Roll Out: Create & Implement a Salesforce Lightning Migration Plan
- Will you be running a pilot program?
- What expectations are you setting for your implementation?
- What are your success metrics?
- How will you plan your project and ensure the plan is followed?
- What customizations will you need to build out?
- What will it take to be ready for launch?
- It’s a lot, but stick with us, and we’ll guide you through it.
Decision time: Phased or all-at-once Salesforce Lightning roll out?
Phased Salesforce
Lightning roll out
In a phased roll out, the goal is to transition users by teams or user groups, learning how to improve the transition with each deployment. A phased roll out is usually not necessary for small organizations. But if you’re part of a vast organization, it typically makes sense to roll out your migration in phases.
>One of the biggest advantages of a phased roll out is running a pilot program. To run a pilot program, choose a team of Salesforce users with few technical hurdles and switch them to Lightning first. As you receive their feedback, improve the experience for them and future users.
Another advantage of a phased roll out is less front-loaded work to set up Salesforce Lightning for the whole organization. You can focus on a single team or department at a time, preventing a build up of technical debt. And keeping teams together allows them to collaborate within the new space and give you manageable feedback.
The most noticeable downside to the phased approach is that you’ll have to maintain training for both Salesforce Lightning and Classic during the roll out, as your company will most likely still be hiring during the transition.
All-at-once Salesforce
Lightning roll out
An all-at-once roll out might be the best option if you’re part of a small organization, or if you have a relatively straightforward business process within your CRM.
But with an all-at-once roll out, you don’t need to worry about maintaining training materials or programs for both Lightning and Classic. You’ll be able to focus on Lightning and streamlining the onboarding process. It’s also easier to push out new features, as all users will have access at once. However, you’ll need to do more work ahead of timeto minimize any hiccups with feature deployment.
Technical debt is also a much larger concern with an all-at-once roll out. If you don’t adequately prepare all features before launch, you could become overburdened with a backlog of critical features that users need or want to improve their work experience.
Whichever migration approach you take, ensure it makes sense for your company’s structure and business goals.
Create a project schedule for your migration
- Task name
- Task owner
- Task dependencies
- Task duration
- Task start date
- Task end date
- Task status
When working with a client, LearningCurv’s consultants create an implementation plan tailored to the client’s business and the scope of their migration. Read more about our implementation services and learn how our experts can optimize your company’s Salesforce Lightning migration.
Define Salesforce success metrics
- In 3 months, we want to increase our MQL conversion rate by 15%.
- Two months after launch, we want to reduce the number of Salesforce user tickets by 30%.
- We want to increase our monthly closed-won opportunities by 10 by the end of the year.
Salesforce Lightning end user training & education
While some of your users will be early adopters, others might be somewhat resistant to change. To ensure a successful and productive migration, try to inject some hype into your organization.
Send out automated emails, promote cool features, maybe even have an actual launch party. It’s imperative in any organization to keep up morale, even more so when you’re asking them to learn a new way of doing their jobs.
Employees may need a fair bit of training to be comfortable transitioning from Classic to Lightning. Luckily, Salesforce’s Trailhead is a straightforward way to give your users the basics they’ll need to know.
One convenient feature of the Trailhead platform is the ability to customize training through Trailmixes. Trailmixes let you handpick modules to be completed in a sequence that gives your users the guided training they need to become familiar with the platform.
If you’re looking for more in-depth user training for Salesforce Lightning (or any Salesforce platform), LearningCurv has a number of options for training employees to use Salesforce.
You can sign up individuals for our live online courses, enroll in more tailored team training programs, or even work with us to develop a custom training program that can be used long-term to train new employees. Visit our Training page to learn more about how we can set up your organization for success.
Customize the Salesforce Lightning Experience
You’ll likely need to customize Lightning to fit your internal process, such as creating Lightning apps or sales paths. You might need to replace legacy features you’re losing with Classic, or add new features to maintain or enhance your business process.
Replacing legacy features is often the most time-consuming part of the customization process. Looking back at the gap analysis we talked about in the last chapter, you should have your list of items that need to be updated.
Work through your list of updates systematically and make sure you have an answer to any features your stakeholders might consider necessary.
You can automatically convert some legacy features to their updated counterparts. Classic actions and buttons, JavaScript buttons, and Visualforce pages can be automatically converted through the Lightning Experience Configuration Converter.
Some other features might require an AppExchange app to be transferred. Classic notes and attachments can be converted with an free AppExchange tool called Magic Mover, for example.
At this point, you’ve done all your preparation and planning. You’ve got a strategy for your roll out and have a clear idea of what a successful migration should look like. Now, it’s time to launch!
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