Imagine you own a small retail shop. Sales reps walk the floors of your shop to help customers. One day, you hear that customers are having a hard time identifying the sales reps, who dress in street clothes.

To solve the problem, you decide to have your reps wear uniforms. You wouldn’t just show up at the store one day and start handing out uniforms, would you? First, you’d need to find out what your reps would feel comfortable wearing and each one’s size. You’d want to give them notice so they didn’t go out and buy a whole new wardrobe for work.

In other words, you’d want to take a change management approach to make sure your plan was successful.

As many of us think about how to move our companies to Lightning successfully, change management is especially important. The phrase “change management” means lots of different things to different people. For my team at Penske Logistics, it meant thinking about what it would take to roll out Lightning in a way that would ensure our users adopted it.

Now, if your sales team immediately adopts everything you roll out, you should probably stop reading this blog post. But for everyone else, my team’s experience may give you some insights into how to use change management to make your transition to Lightning successful.

How change management helped my team move to Lightning.

My team started thinking about making the move to Lightning in 2016. We were excited about all of the nice features in Lightning we had seen at Dreamforce that year, which aligned to what our sales team wanted — an intuitive user interface, flexible page layouts, and kanban views for sales management. After we took the Lightning Readiness Assessment and found out it would be easier to transition to Lightning than we expected, we were thrilled.

But before we started moving full speed ahead, we needed to pause and think about what the transition would mean for our users. Our sales team had been using Sales Cloud since 2011 to track deals, and we knew moving to Lightning would be a big change for team members.

To ensure our move to Lightning was successful for everyone, we started thinking about the key pieces of change management — who, what, when, why, and how.

Start with “who.”

Let’s talk about the “who.” Consider who needs to know about the change — and get more specific than “everyone.” Who are all of the different groups or personas who will be affected? For a Lightning transition, this might include everyone from your leadership team to various Salesforce user groups.

My team decided to take a top-down approach. First, we presented our plan to leadership to generate excitement and convince our leaders that moving to Lightning was the right thing to do. Once we had their approval, it was easier to execute our plan. Our leaders helped us communicate throughout the transition, which helped us get buy-in from users.

Next, we identified two different user groups within our Penske Logistics Salesforce organization. One was our sales team, which logs deal activity in Salesforce every day. We also identified a second group of casual users that would occasionally log in to download reports or check information. Each group needed a different level of training and communication related to the transition to Lightning.

In addition to your Salesforce users, you’ll also need to think about resources needed to manage the transition. I worked with a project manager to lead the transition. My team also worked with Success Cloud, which provides resources and expertise to help Salesforce customers succeed faster. Our success manager and success specialists guided us to valuable resources, like the Lightning Readiness Community on Chatter, and helped us establish metrics to ensure we were successful with Lightning.

Regardless of what resources you have at your disposal, the key is to make sure the people managing your Lightning transition have the training they need and stay involved throughout the project.

Quick tips to help you manage the “who” of your Lightning transition.

So far, my team has seen great results from our transition to Lightning. We’ve migrated more than 500 users starting in 2017. Since then, we’ve seen a 12% increase in sales activities logged, while mobile adoption is up 41%.

Here are some of my top tips, based on our experience at Penske Logistics:

• Try the top-down approach. If you get leaders to buy in, your users are more likely to adopt the change because they know it’s not going away. Try to get your leaders to participate in your communications for the transition.
• Identify your user groups early. This will help make sure that no one gets left out. Find out who needs to know and what resources they’ll need to manage the change.
• Gather your resources. Make sure you have the right people and give them the training they need to help you manage the transition.

Thinking about the “who” is just first step to ensuring that your team ultimately adopts and gets the most out of Lightning. If you’re interested in learning more about using other aspects of change management for your Lightning transition, I hope you’ll join me today for a webinar, “Architecting Change: How Penske Logistics Boosts Productivity By Making the Move to Salesforce Lightning.” Register to watch the webinar.

And most of all, I hope you have a successful transition to Lightning.

Nicole Rothermel is Director of Sales Solutions for Penske Logistics.