Are you thinking about Salesforce Lightning all wrong?

You probably feel like you have done the hard bit. You took the decision to implement Salesforce as your CRM system. You got the platform setup and working for you. You trained your users. You’re seeing the fruits of your labour in results...Then along comes Salesforce Lightning, the biggest overhaul of user experience, development approach and ecosystem that Salesforce has ever released. Now what?

When we begin talking to customers about migration of their Salesforce Classic implementation to Lightning, we see some common reactions as a starting point:

“A new user interface? That sounds fantastic! But I might have a hard time committing the budget…”

“Oh yeah, I’ve seen that…you just flick a switch, right?”

“I’ve heard it’s a bit of a development hurdle if you have had Salesforce for a while and have lots of visualforce...”

“Hmmm…we’ve got other things to sort out in our system before we look at that!”

If you have a similar reaction then the good news is you’re thinking about Lightning Migration all wrong! Why is this good news? We’ll get into that…first let’s recap on what Lightning offers:

 Lightning Experience

• Provides an intuitive, modern experience to drive productivity on every device
  

 Lightning Builder

• For building, customising and deploying apps faster than ever, with no code required

 Lightning Ecosystem

• Allows you to discover and use components from a vibrant ecosystem

This paints an exciting future. When you dig deeper, you find that - compared with Salesforce Classic - Lightning is more robust, scaleable, more marketable and more innovative. All of the offering and features are truly beneficial to your business, however, there is another huge benefit that goes relatively unsung:

The approach you take to the Lightning Migration process itself can be transformative in evolving your CRM and your organisation’s engagement with it.

By asking yourself the right questions and challenging the way you currently work, you will start to benefit before you’ve even thought about how Lightning will fit. The best results come from organisations that understand the change they want to make and use Lightning as part of that journey, rather than expecting the technology to do it all for them. And by bringing your users on the journey with you, you’ll have engaged and energised users before they’ve even clicked a button.

The Emprisia approach to Lightning Migration follows a process that ensures successful delivery, adoption and focus on achieving your aims. You can expect a bespoke plan of services, concentrated around:

• Establishing objectives and ROI criteria & measures
  
• Looking at user journeys to identify & correct pain points
• Eliminating adoption weak spots
  
• Mapping current processes onto industry best practice
• Closing gaps in user experience best practice
  
• Defining a successful and long-lasting roll out and adoption strategy

This bespoke plan can be customised to your own needs; becoming your own path to CRM evolution, your own roadmap to Lightning Migration. It has room to be sensitive to your aspirations in terms of immediate ‘issues’ you might want to deal with or your focus on a wider digital strategy for your organisation. By following this path, by migrating to Lightning, there is the opportunity to streamline processes, fix issues, adjust user perceptions, secure buy-in from executives and re-align your organisation’s overall engagement with CRM. And it’s measurable too. In all of this, we gear the approach towards three factors that drive business value:

• Enhanced Productivity
  
• Increased Adoption & Collaboration
  
• IT Productivity & Cost Savings
  

The good news is that rather than thinking of “budget for a new user interface”, you can think of “budget to re-engage the users and deliver an evolution in our CRM that further drives business value”. Rather than “just flicking a switch” think of “a robust process which delivers value in itself whilst driving our implementation forward”. Not a “development hurdle” but “an opportunity to streamline and build in scalablility”. Rather than seeing “other things to sort out” it's “a wide-reaching opportunity to evaluate, improve and optimise our CRM”.

By getting on this path you can make the switch to Lightning with the full confidence of being able to roll out and realise the benefits, for yourself, your users and your organisation.