This week, we’ve heard — and talked — a lot about the new Salesforce Lightning Experience. In today’s Sales Cloud keynote, we took a deeper dive into its new functionality.

The driving force behind the development of Lightning Experience will be very familiar to most readers: to increase sales rep productivity and to improve the customer experience. For a salesperson, the new user interface offers:

1. A modern, easy-to-use design
2. Automation of tasks in Salesforce
3. In-line intelligence and analytics to help end users make smarter, data-driven decisions

As demoed yesterday in Marc Benioff’s keynote, Lightning Experience is entirely customizable. Companies can modify dashboards and drag-and-drop components from the Lightning App Builder to create a platform interface that works best for them — no coding required. A more tailored Sales Cloud instance makes selling easier, creating a better employee and customer experience.

Here are some additional highlights of the new Lightning Experience.

Salesforce Wave Analytics App

This year’s The State of Salesforce Report found that 81% of companies cited increasing the use of predictive analytics as important to their sales strategies in the coming year. In-line intelligence and analytics are key to the Assistant and Sales Path functions, which were demoed in today’s keynote. Both monitor past activity (for example, the last time a salesperson called or emailed a lead) and use proactive data intelligence to prompt the next action. This real-time guidance will help reps sell better and faster.

Furthermore, year-over-year data is now incorporated into your dashboard, showcasing forecast, pipeline coverage, average win rate, and revenue numbers, and lets you compare past and current performances.

For example, if a sales manager notices that this week’s pipeline numbers are down compared to last week's, he can view a graph of pipeline moving in and out, track the decreased numbers down to the region, find the opportunity manager, and encourage him to work on the account and bring pipeline numbers back up.

Salesforce Engage

Called “the olive branch between Marketing and Sales,” Salesforce Engage allows salespeople to run their own email campaigns within Sales Cloud. Sales can choose a pre-approved, pre-loaded email from Marketing that they can personalize and send to their leads. Within Sales Cloud, they can directly monitor their email campaign to see who took what action (opened, clicked-through, downloaded an asset) so they can immediately follow up, garnering a higher response rate and higher ROI. Traditionally, only marketers have had access to email campaign data, but now salespeople can more closely track their leads and close more sales.

SalesforceIQ

This feature combines CRM and email on a mobile device. With the tap of a finger, a salesperson can create a new contact or opportunity from their email data and move it directly into Salesforce. From there, they can hop right into the Salesforce app on their phone and continue working on the new lead. The State of Salesforce Report found that 61% of salespeople want the Sales Cloud mobile experience to be easier — SalesforceIQ is definitely a step in the right direction.

To learn more about how the best companies, and the best salespeople, are using Salesforce, download The State of Salesforce Report or register for our webcast to hear six Bluewolf experts discuss key trends from the report.