The Salesforce Winter ’25 release brings exciting new features designed to make your sales team’s work easier and more efficient. These updates to the Salesforce Sales Cloud are here to simplify your daily tasks, improve team collaboration, and help you make smarter, data-driven decisions, keeping you always a step ahead in your sales process.
Empowering Outreach with Agentforce for Sales
The new Agentforce SDR (Sales Development Rep) feature revolutionises lead generation by automating top-of-funnel tasks. This AI-driven agent sends personalised initial emails, follows up with leads, and connects interested prospects directly to sales representatives. By leveraging Einstein Generative AI and Einstein Copilot, the SDR agent ensures emails are customised based on lead records, maintaining consistent engagement. Additionally, it schedules meetings using links from the sales rep’s calendar and provides visibility into past and upcoming communications on the activity timeline.
Agentforce also introduces the Sales Coach functionality, enabling sales reps to improve their skills through tailored coaching sessions. By analysing sales pitches and role-play scenarios, the Sales Coach agent provides actionable feedback and outlines steps for improvement. Reps can practice their approaches for various opportunity stages, such as Qualification or Proposal/Negotiation, and receive insights to refine their techniques.
Enhancing Sales Processes with Einstein for Sales
Einstein-powered updates streamline sales activities by automating critical tasks and improving data accessibility. Einstein Activity Capture now supports org-level OAuth 2.0 authentication, ensuring uninterrupted integration with Microsoft Office 365. Resync options for events and emails have been refined for more accurate data synchronisation.
The addition of Sales Copilot Topics brings new efficiency to handling deals, forecasting revenue, and managing customer communications. Features like logging calls, creating to-do tasks, and prioritising opportunities help sales reps focus on what matters most. The Get Product Pricing action allows instant retrieval of pricing and historical data, expediting deal closures. Additionally, personalised daily briefs and the ability to organise records with custom labels make it easier for sales professionals to manage their workload.
Einstein’s Conversation Hub offers a centralised view of conversation data, enabling managers and reps to track metrics, explore topics, and identify trends with the help of AI-powered Sales Signals. The redesigned interface enhances navigation and accessibility for better collaboration.
Simplifying Sales Tasks with Advanced Fundamentals
The enhanced Seller Home consolidates all essential sales data into a single dashboard, providing an overview of accounts, leads, opportunities, and daily goals. Sales reps can now access this feature across all Salesforce apps, allowing them to plan and prioritise effectively.
With the introduction of Account Plans (IdeaExchange Delivered Idea), sales teams can adopt a more strategic approach to account management. This feature facilitates goal setting, performance tracking, and comprehensive account analysis, enabling long-term relationship growth. Enhancements to reporting structures now allow person accounts and contacts to be associated in a hierarchical format, improving visibility and collaboration.
Additionally, updates to LinkedIn Lead Sync (release update) ensure seamless integration with Salesforce by accommodating changes to LinkedIn’s API. This ensures uninterrupted lead management for sales teams that rely on the platform for prospecting.
Discovering and Implementing Features with Sales Cloud Go
Sales Cloud Go centralises feature discovery, making it easy for teams to explore and activate new capabilities directly from Setup. The intuitive interface offers detailed insights into available tools, including guides, tutorials, and resources such as Trailhead badges. This simplifies decision-making for sales leaders and ensures that teams leverage their Salesforce edition to its fullest potential.
Refining Revenue Insights with Revenue Intelligence
Revenue Intelligence brings significant improvements to white space analysis and account management. Using Einstein Account Management, sales teams can identify clusters of opportunities, track product performance over time, and gain insights into evolving white space trends. Risk factors within accounts are now more actionable, as teams can send emails directly from the Account Risk Factors section.
Territory-based security predicates provide an added layer of control for teams managing data access by geographic or functional territories. This ensures data security while maintaining transparency and accessibility for relevant stakeholders.
Improving Forecasting Accuracy with Collaborative Forecasts
The Winter ’25 release enhances forecasting capabilities through Forecast Submissions, allowing sales reps and managers to capture a snapshot of expected revenue during a specific period. Managers can now roll up judgment values across the entire forecast hierarchy, enabling better comparisons and insights.
Opportunity Splits by Territory expands forecasting granularity, allowing teams to allocate and track contributions more precisely. These enhancements ensure that sales forecasts reflect team efforts accurately, facilitating better decision-making.
Integrating Communication with Email and Calendar Tools
Salesforce’s email and calendar integrations have been further streamlined. The Gmail integration, now available in the Chrome side panel, allows users to access Einstein Copilot directly while managing emails and events. This feature reduces manual logging and increases efficiency by providing AI-driven suggestions and actions within the email interface.
For Outlook users, Salesforce continues to maintain integration capabilities, ensuring seamless workflows as Microsoft phases out legacy features. These updates enhance productivity for sales teams working across multiple platforms.
Closing Deals on the Go with the Seller-Focused Mobile App
The Seller-Focused Mobile Experience app brings the power of Salesforce to sales reps’ fingertips, offering on-the-go access to accounts, leads, and opportunities. Users can update records, send emails, and manage tasks directly from their mobile devices. Einstein Copilot further simplifies workflows, allowing reps to retrieve data, summarise records, and generate emails through voice or text commands. This ensures that deals stay on track, even when reps are away from their desks.
Additional Considerations for the Salesforce Winter ’25 Release
By staying informed of these updates and taking proactive steps to integrate the new tools, sales teams can maximise their efficiency and adapt seamlessly to the evolving Sales Cloud ecosystem.
To ensure a seamless transition and optimal use of the updated Sales Cloud, consider the following changes and updates:
- New Order Save Behaviour
Salesforce introduces the New Order Save Behaviour, which automatically evaluates custom application logic (e.g., validation rules, apex triggers, workflows) when updating order products. Enabled by default for new customer orgs starting Winter ’25, this feature simplifies enforcing logic on parent orders, previously requiring additional customisation.
- Refreshed Lightning Experience Design
A modernised interface in Lightning Experience offers improved usability with an updated colour palette, better font and spacing, and enhanced contrast, helping users focus on critical information.
- Retirement of Salesforce for Outlook
Salesforce for Outlook will be fully retired by December 2027. Users are encouraged to transition to next-generation solutions like Outlook Integration and Einstein Activity Capture, which deliver advanced capabilities and are regularly updated.
- Close Date Predictions Retirement
The Close Date Predictions feature of Einstein Deal Insights will be retired in Spring ’25. Sales teams are advised to switch to Einstein Opportunity Scoring, which provides comprehensive insights into the likelihood of deal closures while retaining other Deal Insights functionalities.
- Einstein Automated Contacts Replacement
Einstein Automated Contacts will be retired in February 2025. To maintain robust contact profiling, teams should transition to Automatic Contact Creation, which offers enhanced features.
- Sales Summaries Beta Replacement
The Sales Summaries Beta Program is replaced by the Summarise Record action in Einstein Copilot. This feature provides AI-driven summaries of key records like accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities, streamlining seller workflows.
