Interview: How James Goerke Moved to Lightning

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking with James Goerke, Manager of Global Support at Velocity and Dreamforce 2017 speaker. We discuss adoption and how he got his boss to use Lightning.

Join us as James Goerke shares the strategies and tactics he used to kickstart a Lightning rollout in his organization.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with James Goerke.

Making a case for Lightning.

James’ company doesn’t have a Salesforce Admin as a defined role, which is common for a lot of businesses. He had a lot of experience with Salesforce, however, and so he was asked to jump in and do that job. When he got started, he quickly observed, “Our customers are moving to Lightning, so our business should be on the forefront of that, too.”

Regarding actually getting the rollout to happen, “It was easy to convince my boss from an emotional level,” James says, but the challenge was to show the value. Lightning dashboards are beautiful and appealing, but they’re ultimately like giving someone a dozen roses: “They look great, and they get you in the door, but you have to do really well afterward, too.”

The three steps to adoption.

In James’ adoption talk at Dreamforce, he went through three phases of getting management to buy in: define it, show it, and use it. So you start by defining what you can do with Lightning. James looked at what tasks his team performed over and over again every day and figured out that he could cut down a 2-minute activity to a 1-minute one. When you start talking about a multi-person team each performing that same task several times per day, that 50% reduction can really add up.

For showing it, it’s about taking advantage of all the dashboards that Lightning makes possible, and also maybe taking LeeAnne’s advice and putting together some demos. Finally, you need to use it: create a trusted group of users and get their feedback. At the end of the day, “even when a new process didn’t save me any time, it’s still easier,” and as James says, “and reducing frustration is a good thing no matter what.”

Rollouts as a player/coach.

James works remotely, and most of his team is remote too. He is very familiar with what they do on a day-to-day basis because he does a lot of the same things himself: “I’m in sort of a player/coach role.” It made it a lot easier to know the ins and outs of his teams’ processes because he defined them himself. With a bigger team, his advice is to do the research necessary to know exactly what your users are doing day-in and day-out, and why they do it the way that they do.

“One of my biggest challenges as a support manager is to balance my team,” James says, he needs to know how many cases are active and which agents are dealing with them. With Lightning, he has a dashboard component that he can quickly refresh to make a quick assessment of the work distribution in his team and assign tasks accordingly. Before, that process involved multiple tabs and a lot of waiting for refreshes, so Lightning has really saved him a significant amount of time.

Links:

• James’ Three Ways I Got my Boss on Board with Lightning Dreamforce 2017 presentation
• Lightning Experience Rollout module
• Chippy recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/15554/chocolate-drops/ (James skips the peanuts)

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