16 Amazing Salesforce Features that you Shouldn't Ignore

1. AppExchange --- “empowering business’s functionality across every department & team”

It is an ecosystem of 5000 ready to install Salesforce apps that empowers businesses to rope in the functionality of Salesforce across its customer-facing teams & department.

The Salesforce store has 157 Lightning-ready 3rd party applications available. All the applications hosted on this store are carefully reviewed & integrated to help businesses work finely over the Salesforce platform.

When the businesses move towards the lightning interface, these 157 Lightning-compatible applications can help best with customer success. It is easy to find lightning-compatible applications --- you just have to look for the lightning symbol before the apps.

2. Lightning Application Builder --- “applications without coding part”

The new Salesforce lightning app builder is the best feature one can think of. The Salesforce lightning is a component-based framework that lets you build the application, even if you do not have a hardcore programming experience, with just a few clicks & taps, the feature lets you build the app like a pro. The feature works best for the team members who have to do some customization to pages. 

The lightning app builder is composed of 3 segments - components of lightning exchange - which are developed by different Salesforce partners, pre-build components by Salesforce.org, and its own custom components.

3. Collaborative forecasts --- “predicts future sales performance”

Salesforce collaborative forecasting allows businesses to predict future sales performance and plans future tasks based on real revenue expectations from the sales pipeline. The forecast is an expression of anticipated sales revenue. On the forecasts page rollup table, forecasts are framed by:

• Forecast category
• Time period
• And by the product family (optionally)

4. Marketing Cloud --- “automated & customized email marketing solution”

Salesforce offers highly automated (Artificial intelligence-enabled) and customized email marketing solutions with its marketing cloud feature to help businesses find/explore:

• The new market segments
• Customers who are likely to interact with their products

The tool has free-marketing templates that reduce businesses’ efforts and time to crack business deals.

5. Customer Cloud --- “creates integrated purchasing experience”

Salesforce’s customer cloud is an eCommerce feature that creates an integrated shopping experience for users & enables customers to have seamless order placement.

• Offers a one-touch payment option and does a good deal of work at meeting the mobile shopper’s unique demands and closes them as customers.
• Has a lot of personalization options that are useful for customers who don’t fall into one-size-fits-all categories.

6. Chatter --- “Instant messenger system for teams collaboration”

There are various messaging systems that are easily & cheaply available for business & teams to collaborate, but the only downside with such systems is they operate outside the company’s CRM and are not surely secured.

Salesforce Chatter is an instant messenger system that works like your social media platforms (with features of file attachment, “@ & # use”, threaded conversations) like Twitter or Facebook.

The system memorizes the conversation inside the business’s Salesforce CRM, intertwines with the company’s records, and helps Salesforce users with:

• Seamless collaboration and planning between users, huddle up & virtual meetings for an opportunity or case.
• Carry out the email conversation or on any messenger over CRM.
• Sharing large files easily & quickly.
• Release or publish any information quickly
• Easy following users & records - without having to ask status updates from subordinates.

7. Lightning Voice --- “makes calls directly from sales cloud”

The lightning voice helps businesses to connect with their clients on-the-go. If the business’s phone numbers are synced with the CRM, with lightning voice, businesses can make & receive calls through the cloud also. 

Apart from that, the feature even enables taking notes and maintaining the call logs of the received & dialed calls.

8. Alliance with Microsoft’s Outlook --- “Access lightning platform using Outlook Account”

Salesforce lightning platforms offer a great alliance with Mircosoft’s Outlook, which enfolds business management to a whole new level. Users can sign in to the lightning platform using their outlook account. The enterprises, the teams, and all salesforce users can easily manage tasks without having to run fingers through different programs.

This synchronization has made it easier to keep the logbooks, contacts up to date across all the office 365 suite, Microsoft Exchange account, and Salesforce.

9. Dashboards --- “Summarizes meaningful information quickly”

Salesforce.com can be referred to as a massive database compiled with the company’s crucial to everyday information. The Salesforce feature/tool “Dashboards” aggregates that business information into real-time key business metrics in interesting formats like --- charts, bar diagrams, pie-charts, tables, funnel-charts, leaderboards, graphs, and more. 

