Top New Features for Admins Inside Salesforce's Winter '25 Release - Ad Victoriam Salesforce Simplified podcast

Top New Features for Admins Inside Salesforce’s Winter ’25 Release

Episode Notes/Resources:

In this episode of Salesforce Simplified we’re talking with Salesforce Ben’s Technical Content Director Christine Marshall about seven of her favorite new features inside Salesforce’s Winter ‘25 Release. 

In addition to her Salesforce Ben duties, Christine is an 11x Salesforce-Certified Evangelist, a Salesforce Admin Group leader, and has been named – several times – as a Salesforce MVP.

Links You Need:

Christine Marshall on LinkedIn

Salesforce Ben

Bristol Salesforce Admin User Group

Salesforce Summer ‘25 Release Notes

Christine Marshall’s Salesforce Ben Articles:

Sales Cloud: Top Salesforce Winter ’25 Features

10 Hottest Salesforce Winter ’25 Features For Admins

Transcription

Speaker A: This is Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Here’s your host, Mike Boyle.

Mike Boyle: So can you feel the chill in the air? Hi everyone, welcome to the Salesforce Simplified podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Mike Boyle with you and it’s wonderful to have our guest, our friend from Salesforce Ben, Christine Marshall with us. Christine is an eleven-time Salesforce-certified evangelist evangelist and she’s Salesforce Ben’s Technical Content Director. Hi Christine, welcome back to the podcast.

Christine Marshall: Hi Mike, thank you for having me. It does feel very strange to be talking about Winter in the middle of a heatwave in the UK, which is a very rare phenomenon.

Mike Boyle: Now come on Christine, I can see even though this is an audio podcast, you got the new Winter coat on, you got the boots, you got the scarf, you got the hat and you got the tea going, you’re all ready to rock and roll here, right?

Christine Marshall: Absolutely. Well, I’m excited to get into the cool, new features of Winter ’25.

Mike Boyle: There you go. So you’ve had a few days now as we record this to kind of dive into it and look it over and kick the tires a bit. Did you detect a focus this time? Was there one specific thing or were we kind of all over the board?

Christine Marshall: Well, this release was jam-packed with new features and enhancements, which was great and I bet you think I’m going to say the theme was Einstein, but I’m not. I actually noticed a big theme around user management, user settings, permissions, and profiles. So there’s been a lot of great stuff for us admins in setup for user management this time.

Mike Boyle: Very good. All right, well, we have seven features that you’d like to call out for this edition of the Salesforce Simplified podcast for the Winter ’25 release. We’re going to start in the Sales Cloud world if you will. The first one is: optimize your strategic planning with account plans and what’s going to be inside that one.

Christine Marshall: There’s only one word for this Mike… Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I love this new feature. This is my favorite feature of the release, so we’re starting off very, very strong. There is a feature called account plans and it’s going to empower sales teams and their leaders to take a more strategic and thoughtful approach to their account planning and growth. It has this wonderful page, that looks a bit like a homepage, but where you can see all the interesting metrics about a particular account and it’s got things like you can create a swot analysis so you can take a look and add an account strengths the weaknesses, the opportunities, any threats you have, capture your customer needs or market dynamics. You can create measurable objectives that you can then record against. So you could say, I want to achieve a revenue of 10 million with this specific account and then be accountable to that. And you can also visualize the key stakeholders with a relationship map. Now I have to tell you, Mike, this was something that was requested of me as an admin many times and I could never achieve anything like this without getting a developer in to code it. So this would have saved me countless hours of stress and also companies of money having to pay a developer. and it looks beautiful.

Mike Boyle: Thus the wow, wow, wow rating from Christine Marshall. Number two on our list for Winter ’25 is: configure record highlights in Lightning App Builder. That one is interesting…

Christine Marshall: It is. And it adds to, again, one of my favorite product families. And that is the dynamic product family. There is a new feature called the Dynamic Highlights panel, and it allows you to dynamically display fields in the highlights panel of your lightning record page. So this is typically where you would see the top six most important fields, like the record name, and maybe the owner, and it means that you can focus your users on the most important fields. You can add up to twelve fields and those fields can then be filtered based on the criteria that you determine. So in the dynamic highlights panel, the relevant fields may be different for different types of users or different record types, for example. So it’s a great way of having a really nice customizable experience for different types of users.

Mike Boyle: We’re going to stay on the subject of record fields here for number three on the list, make record fields stand out with conditional formatting. Tell me about that one.

Christine Marshall: Absolutely. So we’re sticking with this user experience theme to get started. This new feature means you can apply conditional formatting to fields on dynamic forms-enabled pages. What this means is you can customize icons or colors to show, hide, or change based on criteria that you set. So if we give it a bit of context to help you visualize what that means, perhaps you have a lead relationship field on the lead record page with the values of hot, warm, or cold. So this is your relationship to a lead, and therefore how easy will it be to sell them something? Well, using conditional formatting you could create rules that would show a green happy face when the field value is hot, a yellow neutral face when the value is warm, and then a red sad face when the value is weak. So I’m sure you’ll agree, Mike, you could have a lot of fun with this new feature, but please do admin responsibly.

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