Walking through the home page

The Lightning Experience was designed after extensive research and feedback from Salesforce’s user base. The majority of Salesforce’s primary users are part of some sales function, so this revamp focuses heavily on providing concise information to a more sales-oriented user.

When you first log in to Salesforce, you see the home page, as usual. However you’ll know when you’re in the Lightning Experience because the navigation menu that takes you to other objects is on the left side of the browser, as showing in Figure 20-1.

The Global Search bar prominently appears in the top center of the page, so you can easily find records. Also, when you move your cursor into the search bar and click, a list of your most recently accessed records shows up, as shown in Figure 20-2.

The right-side of the home page is where the Assistant lives. This right sidebar area serves up records based on several criteria, including those that have past due dates, activities to address today (like contacting a Lead), and Opportunities that are scheduled to close in the future, or ones that haven’t had any interaction with you in a while. It’s meant as a place to quickly understand which activities and deals you should focus on.

The top-middle portion of your home page is taken up by a very noticeable quarterly performance chart. This gives you a quick visualization of your goal this quarter, the amount of money you’ve already closed, which ones are still open with a greater than 70 percent chance of successfully closing this quarter, and your total potential upside.

Below the quarterly performance chart is the Account Insights area, which can provide quick news highlights about accounts relevant to you. The information is aggregated by Data.com.

Below the Account Insights section are two final sections, Recent Records and Top Deals, as shown in Figure 20-3. Recent Records provides a shortcut to your most recently accessed records. Top Deals helps a seller (or sales manager) remember her top potential moneymaking opportunities, so she can better focus her sales activities.

Monitoring activities on a record

When you click a record, you see its details and any activities or collaborative discussions related to that record. Consider this a workspace for this record, from where you can manage all interactions. The presentation of a record’s details begins with highlights about a record, in the top portion of the page. In Figure 20-4, you see an example of an Opportunity detail record, with basic information on the top.

The next section might be the Sales Path, which is unique to Lead and Opportunity records, and which we discuss later in this chapter. For now, we focus on the other sections that foster driving action.

On any detail record page, you see information grouped initially in three buckets — Activity, Collaborate, and Details — to reduce the amount of vertical page scrolling to get to the most pertinent information. Depending on the type of record, these sections may be in the main part of a detail page or in the right-hand column. The behavior will be consistent across objects, and that’s what we want you to learn.

The Collaborate section is where your collaborative Chatter feed interactions appear (see Chapter 6 for more information on Chatter). The Details section displays more fields related to this specific record. The Activity section is the default one that appears, with a subset of composer tabs below it that allow you to immediately compose activities related to this record, like log a call, create a new task or event, or send an email.

When you’re working in Salesforce, it should be about driving action to move a deal forward. The things you’re logging in Salesforce should correlate to that.

Below the Activity section, you see the activity timeline. This includes tasks and events that haven’t been completed yet and are grouped under the Next Steps area. Below that is a Past Activity section, which shows your activity history or previous actions taken.

Tracking all your deals on the Opportunity kanban board

Lightning Experience provides an option to display your Opportunity list views in the format of a columnar kanban board, where each column represents a certain Opportunity stage and applicable deals in that stage.

Kanban refers to an engineering process originally used in Japan by Toyota that optimized inventory levels. The general system of moving a card through various stages, represented visually by columns, until its completion, has been adopted in other industries because it provides a visualization of progressing to a goal.

To visualize your opportunities on a kanban board, as shown in Figure 20-5, follow these steps:

1. From the navigation bar on the left side of the screen, click Opportunities.

   A list of recently viewed Opportunities appears.

2. Click the downward-pointing triangle to the right of the Recently Viewed Opportunities list name.

   A list of standard and custom list views appears.

3. Select a list view so that it displays on the screen.

4. On the right side of the list view header area, click the icon that looks like a small grid.

   The Display As drop-down list appears.

5. Select Board from the Display As drop-down list.

   The list view changes to a kanban board, where each opportunity is represented as a card, nested under its current Opportunity stage. The board also shows a summary of all Opportunity Amounts for that particular stage.

