Are you wondering if you should be a Lightning Trailblazer? In the last 18 months, I’ve talked to hundreds of Salesforce Classic customers about Lightning Experience. Many are scared about the transition. And I get it, many of you have been burned by the costs of upgrading or migrating legacy, on-premise software. But with Salesforce in general, and Lightning Experience in particular, it’s different. Moving to Lightning Experience isn’t an all-or-nothing process. This is why we at Salesforce call it a “transition” and not a “migration.” You control who gets Lightning Experience and when they get it. As a matter of fact, our recommendation is to do exactly that: a phased roll-out and not a Big Bang project.

Here are the key steps to making a successful transition:

1. Run the Readiness Check and see which profile(s) is the most ready for Lightning Experience.

2. Within that profile, pick a Salesforce champion. (If you don’t have one, pick the person who uses Salesforce the most and is always coming up with recommendations to make it better.)

3. Create a permission set with the Lightning Experience User permission and assign it to the champion so they can access the new interface.

4. Work with the champion to make sure they are comfortable using Lightning Experience. Address any questions they have quickly.

5. Ask the champion to do their job in Lightning Experience for a week. (Assure them there’s no risk as they can always switch back to Salesforce Classic).

6. After a week, schedule a debrief session to get feedback. The advantages to this approach are:

   • You don’t waste time on a long and questionable business analysis.

   • You’ll get a list of things to fix, which you can prioritize (business stopping, nice to have, and so forth).

7. Fix the issues reported by the champion.

8. Enable one of the game-changing Lightning Experience-only features (more on this later—see the info about change management below).

9. Give everyone else in the profile access to Lightning Experience.

10. Rinse and repeat with other profiles, working your way up to the most complex cases.

Keep in mind, these steps get you 20% of the way there. The other 80% of the transition—and what’s essential to cementing user adoption—is a good change management strategy. For a successful transition, do these simple things:

First, (over) communicate why you’re moving to Lightning Experience. Help your teams understand the productivity gains they’ll get with the many cool features available only in Lightning Experience. Because, honestly, there’s no point moving to a new experience if everything stays the same way it is today.

Next, Create simple cheat sheets as training materials. You don’t need a 100 page deck—nobody has time for that.

Lastly, For better credibility, have the champion deliver your Lightning Experience training instead of your training or enablement team (assuming you have one). The champion is already on board with Lightning Experience and can help everyone else see the value of making the change.

As you probably noticed, a champion is actually the cornerstone of a successful transition. Your champion will make sure Lightning Experience is configured optimally for their team, be your ears on the floor, and help answer questions from the team. And best of all, this type of model scales indefinitely without requiring extra resources. Enjoy your boosted productivity, Trailblazers!