Salesforce Lightning, in its infancy, lacked many beloved features that Classic offered. There were questions and concerns about stability and core functionality. There were also concerns about custom development like Visualforce pages and custom buttons . . . would they be migrated? It was understandable why companies showed reluctance to flip the switch.
Today Salesforce Lightning can be considered ‘mature’ and with each new release, it has gained many new enhancements such as:
- Intuitive tools
- Migration assistant tools
- Business process efficiencies
Despite these new features, many are still reluctant to migrate to Salesforce Lightning.
Besides the obvious fear that Salesforce Classic may be sunsetted someday, below are some of the most compelling reasons why an organization would do well to make the switch.
Key Benefits and Features
1. Optimized Sales Process
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- With the Guidance for Success feature of Salesforce Lightning, you can add fields that are relevant to your company’s sales processes.
- You might include such items as details about company policy, tips for establishing positive selling relationships, and even links to relevant feeds.
- All this in a visual guide in-app will decrease new sale reps’ onboarding time.
- You get consistency and stability in sales process that is now streamlined to your company.
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a. Kanban view
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- Several sales leaders and managers are now having pipeline calls based on what is seen in Kanban view
- It provides a quick area to drag-and-drop an opportunity to the next stage, etc. and caters to real-time updates that many organizations look to achieve.
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b. Cleaner, Sleeker Reporting
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- More modern look to reports/dashboards
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2. Intuitive/Dynamic Pages
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- Now you can have Lightning pages behave dynamically – which means you’ve got the ability to call the shots on what is presented and when. For example, an Opportunity in Qualification Stage would not display the Products list until it reaches “Quote” stage.
- With the latest Winter ‘21 release, Dynamic forms extends this functionality to now have full control over sections of a layout behaving dynamically. Also, you can hide/show buttons based on record criteria – but this is only available for custom objects at the moment.
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3. Mobile-Friendly UI and Function
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- No more having to worry about whether VF pages are optimized for desktop and mobile. Lightning is a cross-functional platform meaning you only have to build once and it will be available across each device (developers rejoice!)
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4. All New Functionality will be Lightning Focused
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- Classic has not been getting any new releases for some time now. If you want to feel like you are getting your money’s worth in your CRM subscription, it will benefit the organization to migrate to Lightning to take advantage of all the new goodies.
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Summary
When considering the switch to Lightning, it is important to come up with a well thought out migration strategy:
- Identify key stakeholders
- Conduct gap analysis (in conjunction with results from Lightning Readiness Report)
- Determine rollout strategy (all users at once or release to a subset of pilot users)
- Develop adequate messaging/training for end users
- Normally this is a good time to take inventory of existing data structure/processes and determine if items need to be discontinued/optimized/etc.
A Salesforce partner can assist in providing best practices, recommendations, and guidance to a successful Lightning migration.