Sales productivity is the #1 challenge for more than 60 percent of B2B organizations (Bridge Group). How can sales managers tackle this challenge? They can make the tasks all sales reps perform more efficient, including calendar management and account updates. No matter what sales reps sell, everyone is using a calendar and updating customer information.

With these daily tasks in mind, Salesforce is excited to announce new productivity enhancements in Sales Cloud Lightning that salespeople will love—giving them a simple way to manage their calendars and contacts while also reducing manual data entry.

Easily Manage Your Day with New Calendar All

Think about your average day. If you’re a salesperson, odds are you have a full plate of meetings and you check your calendar multiple times before you even leave the house. You may have a few different calendars—one for events, another for customer meetings and yet another for personal appointments. You track your open projects and campaigns on a separate spreadsheet or in a siloed system. You dream of having a consolidated calendar that lets you keep track of all your important events and gives you insight into customer activity all in one place, on one CRM platform.

Salesforce is making this dream come true and boosting productivity with Calendar All, which allows you to overlay and view multiple calendars at the same time. Now, no matter where you manage all of your appointments, you will have one view of your calendar in Salesforce, helping you better manage your day.

This GIF shows a single view of multiple calendars 

Minimize Duplicates and Save Time by Linking a Contact to Multiple Accounts

Because Salesforce wants to help you sell faster, we’re announcing the ability to link a contact to multiple accounts. This is one of the most requested features by our customers. It enables you to sell more efficiently by minimizing duplicate records while cutting down on the time it takes to find the right contact info.

For example, say that you're a pharmaceutical sales rep calling a doctor. The doctor works at two different hospitals and a clinic. Rather than having three separate records for the doctor with each different location, now there is a single record for the doctor that lists all three of her office locations. It's never been easier to keep all of your contact records updated and accurate, all from one place.

This picture shows a contact and his relationship to multiple accounts 

Quickly Add New Customer Contacts with New Account Autofill

What else do sales people dream of? Having more time in their day is definitely at the top of their wish list. With the new Account Autofill in Sales Cloud Lightning, salespeople can reduce time spent typing data into Account records and can now create new accounts faster than ever. When reps start typing a company in the Account Name field, Salesforce Account Autofill will provide suggestions based on Data.com data.

After a rep selects a company from the list, Salesforce Account Autofill will also fill in several other fields with data when available, including website, phone, and billing address. Typing in two characters could save you from typing in over 100 characters. This means less time entering data—what’s not to love?

With productivity enhancements in Sales Cloud Lightning, we’re continuing to make dreams come true for salespeople by eliminating manual tasks so that they can focus on the work that matters—putting customers at the center of everything they do.  

Pricing & Availability

• Contacts to Multiple Accounts (also available in Classic) and Account Autofill are expected to be generally available in June 2016 at no added cost for all Sales Cloud Lightning users.

• Calendar All is expected to be generally available in June 2016 at no added cost for Sales Cloud Lightning users with Lightning Enterprise Edition and above.

• Sales Cloud Lightning is generally available now and editions start at $75 per user, per month.