The up next widget on records

What it does

The up next widget is a panel on a record form showing the current action a seller owes on that record, the one after it, and the ones already done. It's how the accelerator's next-action logic reaches sellers who are working inside a record rather than down the work list.

Key facts

Three sections: current activity (actionable), upcoming activity (read-only, a preview of what follows), and completed or skipped items behind Show completed.
Actions on the current item are Mark complete, Skip, Assign, View suggestions and Preview sequence. Preview sequence shows the whole step sequence rather than just the next hop.
Marking complete closes the activity and writes it to the record timeline, so the widget and the timeline stay consistent without extra configuration.
Steps are assigned to the record owner by default. If ownership changes mid-sequence, the currently active step stays with the previous owner and only subsequent steps go to the new owner.
Assign can target a user or a team, which is the escape hatch when a step lands on the wrong person.
Manually created activities — emails, phone calls, tasks, appointments — appear in the widget alongside sequence steps and are surfaced one at a time, ordered by due date.
The widget ships on the out-of-the-box lead and opportunity forms, including the Sales Insight forms. Anywhere else you place it yourself.
In the form designer the component is listed as Sequence (Up next) under Display. You add a column as a placeholder first, drop the component into it, then save and publish.
Adding it is supported on managed forms and in Unified Interface apps only.
The admin entry point for choosing which forms carry it is Sales Insights settings > Sales accelerator > Set up > Choose content and layout, which links straight out to the form designer.

When to use / skip

Put it on any form a seller opens during a sequence-driven motion. The work list is fine for a seller who works top-down, but plenty of sellers navigate from an email, a dashboard or a search, and land on the record cold. Without the widget, those sellers have no idea a sequence is running.

The case for adding it to accounts and contacts depends on whether sequences actually run there. If the client's cadences are lead-only, an empty widget on the account form is just wasted vertical space and an invitation to ask what it's for.

Skip it entirely on forms used by non-sales roles — service agents, finance, marketing operations. They don't own the steps, they can't complete them meaningfully, and giving them a Mark complete button is asking for the sequence to be corrupted by someone who was only checking an address.

Configuration decisions

Which forms get the widget, per record type, and whether that includes custom tables in the accelerator's scope.
Where on the form it sits. A right-hand column keeps it visible; burying it on a second tab means sellers never see it and the whole thing fails quietly.
Whether sellers can assign steps to other users and teams, or whether reassignment goes through a manager. This is a process decision more than a technical one.
Whether manual activities are expected to flow through the widget at all, or whether the client treats it as sequence-only and uses the timeline for everything else.
What the seller does at the end of a sequence — the widget goes quiet, and something has to tell them the record is now theirs to manage normally.

Gotchas

The step-ownership rule on reassignment catches everyone. Hand a lead to a colleague and the live step is still sitting in your work list, not theirs. Reassign the step as well as the record.
Managed forms only. If the client's lead form was built in an unmanaged solution in the target environment — which happens more often than anyone admits — you cannot add the widget until that's untangled.
Publishing the form is a separate step from saving it. A widget that "didn't appear" is usually an unpublished form.
Upcoming activity is read-only by design. Sellers try to work ahead from it and conclude the panel is broken.
Skip is not undo. A skipped step advances the sequence and doesn't come back, and it looks almost identical to Snooze in the work list.
The widget needs both the accelerator enabled and the seller's licence and role in place. A blank panel gives no clue which of the three is missing.

Consultant notes

Demo the record-first path, not just the work list. Managers are the ones who arrive at records sideways, and it's the demo that convinces them the accelerator isn't only an SDR tool.
Agree form placement with sellers before you build it. This is one of the rare bits of configuration where a five-minute conversation prevents a change request.
Check the widget on every form variant in scope, including any role-specific or business-process-specific forms. Clients rarely mention they have four lead forms.
Cover the reassignment behaviour explicitly in training and in the admin handover — it's the single most reported "bug" that isn't one.
Before go-live, walk one record end to end through a real sequence with the widget open, so someone has actually seen the completed state.

Worth revisiting if step reassignment on record ownership change gets fixed, or if unmanaged form support arrives.