Chapter 20
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting acquainted with the Lightning Experience user interface
Deciding whether the Lightning Experience is right for your company
Preparing to switch to the Lightning Experience
Salesforce has been struck by lightning! No, not really, silly. But figuratively, its new Lightning branding describes several new or revamped features that provide a more modern visual experience for users used to the look and feel of common consumer-like apps like Twitter and Facebook. Lightning features are also built to more easily adapt to how information is displayed and interacted with on tablets and mobile devices. More Salesforce users will be experiencing the tool on devices other than the web browser on a computer, and Salesforce wants to empower administrators to build solutions that are compatible with an increasingly mobile workforce.
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the Lightning Experience, which provides a different end-user experience from the one that has evolved more than 15 years ago when Salesforce first debuted. The changes are relevant most noticeably on the home page, object home pages, records, and reports and dashboards. The look and feel that is the default interface, and that we display in the rest of this book’s figures, is called Salesforce Classic.
As of the publication of this book, the Lightning Experience and its compatibility with Salesforce Classic customizations continues to evolve. In this chapter, we tell you where you should go for more information to help assess if your company is ready to make use of the Lightning Experience. If the answer is yes, we help you prepare to make that leap.
In this section, we highlight what an end-user sees when he logs in to a Salesforce instance that’s chosen the Lightning Experience user interface.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To visualize your opportunities on a kanban board, as shown in Figure 20-5, follow these steps:
From the navigation bar on the left side of the screen, click Opportunities.
A list of recently viewed Opportunities appears.
Click the downward-pointing triangle to the right of the Recently Viewed Opportunities list name.
A list of standard and custom list views appears.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
You may be hearing all this talk about the Lightning Experience, while your company currently uses Salesforce and lives in the Salesforce Classic world. At some point, people may be looking to you for your opinion on whether Lightning Experience is the magic bullet for your organization.
In this section, we discuss what you should evaluate in order to make some educated decisions at your company.
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 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.
If you think your organization is ready to convert to the Lightning Experience, you’ll want to ensure you have some processes confirmed first in order to make use of the user interface. In this section, we discuss a few areas that, with a little planning, can prepare your users for a richer experience when they join the Lightning Experience.
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.
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).
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.
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:
Click Setup in the upper-right corner.
The Force.com home page appears.
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.
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.
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.
Click the Setup link.
You’ll see a progress page as you magically transform to the new experience.
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:
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.
Click Switch to Salesforce Classic.
Your Salesforce Classic home page appears.