“Winter is coming” – does it ring any bells? Well, it’s time. They are coming. Not the white walkers, but a lot of new features from the Salesforce Winter ’21 release.

Even in these unprecedented times when the world is struggling with a major pandemic that has brought everything to a standstill, Salesforce has strived hard to not miss the schedule and enhance the user experience for all its users by bringing in great features as part of the Salesforce Winter ’21 release. 

Wondering when it’s kicking in? Well, Salesforce has already shared the release schedule. Below are the key dates you should mark your calendars with:

You may very well go ahead and visit the Salesforce Trust website to check the status of your org and know the exact dates for when the new release is hitting your org.

It will be best to check out the Release Notes as the next step. It’s good to read through the Salesforce Winter ’21 release notes in advance and then move over to check out these new features in your Sandbox before they are deployed to production. As with all Salesforce releases, Salesforce deploys all the changes to Sandbox environments first to provide a sandbox preview to the admins to make necessary preparations. You can get more details on Sandbox preview and feature release dates on Sandboxes from this useful article on the Salesforce blog.

To further assess your release readiness and discuss with fellow trailblazers, you can join this group.

Now that we know how to prepare for the Salesforce Winter ’21 release, it’s time to get into details of what is coming our way. As usual, Salesforce has come up with a lot of improvements across the platform in different modules, giving more power to the users. All these features can be found out in the release notes, however, we will focus on the release features for Sales Cloud here.

Salesforce being majorly a CRM platform, the Sales team and process lies at the center of its heart. Keeping in mind the priorities and ease of use for the Sales team, Salesforce has come up with the following features as part of the Winter ’21 release:

Einstein Lead Scoring

With this new feature, organizations can now bypass the previous limitation of needing enough data (1,000 new leads and 120 lead conversions in the previous 6 months) to turn on Einstein Lead Scoring. Salesforce has now removed this condition from the Einstein Readiness Assessor and now anyone with lesser data too can turn on Einstein Lead Scoring for their org. In cases where enough data is not available, Salesforce Einstein will leverage a global scoring model that uses anonymous aggregated data flow and will switch to scoring with your data only once there is enough data to do that.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Einstein Opportunity Scoring will now provide flexibility to users to choose the opportunities which need to be considered for scoring and selectively pick those opportunities. This new feature will also provide the ability to users to exclude any custom opportunity fields from the overall score thereby making the scoring model more accurate.

Salesforce Anywhere (Beta)

Salesforce introduced this new product during the TrailheaDX conference in 2020, which is supposed to help Salesforce users to collaborate on the records in real-time to unlock new levels of productivity and customer success.

The new Salesforce Anywhere app allows you to embed chat, alerts, comments, and video directly into the Salesforce experience, so that you can work together in real-time and make decisions faster.

Salesforce Anywhere is a Non-GA Service so far, but you can already sign up to join the Beta of Salesforce Anywhere here.

Email Experience in Salesforce Winter ’21 Release

Salesforce has taken this step to improve the email experience for Sales users providing them with the capability to add their calendar availability in the emails, making it easier for them to schedule meetings with external participants. This feature also enables automatic meeting creation and blocking of calendars once the recipient chooses a timeslot sent to him/her in the email. This will no doubt save a lot of time and provide a hassle-free experience to Sales users in terms of setting up meetings. All they need to do is just click a button to insert available time slots to the email and Salesforce will take care of the rest.

Furthermore, you can now send List Emails at the ideal time by scheduling them in advance, create larger emails with the maximum size of 35 MB, and more.

Check out the following article to find other tips on how to use Salesforce to send emails quicker than ever before.

Opportunity Change Highlights in Salesforce Winter ’21 Release

This is a new feature introduced in Salesforce List Views and Kanban view for Opportunities where text colors and arrows will indicate the changes made to the opportunity amounts and/or close dates in the last 7 days. This feature allows Sales users to quickly review all the recent changes in their opportunities and get more details around these changes by hovering over these texts and arrows.

Collaborative Forecasts

With the new release, Salesforce has expanded the collaborative forecasting from just iOS to Android as well. Apart from this, Forecast users will now be able to update stages within the opportunity list without leaving the forecast page. This feature of inline editing of the stage was not available in previous versions.

Gmail Integration Upgrades

As part of integration upgrades with Gmail, Sales reps will now see a better look at the Insert Availability window in the Gmail integration. Apart from that, Sales reps will now be able to manually log emails through Gmail integration to the records in Salesforce if Einstein Activity Capture configuration has emails disabled and will be able to set up sharing options if automatic capturing of emails is enabled.

Microsoft Integration Upgrades

In terms of Microsoft integration, Salesforce is running a pilot program for Microsoft Teams to Salesforce integration which will provide users with advanced capabilities to mention Salesforce records in teams, preview details of records that others post, pin records to channel tabs for easy access, keep records up to date with inline editing, and other features. Although this feature is not yet available, you can register for this feature in its current pilot mode by contacting your AE.

Other Updates in Salesforce Winter ’21 release

Apart from this, Salesforce for Outlook will be retiring in December 2020 and any new users will not be able to use Lightning Sync and will need to use Einstein Activity Capture. Similar to Gmail, users will also have options to manually log emails to Salesforce using Einstein Activity Capture settings.

Some of the other cool features include an upgrade to Salesforce Inbox Mobile and upgrades to Enterprise territory management. Also, another important announcement was that the Enterprise Territory Management will now need to be mandatorily applied as the original territory management feature will be retired in Summer ’21 release. This announcement does not bring anything new in this release but is surely a signal to start prepping for this change.

The above-mentioned features are icing on the cake and there are a lot more cool features that will be kicking in with the Salesforce Winter ’21 release. So, what are you waiting for? Get ready to go through the exciting journey!