“Keep in mind that the landscape is always changing; you must always examine what’s working, evolve your ideas, and change the way you do things.” – Marc Benioff, Salesforce Chairman and CEO in “Behind the Cloud”.

This quote represents what Salesforce expects of itself and more importantly, in the context of Salesforce Lightning®, of its customers. Salesforce previously asked us to evolve from on-premise systems and we did. This time, it is asking us to adopt a new user interface and we will.

It took many years for some firms to make the switch to the cloud, especially larger ones. The switch to Lightning may happen much faster because it enables initiatives already taking place within organizations—greater emphasis on design and usability—resulting in more productive, more engaging and less expensive business process execution.

How does Lightning help?

Before we get there, let’s add that business processes themselves continue to get more complex. As an example, implementing MiFID II requirements in Salesforce adds additional complexity in the financial services industry that is already saddled with large volumes of data to collect, store, and analyze during the sales process.

With Lightning, information in Salesforce is now even easier to find and manage. By taking advantage of the Lightning framework’s flexibility—and when needed, the full power of JavaScript and HTML5—Salesforce implements the latest standards for enhanced user experiences. A common scenario is that pertinent information can be difficult to find and enter with an elongated page length and many related lists appended to the record layout. Lightning, out of the box, provides three ways to overcome this—retain the existing Classic design for related lists, move related lists to tabs, or move related lists to sidebar components. The ability to move related lists to components is especially useful to declaratively tailor the display and order of components for difference users.

So your transition to Lightning needs to start now or at least very soon, as your business has the opportunity to take advantage of benefits that can help accelerate your move up the cloud CRM maturity curve for greater CRM transformation. Wherever you are, it’s not just the right time to push forward quickly, it’s the only time. Waiting may mean putting your organization at a competitive disadvantage.

Seize the Opportunity

No matter your position in your CRM program, there’s plentiful opportunity to improve your user experience and add more functionality and “friendly sophistication” to processes—the kind that can invite users to dig in and adopt the features, which in turn can positively impact your business operations. Lighting offers a far friendlier and more effective UX, which means it gets used more—and the more it’s used, the more your organization ultimately benefits through improved customer service and sales.

However, each step should be approached logically. You’ll want to examine and probably revise some business processes if they are out of synch and ask:

• Do they truly provide a single view of customers, prospects and the customer experience?
• Do they seamlessly escort people through the pipeline, offering the right incentives and promotions at the right times?
• Do they track across all touchpoints, assessing the mood of the customer and prompting action to improve that mood when necessary?

Your willingness to “catapult” your CRM capabilities through Salesforce Lightning is more important than ever because Classic is going away. The lesson: Don’t wait until the last minute, there are many features in Lightning that are not in Classic and more are being added with every Salesforce release.

Your mantra: It’s not only possible to catapult your CRM, it’s necessary to maintain a competitive advantage. Learn more about how to plan your move to Lightning in this paper, Path to Enterprise Excellence with Salesforce Lightning.