Transitioning to Lightning with Matt Bertuzzi

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Matt Bertuzzi, Salesforce MVP, author of Lightning Sales Ops, and host of the One of These Things podcast. We caught up with Matt at the Salesforce World Tour in Boston and had a great conversation about Lightning and why you should jump in and make the switch.

Join us to hear about how Matt gained insights into how to own the front end of the funnel by focusing on reducing friction.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Matt Bertuzzi.

Writing the Book on Lightning

Matt does an extraordinary amount of things, from being a Salesforce MVP to hosting a great podcast to authoring a new book, Lightning Sales Ops. Still, and the end of the day, “I’m a Salesforce Admin number one, and the other stuff is things I do after six o’clock.”

When Matt started his book in May 2016, he sat down with a neat arrangement of index cards that outlined everything he wanted to say. Originally he had planned for just one chapter on Lightning, but when he started to get his Lightning material together, he realized he was onto something. He started showing Reps his demo Org, and they demanded that he make the switch. As Matt says, “The Reps are the ones who convinced me that it was a legitimate game changer. They pulled me into Lightning.”

The Key Journey of the Book

As Matt puts it, “The book is the story of making Salesforce work for Sales Development Reps.” In writing it, Matt tried to think like a Business Analysis person, so he organized it in order of a Rep’s workflow. He feels that Devs, in general, don’t spend enough time thinking about how to really optimize the workflow for their frontline users. “How can we as the tinkerers behind the scenes, as Admins, support reps with automation, customization, and UX?” With Lightning App Pages, we can start to think like a UX designer and make a big impact on what people do every day.

For Matt, the reason to add Lightning is not to make your job easier, but to make your actual users’ lives better. “In my experience, users are contently unhappy,” so to get started he asked a bunch of Sales Reps to describe what a day in the life of using Salesforce is like. They’d say “it’s miserable, it’s clicky, and it’s tedious.” Matt realized that those Reps never got any mindshare from the Admin team: “What ‘perfectly happy’ sounds like to an Admin is actually just that they’re not complaining.” The truth is that absence of complaints is actually not a sentiment— it’s not the same thing as the presence of happiness.

Focus on Reducing Friction

When we’re Admins, we often think about how we can make all ten things that a user needs to do easier. However, what we don’t realize is that there’s one or two of those things that they need to do 80% of the time. Matt realized that we need to take the top things that people do and make them incredibly easy. If the other things are a little clicky, that’s OK because we’ve reduced friction. It might be the difference between 70 clicks and 40 clicks but, in the long-run, making the things that you do 60 times a day more efficient will do great things for adoption and perception.

People worry about adoption when they think about switching over to Lightning, but the truth of the matter is that your users will go with whatever helps them get things done faster. Lightning’s features can be a big help with that because the interface is more “3D.” If you get an inbound lead, wouldn’t you, as the Rep, want to know if this lead is already a contact? Wouldn’t you want to know if their email address is associated with a current customer, so you don’t approach them as if they don’t know you? You can do all of this with one tab open in Lightning, but, as Matt says, “I’ve never seen a Salesforce Classic user with one tab open— it just doesn’t happen.”

Matt’s Own Transition to Lightning

Matt’s company is relatively small, so the usability acceptance testing is pretty informal, “but really I tried to pull a Mike Gerholdt: bring a cup of coffee, close my mouth, and open eyes, and watch how users use Salesforce.” A turning point came when he realized that nobody was using the great button hack he had made because his users only needed to do that action once a month, if that. Instead, he realized that he needed to focus on cutting clicks in half on the other 29 days.

For Matt, “You should judge your Admins by how much friction they can take away from their users.” Instead of looking at capabilities or performance, it’s about focusing on efficiency: “How can they make the process bend around the user?” Salesforce is a tool to make sales and do business smarter and not an end unto itself.

For more insights, make sure to follow Matt on Twitter (@mattbertuzzi)

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