My love/hate relationship with Lightning slowly moved more to the loving side. At the end of last year I even set a goal for myself for this year to migrate as many clients as possible to Lightning. So far so good, it doesn’t go as quickly as I hoped for but I like the progress so far.
At the same time Salesforce came with the Lightning Champion initiative and I was lucky and quick enough to be among first who made it into this program.
Lightning Champions is a peer-to-peer program that encourages those who have already made the move to Lightning help those who haven’t yet started the trip. And, for those of you who are still in the planning or prioritizing stages and may think it’s more than just a quick hop to get to Lightning, we want you to learn from others who know what the road looks like. They can help you navigate any speed bumps, and together, we can help each other enjoy the ride.
How to get in
The way in is pretty easy. One nice Trailmix and then a lovely call with Kelly from Salesforce. We spend an hour talking about some of the benefits of Lightning, what other people spot, what are the strong points (and what less). During this process I saw one of (if not the) best presentation about Lightning I saw so far.
The talk was also great to realize how many things we take for granted nowadays but they really weren’t in Classic. Predictive search, the massive ability to customize page layout, include flows, create custom components which can be almost anywhere on the screen and more and more.
What you get
Swag (of course), privilige to speak at Salesforce events, access to private group on Success Community, where program managers should be active (I always like to get insights and direct link to product people even though I don’t use it much).
What is in plan (Safe Harbour included and I didn’t sign any NDA) is even that customers who didn’t migrate yet will be able to ask help of Champion and we should be somehow able to give that some insights/consultations. Will see how this will work out.
Why I think Lightning is great
One client saw the Lightning and was like – we really need to migrate. When I created a simple flow on contract, which is visible only when opportunity or contact field is empty, which shows them all opportunities or contact for the specific client, which they can use with one click, they were blown away as they don’t want to type into those fields manually and search for the records they are looking for.
Second client likes the new (and simple) Lightning Component I created for them, which helps them quickly add products to opportunity based on some values in various fields. Yeah, plenty of products to choose from.
The new report builder and dashboards? You win the fight for Lightning with any client just by showing those.
Also the navigation is great with ability to create a new record or switch to some recently used right from the menu.
And so on and so on. I really think the time to switch to Lightning is here and no reason to wait anymore.