Since the Salesforce Spring '10 release is coming out this Friday, February 5th, I decided to take a break from my Lead Qualification in Salesforce.com series and talk a little bit about the features that are coming out.

 Like most of the Salesforce Spring releases, this one isn't too heavy on functionality, but here are 5 things that might help your sales organization.

Read the full release notes for all the new features, and details on how to set these up for your organization.

1. Quotes

By far Salesforce's most talked about sales enhancement in this release, the new quoting tool which was in pilot since the winter release, is now generally available. Salesforce Quotes will allow you to quickly create a quote from an Opportunity, including all of it's products. There is some built-in branding and customization of the quote page, but it is pretty limited in this release. However, it's much easier to create a visualforce page using the standard quote controller than to have to create the whole quotes module yourself.

Quote highlights:

• Generate quote in just a few clicks
• Show history of all quotes generated for an Opportunity
• Sync quote changes with Opportunity
• Discount support
• Preview quote online
• Send as PDF straight from Salesforce

Benefits: Reduce time to close

Watch the demo:

2. Branded Event Invitations

Salesforce has continuously kept companies from wanting to send out event invites from Salesforce. This new release makes it one step better, although they still could use a lot of work.

Benefits: Track events in Salesforce, for better visibility into sales activities and reduced administration time.

Check it out:

3. New User Interface

The new user interface may not impact your sales results, but it will make it a little easier to work in Salesforce. As with the last user interface change, Salesforce has made quite a big change. The new interface is much, much simpler than the last one, and has a more web 2.0 feel.

4. Salesforce Content

Salesforce Content is not a new feature at all, but as they announced at Dreamforce, Salesforce Content is going to be FREE! This is not technically a part of the Spring '10 release, but according to my contacts at Salesforce they will be rolling it in phases, starting after the Spring '10 release. Contact your Account Manager to find out when you'll be getting it. 

Highlights:

• Enhanced Document Search
• Get notified of new documents and changes to documents you're interested in
•  Tag documents and find documents by tags
• Rate and comment on documents to give feedback on how they worked
• Build customized sales presentations online from existing templates
• Send straight from Salesforce
• Track whether or not your prospects are viewing documents, and how often

Benefits: Getting the right information to the right person is one key aspect of moving a sales cycle forward. Often companies spend lots of time and money building the right content just to have it sit unused in an intranet or in old email messages. Salesforce Content gives you the tools to keep it up-to-date and measure who's using it and how it's working, decreasing sales cycles and increasing close rates.

Read More from Salesforce.com

5. New Opportunity Page - Pilot

This feature is only a pilot, so if you're interested, contact your Account Manager ASAP. 

The new Opportunity page is designed to bring the key information to the top of the page and tap into the best practices of other sales reps in your organization.

Highlights:

• An improvement on the Related Opportunities feature, Recommendations allows users to connect with people who have won similar deals
•  Highlights panel - Show the key opportunity fields like Probability and Close date right at the top of the page so no one can miss them. (Maybe this will help remind sales people to update their close dates)
• Drag and drop side tabs - Each rep can now choose which related list they want at the top.

Benefits: Not sure how much this is going to help, but it definitely looks cool.