from most Salesforce customers, especially for the Sales & Service users. Salesforce has kept this in mind and introduced a few new features:

• Sales users can now add Zoom meeting links directly to the emails by connecting their Zoom accounts. You can learn more about Salesforce and Zoom integration here.
• Sales users can now track if the emails were soft bounced.

• Sales Users can now use the Send Later option in threaded emails as well. Previously, they were able to schedule only new/unthreaded emails.

Conclusion

Apart from the above-listed features coming with the Salesforce Spring ’21 release, a few existing features will start retiring in 2021. Users will need to review their current settings and migrate to new features to avoid any business disruptions. Some of these features include Salesforce for Outlook, Lightning Sync for Microsoft (to be replaced by Einstein Activity Capture), Lightning Sync for Google (to be replaced by Einstein Activity Capture), Inbox outlook add-in, Inbox Chrome extension, and others.

There is a lot of exciting stuff coming up in this Salesforce Spring ’21 release. So, buckle up and enjoy Salesforce. For the geeks who want to explore more of the release notes, do check out the complete Salesforce Release Notes section.