Case study: How Salesforce Lightning helped simplify our visual data
The Objective
Like any Salesforce consulting firm, we had been talking about Salesforce Lightning and it’s rumored benefits for a while. With Lightning’s new interface, we would need to make a few changes to how our data was presented, including within the Opportunity Object.
The Problem
We had too many opportunity stage options in the Opportunity Object. Many of the stages related to the small steps in a sales cycle, for example, two of those stages where when an estimate was being put together for a client and when it was sent off for review to a client.
We knew we had to streamline our process in order to move over to Salesforce Lightning, as the visual data would be too cluttered if we did not. For a laugh here’s how all our stages would have looked in the Lightning interface.
The Solution
We decided to create a new object to collect the smaller stages and project-related data that is focused on customer success and project management but not to the actual sales opportunity. As ownership of fields can get convoluted very quickly when you have multi-department teams contributing to one object, we wanted to be able to clearly define ownership between the sales and service teams with this new custom object.
First, we thought up new stages and definitions to streamline. We also listed all field values and figured out what should actually be covered in a separate object.
The Challenges
As moving to Salesforce Lightning is a massive user experience project, we had to treat this like any other large-scale database project by including project calendars and timelines, deliverables, and regular status updates. We needed to identify a project manager, a Salesforce Admin, and an executive sponsor as well as any departmental leaders that may be impacted by database configuration changes.
Additionally, one of the hardest things about upgrading our instance to Lightning was to know how much we should keep consistent with our previous instance or when to apply new best practices.
Beware of opening a Pandora’s box of everything people have ever wanted to change in your system or business process. Know how to respond diplomatically without over-promising.
“Those are very interesting and thoughtful comments. They are also mildly terrifying.”
The Results
Our data is now much more streamlined to our processes and easier to visually navigate within Salesforce. Now when an opportunity is won it creates a new object called “project”. This creates visibility certain users previously couldn't access and allows them to see relevant information for successful client engagements.
Additionally, it has improved the level of visibility our service team leaders have about projects, resources, and communication. Our services team now has an appropriate area to discuss projects and report accurately. Compare our new stages in the screenshot below to see the improvement from the original screenshot above.
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