Struck by Lightning: Part 1

(this is a post from Alli about a project she's been working on mostly without Michelle!)

After coming back from Dreamforce this year, it was impossible to not feel excitement over the newly released Lightning Experience. We all recognize that Lightning is the future for Salesforce, and are eager to get on board, even at this early stage when it’s specifically geared towards sales teams and their pipelines. I was asked to don my “admin” hat and roll it out to our sales team.

astro and i had matching halloween costumes

We've begun the process of rolling out Lightning Experience to our sales team, with a plan to be live in early Q1 -- so even though we're still in the middle of this project, I have some thoughts about what we've lightning-experienced so far.

Everything Has Changed

First, this is the first time in 10 years of working with SF that there's been something new and different enough that I've had to stop and actually learn it from scratch. Lightning isn't just an iteration/improvement on an old thing, there are some fundamental differences in how things work and what's even possible, and that means that I've had to learn it by reading and practicing, not just diving in. (Even the "new" Report Builder in Winter '11 was pretty easy to understand if you had any experience with the old Report Wizard, for example.) So, after I made it through all of the relevant Trailhead lessons, I created a new Sandbox to get into the nitty gritty of it all. Turning “on” Lightning Experience is easy, but understanding what that actually means is the challenge.

Following the Trail

Also, this is the biggest change we've ever really undertaken in our own Salesforce account that hasn't been entirely invented by our own team. We build all sort of custom objects and complex workflows or processes, and things like that, but for those projects, I'm one of our primary Salesforce Admins, so I'm always involved in the development/creation of the new thing -- it's not something external that I've had to learn and become an expert about, because I've usually invented it, so I've been the expert all along! Lightning has required a whole new approach to getting up to speed. Lucky for me, Trailhead and the community were already abuzz with tips and project plans for me to borrow from.

Reviewing Business Processes

And lastly, I realized as we began the project that it's been a while since we last evaluated the business processes in the sales team. Even before getting into LE directly, it's been interesting and valuable to talk to a sales user and learn about the day-to-day tasks (and find out some of the annoying things that we probably could have improved ages ago!). For example, the Opportunity page layout that's assigned to the Sales Team profile has never been customized specifically for them -- and as a result, nearly ¾ of the page real estate is taken up by fields that would never be filled in until the Opportunity is long-since Closed Won. Even if we weren’t going to migrate them to LE, this is something we could easily fix, but only by taking the time to have that discovery conversation.

We're still right in the middle of things -- here's the project plan Trello board as it stands today:

"done" is always the best column

I'll post more updates as we move further along! Next time, I'll talk about some of the most surprising things I've discovered about Lightning Experience and how it's going to change our processes.

Three Reasons You Need the Salesforce1 App on Your Phone

With the Salesforce1 app, you can have access to all of your Salesforce/PatronManager data no matter where you go. For a while, we sort of forgot to emphatically recommend it to our clients, because there are a few PatronManager-specific tasks that you can't really use it for right now -- we haven't yet built a way to sell tickets or process credit card donations from within that app, so we didn't really go out of our way to promote all its other amazing features. But we should! Because it's great! So here's our excited recommendation.

Here are 3 things you can do from SF1 on your phone.

1. Look up people or companies that you encounter out in the world.

Say you're at another organization's gala, and you're introduced to a few donors that are being honored that evening. You can instantly and discreetly search your own PatronManager account for those names, to see if you also have some kind of relationship with these people and know when your last interaction was. (We do a similar thing all the time at conferences, looking up potential clients and prospects that we meet casually during lunch or in a session!) It's so helpful to be able to quickly check on the context and history of your organization's relationship with someone.

of course Peggy Olson is a VIP

2. Ask your colleagues for help, or delegate responsibilities.    

Say you run into a patron at a volunteer event and she asks for your help -- she has tickets to Thursday night's show and she can't make it and would like to switch to next Friday's. You're going to accommodate her request and waive the exchange fee. You COULD log in to PatronManager/Salesforce in your phone's browser and zoom in to painstakingly process the exchange yourself -- OR, you can simply navigate to the Ticket Order record within SF1 and Chatter at your colleague, the box office rep who's working today, and ask her to process the exchange right away instead. (Or in a similar vein, say you're expecting a package to be picked up from the office, but you're not going to be in that day! When you receive a notification of the scheduled pickup time, just Chatter at your colleagues to let them know to expect the visitor.)

teamwork, dream work, etc.

3. Get notifications about important business goals.

Say you're the development director and you're running a big annual fund campaign over the summer, with a bunch of benchmark goals through the campaign. Create a report that shows cumulative giving so far, and then "subscribe" to the report and have it send you notifications as you meet each goal. (Or if you're a sales manager with reps working toward a quarterly quota, subscribe to a report of the whole team's Closed Won opportunities so you can properly celebrate when the goal is met.)

this is some pretty powerful stuff!

We all wish that we didn’t have to constantly be “at work” when we’re on the go, but let’s face it -- we all are. The Salesforce1 app lets you be more productive and produce a much higher quality of patron interaction than you would otherwise be able to do. Here's a post from PatronTech CEO Gene Carr about working on the go.

And now that you're convinced, here's a post from our friend Christian Carter with some more specifics about how to get started (and a video of him talking about this at #DF15!).