6. (Optional) Move an Opportunity to a different stage by hovering over its card, and then clicking and dragging it to its updated column.

   The Opportunity’s stage is updated, and the sum of the Opportunity Amounts in the affected columns changes to reflect the move.

Accessing apps with the App Launcher

In the upper-right corner of any Lightning Experience page is a small icon that looks like a 3 x 3 gray grid. That’s the App Launcher icon. Clicking the App Launcher icon takes you to the App Launcher page, shown in Figure 20-6, which shows all the various apps that your Salesforce instance has installed.

Apps in Salesforce can mean a collection of custom objects that you’ve chosen to group together, or that have been provided by a third-party via the AppExchange. For more information on creating custom apps, check out Chapter 19.

You can click and drag an app “card” so the cards are displayed in an order that represents the apps that you access most frequently.

Clicking an app card shows the brief description of the app, and then the various object names grouped under it, which you can also click to get to that object’s home page. Also, because the Lightning Experience continues to evolve, this app page will specify which objects are not yet supported within the Lightning Experience’s look and feel. Clicking those not-yet-supported objects will open a new browser tab, in the Salesforce Classic display, so you can still continue to be productive.

Comparing the Lightning Experience to Salesforce Classic

In this section, we cover some key differences between the Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic. Over time, there may be more differences as Salesforce.com pours more effort into enhancements within the Lightning Experience, but here are some fundamental differences as of this writing:

• The home page has been updated. The navigation options have moved to the left of the screen, the main focus of the page is on the quarterly performance chart, and the Calendar and My Tasks sections have been consolidated and replaced by the Assistant. The experience today is deliberately focused on a user with sales responsibilities.
• Home page tabs have moved. The navigation to various objects used to look like tabs, and then over time looked like headings, but the tab name always stuck around. Whatever you call them, they’ve now moved to the left of the screen, where the object name can be reduced to just its icon, and the navigation bar’s width can shrink, too, to allow the most efficient use of your browser window.
• The Chatter feed is now nested in its own subsection. In Salesforce Classic, the Chatter feed is at the top of the record’s page. Lots of collaboration can turn into lots of posts that users have to scroll past to get to the record details. In the Lightning Experience, the Chatter feed is tucked within the Collaborate subtab, which is accessible from the “top of the fold” view in a browser. The feed’s details are just a click away if you want to see them, and not taking up valuable visual real estate otherwise. See Figure 20-7 for an example of the Collaborate subtab on an Opportunity record.
• Record details are now nested in their own subsection. Similar to the Chatter feed, a record’s details can often span many pages. A record’s details are nested under a Details subtab.
• Sales Path provides guidance on Leads and Opportunities. To help coach users within a sales organization and foster proper usage of Salesforce, leads and opportunities can now offer a Sales Path. This gives sales trainers and managers a narrative of what a user should accomplish in a particular stage of his process. This can include what fields should be filled out, instructions, and links to resources. Of course, this means your business has to have some business process to reflect within the system! For an example of a Sales Path item, see Figure 20-8.

The Lightning Experience will continue to evolve and more features will be supported in this user interface. Because Salesforce.com averages three updates a year to its product, a lot can happen within a year! To stay up to date on what features are supported, click Help from the upper-right section of your Salesforce Classic interface. Search for the keywords compare Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic for a grid of features by object, and what’s supported in each.

Assessing your organization’s readiness

The devil’s in the details, and you should be familiar with your organization’s configuration before diving in deeper.

Primarily, the Lightning Experience is focused on making your sales users even more efficient. If you have a lot of users outside of sales that are heavy users of Salesforce, consider their experience if you were to debut the Lightning Experience to your sales users.

Also consider how defined your business processes are today. If your sales reps aren’t expected to log calls or activities, and they’re not being too consistent with when they’re adding opportunities or updating their stages, the Lightning Experience’s benefits may not be fully realized by your users.

Does your Salesforce instance use a lot of custom code? You’ll need to have your developers confirm if what they’ve built is supported in the Lightning Experience. This area is evolving quickly, so it’s best to check the Salesforce Release Notes to confirm.

