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.
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.
Mike Boyle: We’re going to hang out in the fields here for number four on the list with Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben: add calculated fields to your lightning reports with Einstein generative AI. A mouthful, but sounds interesting.
Christine Marshall: Another new Einstein feature for us admin. So it’s Einstein report formula generation. That’s what the feature is called. Now we already have a couple of features like this. We have Einstein for formulas being one of them. I think there’s also an Einstein for flow and in layperson’s terms, what this means is that if you want to create a summary formula or a row-level formula in your reports, you can use Einstein to do so. So you would simply describe your calculation in layperson terms and Einstein will then suggest a formula for you. Now that’s fabulous because it’s going to help you create formulas that aren’t the easiest. But I have to say, Mike, I have some pretty mixed feelings about these AI features. I know they’re designed to help admins and it’s great if you’re just getting started, but I worry that people become too reliant on getting AI to do things and then you never learn how to do it yourself.
Mike Boyle: Good point. Number five on our list of things that Christine Marshall from Salesforce Ben is calling out for the Winter ’25 release is: make inline edits with the enhanced user list view. I kind of snuck in there a little bit to look at this one. This one really stuck out to me.
Christine Marshall: It brings the power of list views to the user, management experience, which is lovely. So when you’re in setup and you’re looking at your users and perhaps you want to make some changes, you can now do it from a single list view. And just like any other list view in Salesforce, you can view, sort, filter, and also modify records without needing to navigate away from the user list view.
Mike Boyle: Rolling along here into number six already get insight into how a user’s permissions are granted. Tell me about that one.
Christine Marshall: So, security, user access, permissions profiles, these have been hot topics for a little while. Cheryl Feldman and her amazing team at Salesforce are continuing to deliver new features to help us admins work out exactly how people have access to things. So there’s this button now called access granted by and it will bring up a pop-up where you can see any permission sets, permission set groups, or the profile that’s granting access to a user. This is amazing because it means no more endless searching to try and figure out why somebody has access to something.
Mike Boyle: And finally on our list is: see how object access is granted in object manager. Tell us about that one.
Christine Marshall: So yet another way to see how people are getting access to things, but this time specifically per, object. So perhaps you go to the account object in setup or the lead object in setup and you can now see what’s granting access to that particular object, whether that be permission sets, permission set groups, or profiles. So it will not only show you what’s granting access but also exactly what level of access they are granting.
Mike Boyle: You’ve obviously been having fun and still a lot more to digest too, from what I understand.
Christine Marshall: Loads, loads of features. We’ve done bumper editions this time in terms of the release notes for admins, developers, and for flows specifically. Also for Sales and Service Cloud specifically this time as well to help people make the most out of the releases.
Mike Boyle: Yeah, and I really want to encourage folks to visit salesforceben.com because there’s a ton of information on there that you should be digesting every day anyway. But specifically for the Salesforce Winter ’25 release, Lucy Mazalon’s writing about marketing cloud. Mario Domingo is writing about Service Cloud. You mentioned flow. Tim Cumbridge is writing about that for developers. Andrew, Cook’s got some stuff up there. Christine has a couple of articles up there that you should be checking out, which I will be putting links to in this show’s, episode. Notes one specifically about sales cloud and its top features and the ten hottest Salesforce Winter ’25 features for admins all up there on SalesforceBen.com… Christine Marshall, thanks so much for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure to have you here. You know, as we were saying, kind of before we started this recording, we get to chat three times a year and it just always comes so quickly. And I’m going to be looking forward to talking about the Spring ’25 release, which we will do in January 2025, which will be here right around the corner. Christine, thank you so much.
Christine Marshall: Thank you, Mike.
Mike Boyle: To the audience, if this is your first time checking out this podcast, know that Christine and I are here three times a year, spring, Winter, and Summer, for the Salesforce releases. And we hope you enjoy them. We have other podcasts throughout the year as well. And by the way, I should mention Salesforce Ben just started a podcast, right, Christine?
Christine Marshall: That is true. And I think there are two episodes out so far at the time of recording.
Mike Boyle: Yeah. And so you know, please do check that out. Salesforce Ben’s Ben McCarthy is doing those and doing a real fine job with him as well. Anyway, if you have the opportunity to find the Salesforce Ben podcast and the Ad Victoriam Salesforce Simplified podcast on Apple and Spotify, think about giving us a five-star star review if you think we earned it. And also subscribe to both of the podcasts right there on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get a podcast. I am Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thanks for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.
Speaker A: You’ve been listening to Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.
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