When we announced Salesforce Lightning in 2015, we promised the future of CRM with a new, modern user experience. Since then, the Salesforce Lightning Experience has continued to expand to include every aspect of the customer journey, from your sales team to your service department to marketing and even speeding up how you build apps. The Lightning Experience is for companies that are excited about the future, and are looking for ways to innovate across every department at light speed.

For those companies that jumped feet-first and took advantage of Sales Cloud Lightning, the results have been tremendous — like Tuff Shed, a 35-year-old company that is using Sales Cloud Lightning to move and innovate faster than ever with the customer at the center of every business decision.

Tuff Shed is an American company that manufactures and installs quality backyard storage units (like garages and sheds) using innovative, customizable materials. But a painful, slow implementation of a legacy CRM vendor in 2012 threatened Tuff Shed’s ability to deliver the quality and speed of service that its customers expected from the respected brand. A year and a half into their contract and the results were poor — reporting and data mapping were not smooth, and the CRM solution wasn’t able to manage the thousands of opportunities that sales reps needed to submit. Additionally, Tuff Shed had to limit the number of Outlook contacts they could sync and the CRM’s mobile application was inadequate for managing opportunities, which couldn’t cut it for a mobile workforce. Not to mention that the implementation costs were tremendous.

Choosing Sales Cloud Lightning 

Tuff Shed needed a change, and the company selected Salesforce to make it happen, rolling out Sales Cloud Lightning to 100% of its users the week of their annual sales kickoff.

It didn’t take long to see unprecedented results with Lightning. A week after going live, Tuff Shed set a sales day record, saw a zero dip in closing deals, and had double-digit compensation increases for sales reps.

The Tuff Shed sales team attributes Account Insights, Pipeline Board, and Sales Path as the key features that enables the team to be their most productive selves, as well as arming them with the up-to-the-minute insights they need to make key business decisions in real-time. With Lightning, reports and dashboards are not only easy to build, they’re always accurate. Plus, an easy-to-configure 9-column dashboard allows salespeople to display and manage data exactly the way they want it.

Sales Cloud Lightning across all devices 

Tuff Shed’s IT team appreciates the workflow flexibility and configuration of the Lightning Experience on the Salesforce platform. Additionally, the power of the Salesforce AppExchange gives the IT team almost 3,000 apps that seamlessly plug into the platform. In less than two weeks, Tuff Shed’s IT team was able to roll out a call center dialer app from the AppExchange, avoiding a months-long process of building a homegrown app from scratch.

Success in the Age of the Customer means understanding what customers are looking for from your company, but understanding their demands is just one piece of the puzzle. You need to be able to act on delivering what they’re asking for. More than ever before, the future of business success relies on a company’s ability to innovate alongside of, not behind, its customers.

Want to learn more about why 2016 is the Year of Lightning? Download the free Salesforce e-book.