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Slalom is a purpose-driven consulting firm that helps companies solve business problems and build for the future. They're really passionate about helping their customers get more insight from their data through technology.
In 2015, leadership at Slalom realized that their sales reps were slowed down by not having access to a unified mobile and desktop experience. They have over 1,300 sellers who need to input data in Salesforce, but spend the majority of their time in the field. They found that, because of this, opportunities would be missed due to lack of follow up. Reps needed the ability to update opportunities from anywhere.
For Todd Sink, Managing Director at Slalom, implementing Lightning Experience was exactly what they needed. Once the decision was made to do the project, several months were spent trying to get emotional alignment across the organization, which was difficult because this was their first huge investment in a technology platform in 10 years.
In August 2015, they pulled their project team together and began implementing Lightning. They started with discovery, going through their Salesforce instance to see what changes they could make on the technical side to make the move. Rather than doing a phased rollout to pilot groups, like most companies do when transitioning to Lightning, Todd insisted on moving everyone all at once. Because of his previous experience with enterprise resource planning, he was confident that he could pull it off.
After the discovery phase, Slalom had 10 functional two-week sprints before they rolled out Lightning with a big bang to the entire company in February. To assist with change management and adoption efforts, they empowered a team of sales champions across all markets to review what had been built, ask questions, and give feedback.
They also had a group of IT professionals looking at how many people were logging into the system and tracking progress over time. This constant cycle of feedback proved critical to tailoring the Lightning experience to their end-users. After the go-live date, teams of two or three people conducted in-person training for every sales user.
Slalom employees were extremely receptive to the Lightning Experience. Managers noticed that opportunities came in quicker and were updated more frequently, giving them better visibility into the sales pipeline. Salespeople could now do everything they needed to on mobile, including updating their opportunities after leaving a meeting with a client.
“If I’m a sales exec and I go to five different clients, I can walk out of each meeting and dictate into my phone updates to the opportunity records, so everyone working on that account knows what happened,” stated Sara Tupac, Sales Operations Director.
Of the feedback that managers received pertaining to Lightning, nine out of 10 comments were positive. The sales process at Slalom can be very complex, with a lot of information to take in for new reps, but now they have the foundation to align everyone at each stage of the sales cycle.
Features such as Sales Path allow sales managers to align all their reps with a unified strategy. Users really love the intuitiveness of managing their opportunities with Kanban. Many of the tools that Slalom had developed in Classic could be brought over to Lightning Experience, too. Also, by maintaining their internal Storyforce hub (a hub that captures and surfaces up customer stories to educate and enable sales and other customer-facing teams), they're able to surface relevant customer stories on similar opportunities to help close more deals.
Want to learn more about how our customers have been successful with Lightning? Check out our webinar, Lightning Lounge: Customer Heroes, featuring Jessica Stuckey, the Director of Sales Enablement at Service Corporation International. You'll learn how Jessica and her team drove +95% adoption of Salesforce Lightning and how the technology is taking the company to new heights.
