Do you have the new UI? That is the question that is being asked internally by Salesforce.com, and every other organization that is using the World’s Number 1 Customer Success Platform. The new UI in question is Salesforce Lightning.
Salesforce Lightning is a completely redesigned User Interface (UI) that has been built on top of and in addition to the classic Salesforce UI. It gives Salesforce a completely redefined look and feel.
As Salesforce defines the new Interface:
“Sales Cloud has been rebuilt from the ground up with Lightning Experience and more than 25 new innovations to set a new standard for CRM”.
Lightning is being pushed this week with the Salesforce.com Winter Release and it’s going to be a game-changer with the way you interact with your business. This is literally Salesforce’s biggest release ever!
Lightning allows you to make radical changes to page layouts, real-time instantaneous changes to sales pipelines, visual views of forecasting including drag and drop opportunity adjustments, timing and dollar amounts as well as drag and drop changes to reports and dashboards.
What’s New?
Lightning Experience: Here users receive a consumer-like experience across every device. Relevant information is surfaced for each screen, streamlining processes and workflows.
Lightning Design System: Here the platform provides principles for building apps with the Salesforce design language that support multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems.
Lightning App Builder: With this tool, any user can now start to build apps using the drag-and-drop visual interface of Lightning Components.
Key Features of the Lightning Experience
Here are a few of the top features of Salesforce Lightning:
Customizable Dashboards: Dashboards are available with more than three columns — in fact; you can have up to nine. There is now the ability to have much more complex, dynamic, and attractive-looking dashboards.
Opportunity Board: This new feature gives you the complete picture across all of your deals. You can drag-and-drop deals from stage to stage like digital sticky notes, or the Project Management software, Trello.
Activity Feed: Sales reps want to know two things, in an account – what just happened and what they need to do next. The Activity Feed does exactly that.
Contextual Hovers: You can now see everything going on with a customer without going to different pages or records within the platform.
This list is just a small sample. There are more than 50 re-imagined Sales Cloud pages and 25 completely new features launching with this release. Again, this is Salesforce’s most ambitious release ever!
What to do Now
You have control over the roll-out strategy for your business, as your admins can enable Lightning Experience access at the user, profile and organization level.
We recommend that your teams evaluate how Lightning works for your organization and the business processes you manage with Salesforce and you may also want to evaluate each AppExchange app you use and how it is evolving to Lightning.
You can also work with a Salesforce Implementation Partner like us and receive training and best practices on how your organization can benefit from this incredible change to the platform.
As a Salesforce Implementation Partner, we work with businesses all around North America to Implement Salesforce for the first time, run programs to re-optimize the platform, add Salesforce modules, integrate Salesforce with other business applications, and also provide training and best practices.
