In case you’ve never worked with Salesforce before, I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret secret: our customers are our #1 priority. This is particularly true when we bring our customers together with Salesforce leaders for executive briefing meetings. In my role at our Salesforce Innovation Center, I help manage the customer experience during these meetings. But in order to do so, I often have to innovate and find new solutions to the challenges I face.

For example, these multi-day meetings would often require lots of coordination and organization in order to nail the customer experience, on top of lots of planning and input from our sales teams. And in the past, all that coordination and preparation took an inordinate amount of time for everyone involved, which left us feeling like the customer experience had taken a back seat.

We knew we needed to find a better, more streamlined way to organize these meetings and equip both our sales teams and our customers with the right information to ensure all parties would feel like it was a valuable use of time. So, in this case, we turned to our own technology — the Lightning Platform — to build an app to meet these needs. 

Orchestrating Outstanding Customer Meetings With an App

We built the Executive Briefing app to automate meeting requests and preparation, and customized it to fit our process. The app lets salespeople request meetings, communicate key customer details, and track meeting impact. Built on the Lightning Platform, the app creates a meeting record for each request and ties that record to an opportunity in Salesforce. Because it’s all built on top of our CRM, all customer information is automatically brought into the meeting record, so there’s no need for Account Executives to manually enter this data. This was a game changer for us — attendees now had access to everything they need to know about an account in order to fully prepare.

Building a Better Business Meeting

Automating the executive briefing request process by building this app is a game changer not only for our internal teams but for our customers as well. When meeting coordination goes off without a hitch, Salesforce executives and presenters can focus on what matters most: the customer! 

Building an app actually helped us build a better meeting by providing a single place where everyone can see important meeting details and collaborate on meeting preparation. And since Quip is integrated right into Salesforce, we can bring everything full-circle by collaborating during the meeting, with the Quip doc linked right to the executive briefing meeting record.

Eager to learn more about the Executive Briefing app? Check out our latest series of Inside Stories: How Salesforce Uses the Lightning Platform. This series explores seven apps that showcase the power and flexibility of the Lightning Platform to solve everyday business challenges, improve employee engagement, and boost innovation.

Go inside Salesforce’s employee app development strategy with Inside Stories.