Summer '19 for Manufacturers

If you're in the Manufacturing industry and using Salesforce, keep reading! This blog post on Summer '19 can help you focus on the right features to possibly increase sales, do more with Salesforce, and increase engagement with your current audience.

Let's dive in and look a bit closer.

Increasing Sales

If you are in Marketing and using Pardot, the new campaign insights feature would help your marketing team to find the most engaging prospects, title of the prospects and countries in one page in Salesforce campaigns. The dashboard view would help your marketing team to get all the insights in one page under salesforce campaigns.

• Aligned Insights for Sales & Marketing - Marketing users need to understand that their campaign efforts are creating engagement, while Sales needs to understand who is engaging, and identify strong leads.
• Identify Engagement Patterns and Trends - Visualize engagement over time to identify any patterns or trends in campaign engagement.
• Truly Actionable Insights - Segment and explore data to immediately take actions directly from the dashboard.

Plan Your Activities on the Last Days of the Quarter

If you have Einstein activity capture through your inbox or other license, now key reporting metrics are now available for reporting and process automation. If you are a sales manager, you can just create a list view of the closing deals and monitor last email, last phone call, todays activities which would help you track opportunities ready to close. You can also look at an opportunity and using the Einstein scoring, you can see last email, last call date and other activities which would help to identify if the opportunity is on track. 

If you have an opportunity which was inactive and found an activity in the last seven days, an email notification can be triggered to the account team which would help to speed up sales.

You can also test Einstein activity capture in a sandbox which would help you to test and do a demo to your sales team before going live to production. 

Track Product Revenue with Flexible Billing Options and Forecasting

If you are using product schedule, Summer '19 makes it easy to add custom fields on product schedules like a status field, ERP related fields which would help your sales team to show why they changed the pricing based on customer needs.

If there is a customer who wants a flexible billing to say a discount in the first month, add the pricing to the second month, custom fields on product schedules would help you to make this happen. Now you can also add workflow automation in the form of apex triggers and process builders to notify account teams on product schedule changes. 

Record types and other features are not available yet, but this would be a great feature for sales team to increase productivity.

Publish Mobile Apps for Reseller and Distributor Communities

With Summer '19, you can hide and show only components which are mobile optimized. This would help in avoiding the page scrolls for your user and create mobile friendly pages for your distributors and resellers to act. 

You can also increase engagement using mission features where you can assign badges to users automatically on answering the first question. 

Increase Productivity of Community Users by Doing Mass Actions on List Views

Now admins can allow community users to see always the most accessibly list view using pinned list view, do mass actions like update cases, leads in one shot on the list views. The new record list component also allows community users to search on records and update the records easily saving clicks.

Support your Distributor and Reseller with a Self-Help Request Button

If you use Lightning communities, you can now enable your distributors and resellers to log a support case or request help based on this feature. Add the Contact Request Button & Flow component to your community, portal, or Help Center to let members request that customer support call them back. When a user clicks the Request Help button, a popup displays for the user to enter their issue and contact details.

Do More

If you have a lot of opportunities or cases under accounts, now with enhanced related lists, you can view up to 10 columns of your related lists in one view. You can sort on them and do mass actions like add to campaigns. Time saver to make your users jump with joy!

Increase Engagement and Training with New Prompts Feature

This new prompt feature would help admins to quickly deploy guided training to users, monitor if users complete them and increase engagement. You can create prompts on any page, have users navigate the prompts, show and hide to only select users and have them do actions like a trailhead module to complete the training. This feature alone would help to increase engagement with the users and help you to quickly onboard users and train them.

Marketing Cloud

For Manufacturers using Marketing cloud, Summer '19 has some great features which would help you to increase engagement on your email campaigns, send selective messages based on most recent interactions than sending emails.

Einstein engagement frequency which is a new add on with marketing cloud would help your marketing team determine what is the right number of emails to send to your subscribers over a period. It also identifies leads or contacts who are over and under saturated which can be used as suppression list for future email sends.

With integration with google 365, your marketing department can send targeted messages to your distributors and resellers if they visit landing pages on your website and help to increase engagement with your customers.

If you have seasonal products and want to send seasonal pictures on emails based on weather like sunny, winter or foggy days, the newest weather widget on your email content block on email templates would embed the right image based on weather conditions on when your customer receives your email driving more relevance and value on your products.

Development (Do More)

Imagine once your ERP integration is done from SAP or updates on a case, you would like to do some automation to update parent accounts. This is a time sensitive operation which had resulted in time outs before. Now with summer 19, asynchronous change event object available for standard and custom objects, you can create triggers which would fire on a change on the fields and perform time intensive operations.

Here is a sample code on using a trigger.

Search within your reports easily.

With Summer '19, you can now search records within reports and navigate between the records.

In summary, these are my top three features that could could help Manufacturers maximize their Salesforce investment:

1. Search, sort and filtering features on your enhanced related lists would help you to quickly search your ERP records within your account detail pages.
2. Increase adoption by leveraging the prompt feature on new releases and app in guidance feature.
3. For Marketers, the new campaign insights feature would help to generate more insights on your campaigns on the campaign detail page.

Buyan Thyagarajan is a Salesforce MVP specializing in Manufacturing, Higher Education, and Financial services leading the Salesforce Practice for Eigen X. Eigen X is an Impact Salesforce partner providing scalable solutions in Salesforce, Einstein, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Lightning upgrades which achieve business outcomes.