On December 17th, 2018 Salesforce.com announced a strategic move to shift all accounts to their new Lightning platform on a rolling basis… Salesforce.com’s new Lightning platform actually isn’t all that new as it has been around for a few years now, officially launching shortly. We find this forced shift to the new platform a little disconcerting, as most organizations are not ready for this shift. The challenge is that Salesforce.com’s growing customer base of 3.75 million users has become extremely familiar with the existing platform. Personally, I cannot remember much of a change in the overall platform for the past ten years. With this new change, Salesforce.com is essentially forcing their entire userbase (with the exception of early adopters) to relearn this new platform… This in itself is not a huge issue, as most users will grow to forget the old platform in little time, with the end result being some—but not total—disruption.
We have been working to strategically get more departments integrated into Salesforce.com over the years taking advantage of the platform’s full potential. Challenge is, once you go beyond sales, the inherent knowledge of a CRM system drastically drops. Anyone that has deployed a CRM to any department beyond sales has experienced a fairly significant learning curve to get these departments onboarded to the CRM. Therein lies the problem: with this change, you’ll find that those same departments that were so difficult to get onboarded will need to be retrained once again.
With this new platform being deployed over the next few months, we advise that businesses start their planning and training on the new platform now. Salesforce.com has made the new platform available now for select users within organizations to get familiar with the system. Our suggestion is to get your most active users on the new Lightning platform today, allowing them to learn the new system sooner than later. Then, start setting up sessions with the various teams and departments to educate them on the new platform… The sooner you can get them educated and adjusted around this new platform, the less downtime your organization will be subject to when Salesforce.com flips the switch.