The majority of companies, especially those who have been using Salesforce for awhile, shouldn’t transition to Lightning overnight. From planning out the transition and building the right team, to educating users and rolling out the transition, here are the ten steps for making a successful move to Lightning Experience.
1. Build Your Salesforce Lightning Team
A successful transition to Lighting will require a team that can remove obstacles and help achieve the company’s goals. Typically, the team will include an executive sponsor, sales manager, sales operations, Salesforce admin, super users, and a Salesforce Lightning champion.
2. Lightning Experience Readiness Check
Take the Lightning Experience Readiness Check to identify any issues before you transition to Lightning. This check will produce a readiness report containing considerations and recommendations on what to do before enabling Lightning Experience. Before planning out your Lightning transition, discover which user profiles are almost ready to make the move, locate potential bugs, and understand if segments of your Org may not be compatible.
3. Salesforce Optimizer
Another tool to use before you begin planning a Lightning transition is the Salesforce Optimizer. This tool identifies things you can simplify, improve, or leave behind when transitioning to Lightning Experience. That way you’ll know where to concentrate your time and resources. The Salesforce Optimizer is valuable, especially for those who are interested in speeding up company operations and user productivity.
4. Speak with Users
Since each employee uses Salesforce differently, the key to a successful change is to ensure no users feel left out or neglected during the transition process. Communication is critical during all stages of a company’s Lightning transition, including the planning phase. You should speak with all of the teams and stakeholders who use Salesforce to understand which features and customizations they’re using. If any teams or users will be impacted by any new Lightning features, you should also discuss this with them and map out an amicable solution before the transition. That way all users will be able to continue performing their jobs with minimal interruption.
5. Prioritize New Features
After speaking with your Salesforce users and stakeholders, you should understand the Salesforce Lightning features that are of interest to your company. Doing this will help you build a transition plan that prioritizes specific features, functionality, and user personas.
6. Develop a Roll Out Plan
When transitioning to Lightning, we recommend a phased roll-out that is Org-based, persona-based, or permission sets-based. No matter which type of roll-out you select, you’ll need to work closely with your Salesforce champion and power users throughout the process. Don’t forget to consider how you will migrate applications, integrations, and other external systems. Last, but not least, pay attention to how all of these separate pieces come together and how it impacts your Salesforce Lightning team’s schedules. Once you have a step-by-step roll-out plan outlined, you’re ready to start communicating the plan to your organization.
7. Educate and Train Users
Change is not always well-received by employees or management. You may encounter users who are hesitant to learn new processes. As you introduce the Lightning transition plan company-wide, you’ll need to stay positive and highlight the amazing new capabilities Lightning will give them and the company as a whole. Distribute easy-to-read training materials targeted to each user persona. That way they’ll be able to answer any questions themselves instead of asking you to remind them how to do simple tasks. Encourage your Salesforce champion and power users to help train users and further spread your pro-Lightning message.
8. Backup and Test Regularly
Before implementing your Salesforce Lightning transition plan, make sure you have a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy in place. This should include the ability to backup daily, monitor data changes, compare backups with previous backups, as well as completely recover Salesforce data, metadata, and attachments. Furthermore, you need to have a quality assurance (QA) plan that can be tested during and after each roll out stage.
9. Launch Roll Out
Before deploying a new Lightning stage roll out into your production Orgs, it’s best practice to isolate and test your Lightning transition in a sandbox. Then, after you’ve launched the first stage of the roll out, check in frequently with impacted users to make sure everything is working as intended. By checking in within the first couple of days, you’ll be able to get real feedback for improvement before users start to adjust. Before moving on to the next stage of the roll out, implement changes and release the updated functionality to production. Repeat this process at each stage of the roll out to ensure the smoothest transition to Lighting.
10. Evaluate and Improve
In addition to monitoring adoption and usage post-rollout, check in frequently with key company stakeholders to measure the success of the Lightning transition. During these check-ins, ensure the new Lightning features are accomplishing the goals you initially outlined during the planning stage. If anything seems off, take the time to correct it. It’s better to make improvements now before users get set in their ways.
Minimize Business Risk During Your Salesforce Lightning Transition with Own
Before you transition to Salesforce Lightning Experience, secure your business with a solid data protection foundation. Business risk is high during this transformative initiative, which means it’s critical to have a comprehensive data, metadata, and attachment backup and recovery strategy in place beforehand. With Own you can innovate confidently on the Salesforce platform with peace of mind that your data is safe and sound.
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