Dashboards track any limitless information businesses want to like sales figures, lead, conversions or so, here are the few key business metrics for example: 

• Opportunities that have met or hampered
• New or existing opportunities
• Win rates, top sales on sales rep leaderboards
• Salesforce pipeline condition
• Existing support issues with top accounts
• Time took on an average by a sales rep to close a case
• Cases which are prone to not hitting Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

10. Lightning Snap-Ins --- “brings on-the-go business-client coordination”

Snaps-ins is one of the most useful Salesforce features by cloud lightning service. The features let businesses to add service functionality to the apps or webpages. No matter where businesses are, they can snap in service channels into their native business app to develop a more connected and close-knit customer experience. 

The features help users connect with businesses anytime from any place they want to and lets apps and websites convert into a personalized mobile center for customers.

11. Email Templates --- “Which are centric to brand’s policy”

This feature is another one of Salesforce essentials features that employees in the Sales & customer service role can’t thank enough. With this Salesforce feature, businesses can use pre-scripted email templates with a business logo on it, and send them to multiple customers, without having to compose each message manually (which sometimes is time taking and results in a lot of typing errors). 

Another great benefit of sending emails through pre-scripted templates (than any other channel) is that businesses can easily identify:-

• When was the email opened?
• How many times?

12. Salesforce Touch --- “Updates Salesforce information from anywhere”

Salesforce touch (touch.Salesforce.com), an extended version of Salesforce desktop is an interface made in HTML-- made to let businesses have access to information or records anywhere outside the desk.

The feature lets the users:

• Update records in real-time, even outside the office desk at a quick touch over palmtop devices as mobiles or tablets.
• Sales reps can crosscheck for any open support cases over their phones before approaching a client’s office.
• Reps can update their opportunities after the meeting or run a dashboard anywhere outside the office premises.

13. Salesforce Steelbrick --- “apps for high-growth Salesforce customers”

Steelbrick is one of the Salesforce essentials features that provide easily manageable CPQ - Configure-Price-Quote apps for high-growth Salesforce customers. 

CPQ software/app lets users create authentic & professional looking sales quotes easily without any scope of errors, inefficiencies, or any setbacks.

CPQ lets Sales organizations:

• Get more Sales faster
• Helps Sales rep in doing their jobs more efficiently
• Bypass the roadblocks or any type of error during contracts, quotes, opportunities
• Create more accurate proposals & quotes
• Close more deals and turn towards more productivity
• Expands deal sizes by aiding guidance on cross-sells & up-sells
• Speeds up the sales cycle and saves on a lot of reps time & efforts

14. Lightning Salesforce Community --- “feature-packed community empowering businesses”

This lightning Salesforce community was made to empower businesses in boosting their business-client engagement. It comes with a lot of new & workable client-engagement opportunities, UX for creating a new level of personalization --- to help businesses discover new-level of client experience & success. It also offers multifarious built-in solutions to help businesses resolve their frequent grievances.

15. Workflows --- “automates internal processes/procedures”

Though it is not possible to completely automate the marketing efforts, with if/then rules of the Salesforce Workflow feature, it is quite possible to automate certain internal processes or procedures.

With this feature, the user can set an action for fulfilling automatically, when a certain condition (as decided) is duly met.

For instance - a workflow rule could be made to alert management when a possibility of winning an opportunity reaches a certain value (as decided).

16. Email syncing --- “syncs well with email platforms”

To ensure that every email exchange or thread stays inside the CRM, the Salesforce email syncing feature (one of the much-needed Salesforce inbox features) came into play. The feature allows the users to “sync” emails with the CRM, without letting the users manually cut and paste the information or conversation thread.

This feature supports MS Outlook and even Gmail & Mac Mail with the help of other third-party solutions.

Once the email sync plugin is installed:

• A button will appear in the email client that will allow the email received on the outlook or Gmail to be sent or pushed to the Salesforce CRM. 
• Or can work by simply sending an outbound email and keeping the copy in Salesforce.

Salesforce with its new feature rollout is capable of doing millions of things for businesses. These are just a few Salesforce features inclusive of Salesforce essentials features to Salesforce inbox features to Salesforce new features and a lot more. 

There are a lot of features & capabilities that Salesforce has to offer to businesses, and this is the reason businesses are looking for Salesforce professionals to help integrate those features but with more customized solutions according to their business systems.