Salesforce recently announced the launch of Salesforce Lightning at a global broadcast which took the entire Salesforce community by storm. Salesforce Lightning combines the new Lightning Experience and the new Lightning Design System with Lightning Components and Lightning App Builder, extending the Salesforce App Cloud and empowering anyone to easily create modern enterprise apps. Lightning Experience offers a brand new, modern and intelligent experience across any device that enables users to work faster and smarter.

The TAS Group has been a Salesforce partner since 2006. But, when we first started developing our Dealmaker application suite, we weren’t aligned with any one specific CRM platform. This all changed at the start of 2012 when we made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on the Salesforce suite of products. We did this because we recognized that most of our customers were already using Salesforce CRM and we felt that by focusing our development efforts we could move faster and deliver more value for our customers. Our subsequent company performance has clearly validated that decision.

The launch of Lightning by Salesforce is a big deal. Our applications have always been native in Salesforce. Now, with Lightning, we can offer components that seamlessly blend in with the core CRM functionality to supercharge the user experience for any enterprise wishing to improve the performance of their sales team with our smart Dealmaker functionality. We were one of the first partners to develop a Lightning Component (Our Dealmaker Opportunity Healthcheck component was one of the first to appear on the AppExchange for Components), and one of the first partners with a Lightning Ready app for the new Lightning Experience.

Lightning Components and the App Builder allow us to ‘unbundle’ our main Dealmaker app into various components so that the right componentry can be configured in the right places, for the right people. For example, we created a component to check the health of an opportunity and, using the App Builder in the Lightning Experience, that component can be easily placed on the Opportunity record layout. From an ISV perspective, Lightning gives us an opportunity to interoperate more seamlessly with the underlying Salesforce functionality. This improves the overall experience for the end user, which makes them more successful - our ultimate goal.

Our goal at The TAS Group is to make sales professionals more effective. Our Dealmaker products are unique in that they embed over 25 years of successful sales methodology to give users useful insights and practical coaching tips in context with the status of the deal. Ultimately, this means our customers can manage their opportunities more effectively and maximize revenue in key accounts through the application of strategic account planning, underpinned by the Target Account Selling (TAS) sales methodology.

Lightning will enable us to further extend our unique integration of the TAS methodology within Salesforce through its additional configurability and by making the terminology part of their overall opportunity management and account planning experience.  Whether you’re a sales rep out in the field looking for advice on how to approach key decision makers, or a sales manager who needs a detailed overview of your team’s performance and pipeline health, our Dealmaker apps will integrate natively and easily within your Salesforce CRM.

What does this mean for customers who already use our products? We already support the account planning and opportunity management processes of some of the world’s largest and most successful companies – HP, Lexmark, Autodesk, BT, Honeywell and GE. The work we’re doing with Lightning Components will mean that all of these companies, along with our future customers, will benefit.

We believe Lightning gives Salesforce customers a modern, flexible and engaging user experience that will drive adoption and performance in the enterprise. The ecosystem will benefit also as Lightning provides a standard and consistent way for 3rd parties to interoperate with the core platform to the benefit of users, admins and partners.

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About the Author

Canice Lambe PhD, Chief Technology Officer, The TAS Group