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RELEASE SUMMARY
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A handful of new innovative features have been made available with this release, including:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Steps – Leverage Sales Navigator within your Plays.
- New Insights Panel – Gain additional insight into your prospects.
- New Inbound Routing Options – Route inbound calls by day of week/time of day.
- Call Recording API – Share your call recordings with approved third-parties.
- Merge Fields in Cue Cards – Merge in relevant data so reps know what to say.
- Email Template Syncing – Easier centralized management of email templates.
- New Record Pages – Helps speed up Playbooks for reps with lots of records.
- Caller-ID Permissions – Control what options reps have for caller-id.
- Call Log Customization – Control the order of all fields on the call log.
- Neural Sorting – Sort tasks by who is most contactable, most likely to close, etc.
A handful of other product improvements have been made.
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RELEASE DETAILS
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LinkedIn Sales Navigator Play Steps
Being able to leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator to research and reach out to prospects is a critical tool for most sales reps. With this update, users who create Plays can add in LinkedIn Navigator Play steps.
For example, as part of a Play you may want a rep to send a prospect a LinkedIn InMail message. A few days after sending the LinkedIn InMail message, you want the rep to try to connect with the prospect on LinkedIn. This can now be accomplished directly from within Playbooks, eliminating the need to leave Playbooks to engage prospects in other methods.
All LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps are automatically logged to your CRM for historical tracking. Each Sales Navigator step is done manually by reps within the Playbooks extension – there are no automated Sales Navigator steps.
Implementation Details:
- To begin using this feature, a user who can create Plays must add a Connect with Sales Navigator or Message with Sales Navigator step to a Play.
- This feature requires a customer have the company version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
- Users can skip LinkedIn Sales Navigator steps if a prospect does not have a LinkedIn profile – just like they can skip other tasks in Plays.
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Improved Insights Panel
A new version of the Playbooks Insight Panel has been released. The refreshed Insights panel helps organize data better so that reps can more easily find the critical information they need to sell better.
Implementation Details:
- The new Insights page is automatically applied. No configuration is required to begin using this feature.
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Route Inbound Calls by Time of Day / Day of Week
Playbooks enables organizations to craft the experience inbound callers have when they return rep calls or call into generic inbound numbers. To help ensure a seamless inbound caller experience, organizations can now leverage new Time of Day and Day of Week routing options.
Using these new routing options, administrators can create Inbound Call Paths that route inbound calls differently based on the day of the week or time of day. For example, if a company is closed on weekends then the Call Path will route inbound calls on the weekend directly to an answering service.
Implementation Details:
- Administrators must manually add the new Time of Day and Day of Week routing options to Call Paths for this feature to start routing calls differently.
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Call Recording API
The Playbooks Call Recording API is designed for organizations or third-party applications to be able to download call recordings from calls made through the Playbooks product.
Detailed documentation around how to configure and use the API is available here.
Implementation Details:
- To begin using this feature, an organization must generate a call recording key and share that with the desired third party.
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Merge Fields in Cue Cards
Saying the right thing while on a call can make the difference between a successful call or a failure. With this update users and managers that create Plays can now add merge fields to the cue cards.
This means that cue cards can now dynamically put in the prospects name, company name, or other information. For example:
“Hi {{First.Name}} I am calling to talk about…”
Implementation Details:
- Adding merge fields to cue cards is easy – simply edit the cue card and click the merge field button then select the desired merge field.
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Email Template Syncing
Having a centralized email template library with rich content is an important arrow in any sales rep’s quiver. Previous to this update, if a manager changed an email template that updated version of the template was not applied to Play steps that used that template – resulting in email templates not getting automatically updated.
With this update anytime a template is altered in the template library all Play steps that use that template will automatically get the template update applied.
To benefit from this improved functionality, be sure to alter email templates directly from the email template tag. If an email is altered within the Play manager it will not benefit from future email template updates.
Implementation Details:
- This feature is automatically applied, no configuration is required.
- Templates already assigned to a Play, but were altered within the Play previously, will not receive automatic updates.
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New Record Pages
To better support large quantities of records, Playbooks now displays People and Accounts on pages. Each page within the People or Accounts page displays 50 people/accounts. To move from one page to the next simply click the next navigation arrows.
When applying mass updates on the People page, reps will have the choice of applying the changes to the current page of fifty records, or to 250 records at a time.
Implementation Details:
- No configuration is required to start using this feature.
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Caller-ID Permissions
Depending on your individual company policies, you may need to restrict which caller-ID options are available to an end user. For example, you may want to make sure that all outbound calls a rep makes display a specific number and the rep is unable to change that number. Or, you may have a team that should never use LocalPresence.
New Caller-ID Permissions enable administrators to control what caller-id options are available to reps. A new group of permissions have been created for each of the existing caller-ID options.
New Team Default Caller-ID:
Organizations can now specify a team default setting for caller-IDs for reps. This allows administrators to say “When someone is added to this team, the default caller-ID for them should be LocalPresence” or “should be this custom number” The team default can be found by editing a team within the Playbooks Manager App under “Caller Id Default”.
Implementation Details:
- On release, all users will continue to have permission for all caller-id options. Administrators will need to toggle permissions before any caller-id options disappear.
- On release, all users will retain their existing caller-id setting. For example, if a rep was set to LocalPresence then it will continue to be LocalPresence upon release.
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New Call Log Customization Options
To enable each organization to better customize the Call Log screen to their particular business needs, a handful of improvements have been made to the Call Log editor:
- The “Remarks” field has been renamed to Subject and no longer expands when clicked. This change has been made due to character limits in the subject field within most CRMs.
- If an organization chooses to use the standard “Description” field on the Call Log, when that field is clicked, it will now expand allowing the rep to take more detailed notes around the call.
- Administrators can now arrange all fields on the Call Log, including the subject and call disposition fields. For example, if an organization wants to put a custom field at the top or bottom of all other fields in the Call Log that is now possible.
Implementation Details:
- Administrators will need to go and alter existing Call Disposition screens to make adjustments to the user experience as desired.
- Remarks will be changing to Subject and no longer expands by default.
- To control where the standard fields are displayed, administrators will need to create a new call disposition set. Editing existing dispositions sets do not have the ability to edit the standard field location.
- Changes to the call dispositions are applied when a user signs in to Playbooks. If changes are made in the middle of the day a user will not see the changes until they sign out and back in.
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New Task Sorting
Users can now sort their list of tasks by two new additional Neural sorting options.
Contactability Sorting: Sorts the list of due tasks based on how contactable the prospect is compared to other prospects with due tasks.
Marginal Value: Sorts the tasks by the estimated return of investment on your efforts.
You can find the new Neural sorting options at the bottom of the standard sorting options.
Implementation Details:
- This feature only applies to customers using the Accelerate version of Playbooks.
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Other Product Updates
- Updated the VidYard integration to support video tracking.
- Reps can now minimize the ad-hoc dialing screen while on a call.
- Reps can now use the notes feature on accounts within Playbooks.
- The export user list now includes assigned direct inbound numbers.
- A new inbound routing option for “Path Bridge” has been added, that enables managers to send calls from one Call Path to another.
- Removed Owler Daily Email functionality.
- Resolved an issue where tasks would sometimes log to the wrong record.
- Resolved an issue around list view imports that would sometimes fail.
- Resolved an issue that caused a second scroll bar to appear in the task list.
- Resolved an issue where the connect to CRM authentication window wouldn’t close after a successful connection.