Determining sales path tips

Though training your new sales reps can help them sell more productively, many companies don’t invest in a person or people to help with sales learning and development. Sometimes this is due to companies not having a disciplined sales process to teach their salespeople. Other times, a process may be in place, but sales management doesn’t believe in it and, thus, doesn’t support reps’ adherence to it.

Though the Sales Path feature in the Lightning Experience won’t magically create a business process for you, you can time the enabling of Lightning Experience with sales training on a new process.

You’ll want to define the names of your sales stages, and list expectations of what milestones are accomplished at each stage. Are there specific fields that need to be filled out before progressing to the next stage of the opportunity life cycle? Is there access to presentation templates or marketing material applicable to that stage? Map all those out so you can reflect them in the Sales Path.

Because this feature is also available for the lead life cycle, you can also collect processes and steps for your inside sales or sales development teams.

Benefitting from account insights

What are the approximate sizes of the typical companies that buy your products? Are they Fortune 500 companies publicly traded on a U.S. stock exchange? Are they small private businesses, or perhaps private companies that make as much revenue as some public-company peers?

The answers here will be unique for your business, and can determine if you enable the Account Insights functionality. Larger companies that get reported on in the news will show up in this section; the mom-and-pop shop down the street probably won’t (unless it comes up with a social media campaign that goes viral).

Choosing a pilot group

If you’re still a bit hesitant about rolling out the Lightning Experience to your organization all at once, nominate a sales team to act as your pilot group. People naturally feel uncomfortable with change, so taking baby steps in your organization can allow you to take a more measured approach to deployment. With a smaller set of initial adoptees, you’ll be able to gather feedback and provide more focused help to users, so the transition doesn’t seem so intimidating.

Turning on the Lightning Experience

Now that you’ve gathered all your processes, and you’ve identified your pilot group, it’s time to turn on the Lightning Experience. This section walks you through how to enable this from the Salesforce Classic user interface.

To enable the Lightning Experience, do the following:

1. Click Setup in the upper-right corner.

   The Force.com home page appears.

2. Click Lightning Experience in the left sidebar.

   If you don’t see Lightning Experience, type the phrase Lightning Experience in the Quick Find/Search bar that appears at the top of the left sidebar.

   The Lightning Experience home page appears.

3. In the Enable These Recommended Features First section, review the features mentioned and enable or set up any that are listed.

   Make sure you’ve reviewed any feature’s Tell Me More link first, and that you’ve collected information from your stakeholders on relevant business processes that may need to be mapped into the tool.

4. In the Decide Who Can Use Lightning Experience section, click Set Up Permissions if you want to pilot this to a subset of users.

   The Permission Sets page appears where you can create a permission set to apply to any user who will be using the Lightning Experience. For more information on permission sets, make sure to go online to www.dummies.com/extras/salesforcedotcom to read our Web Extra on this topic.

5. In the Enable the New Salesforce Experience section, toggle the Lightning Experience slider to the right, where the label will change from Disabled to Enabled.

6. Click the Setup link.

   You’ll see a progress page as you magically transform to the new experience.

Switching between the Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic

Now that you’re in the Lightning Experience, what if you change your mind and want to go back to the Salesforce Classic world? In the old days before Salesforce and the cloud, anyone asking this would get a raised eyebrow and a gentle “deal with it” response from her IT department.

Fortunately, the folks at Salesforce.com remember the pain of those old days, and they’ve worked to ensure that users in the Lightning Experience can quickly change back to the Salesforce Classic user interface if desired.

To switch from the Lightning Experience to Salesforce Classic, do the following from the Force.com home page:

1. In the upper-right corner of the page, click the far-right icon that represents you.

   If you’ve got a Chatter profile photo uploaded, that’ll be what you see.

   Your username shows up, along with links to your profile and personal settings. You’ll also see a link to switch to Salesforce Classic, as shown in Figure 20-9.

2. Click Switch to Salesforce Classic.

   Your Salesforce Classic home page appears.