Join us for the recap of this insightful virtual session: “Next-Generation Opportunity Management can drive Salesforce Adoption.” Ready to take your Salesforce adoption to the next level? Follow along as we dive into the power of Next-Gen Opportunity Management!✨

In this insightful session, we’ll explore cutting-edge strategies and best practices that can significantly enhance how your team leverages Salesforce for sales success! Our expert speaker, Larry Hill from Leaping Fox, will share his wealth of knowledge and real-world examples, demonstrating how a modern approach to opportunity management can drive user engagement, improve data quality, and ultimately boost your organization’s ROI in Salesforce.

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!

SPEAKERS:

Larry Hill

Shannon J. Gregg

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hey everybody!  Welcome to the Life Sciences Virtual Trailblazer Group. We are in our May meeting, and today we’re going to be talking about Salesforce adoption, which is one of the biggest challenges that every organization faces with Salesforce. Wether you are rolling it out brand new, you’re rolling out a new module, shifting the way that you’re changing it, adding an integration Salesforce adoption is always a bit of a challenge.

So today we’re really excited to have Larry Hill, who thinks specifically about opportunity management and how to drive adoption in that particular use case. And before we kick it off with Larry, I want to talk to you just a little bit about the user adoption framework that I came up with for my PhD dissertation just to recenter everybody on the way that we get adults excited about using technology that maybe we’re really pumped about, but they aren’t necessarily on board with yet.

And I say yet because I know it can be done! So just to orient you to all of the research that I did, it was a qualitative research study and I had to review a hundred pieces of literature that talked about software, CRM software, how it could be adopted. And so I centered on three eventual seminal theories that would tie together to talk about CRM adoption.

And those are change management theory, which is how do you excite somebody to change the way that they are doing things? Knowing full well that adults like to just keep doing things the way that they’re already doing them because it’s easiest and are heuristics, our synapses say, just travel down the path of least resistance.

So thinking about change management is a critical way to help people to start to use the system, process or technology a little bit better than they are now. Next is the diffusion of innovations theory, which is just like when you think about, I think about it like a hair diffuser. How do you spread an idea?

So how do you make sure that this concept is accepted and also pulled forward by most people? And so when you think about. A new piece of technology or a new solution, particularly when we’re thinking about the life sciences, you’re often saying, how do we get people to accept that there’s a new way to do something and that they should be excited about it?

And this diffusion of Innovations theory centers around that typical bell-shaped curve that you see if you’ve read the book, crossing the Chasm. You’re gonna be familiar with this. If you haven’t, I recommend you read it right away. It is interesting reading. It is not light reading. You know it’s not gonna be your beach book that you’re gonna take and open up and have yourself an adult beverage.

But it is well worth your time if you have not Red Crossing the Chasm. It talks about the majority and how to motivate the majority to use something really critical for us when we’re in regulated environments like the life sciences on how we get people to adopt our theories, I. And Shauna, you mentioned Kappas before.

Even when we think about something like a Kappa, nobody’s really pumped to do one, but we need them to do it. So when you’re thinking about an idea in this regulated environment, spreading the concept and getting people understanding and accepting is critical for diffusion. And then finally is adult learning theory.

And I think that’s what Larry’s gonna be talking about most today in his application. And that is. Adults choose to learn because they want to. So hopefully nobody is here today against their will. You’re here because you’re interested in learning about the topic. This is totally different than children, right?

Pedagogy that PED beginning, is the same as pediatrics. That tells you it’s about children. Children don’t have a choice. They have to go to school. They have to learn. They have to learn the things that you know have been set about. For them, for regulations, adult or adults are not quite the same.

We opt into learning, we spend more time learning the things that interest us. So the combination of those three theories make a framework that helps to drive user adoption when you’re thinking about any system, but particularly Salesforce and particularly in the life sciences, which are, come with a very heavy use case.

I am happy to introduce everybody to my friend and now yours, Larry Hill, because if you’re not connected to Larry on LinkedIn, I really recommend you do and Larry’s gonna talk to us a little bit today about a theory that he had about opportunity management that would help users to use it. And so Larry, I’m going to kick it over to you.

Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Shannon. Yeah. The basic idea, I’ve been a CRM user for. Gosh, going back to act in the nineties, so pretty close to 30 years. And I I have to admit, I I never met one I really liked, never met one I really liked to use. I mean it I constantly would think, did they talk to a salesperson when they designed this app?

Like a lot of people I got into Salesforce in God, I think going back in 2011 when it was just classic, which is basically fields on a database, but it was on the cloud and I didn’t have to manage, earlier systems. I’d had to sync them with a laptop. The sync always broke. You didn’t know whether you were taking your contacts with you when you were going off someplace.

There were just myriad problems with the original client server. Approach there. So what we’ve what I’ve done since is, is basically a couple years ago Salesforce came out with a new a PIA new technology called Lightning Web Components. And if you’ve noticed regular lightning speed up in the last three, four years, it’s because they’re rewriting all of those base components into lightning web components.

And that is, that’s been it’s the next generation of development framework replacing aura. It’s the whole future of Salesforce. It also happens to be a lot more efficient. So you can, and you can do some very interesting things in terms of user experienced. So speaking to Shannon’s theories there certainly the adult learning theory, you gotta give something people something that’s easy to learn.

But it’s also exciting. So I would say within the change management typically when salespeople see this application that I’ve created, which is the express console, they get real excited because, the bottom line on it is it’s about 50% of the clicks. Needed to manage opportunities. And I focused on opportunities because if you really think of it, that’s the, that is the guts of a salesperson’s day.

 Once a deal. They may or may not be doing prospecting, but what most of enterprise reps are doing is trying to close deals. So ideally, they would spend 80% of their day on their pipeline working deals. So I’ve taken that as an assumption. I’ve reimagined the entire opportunity management tab within lightning.

So I guess if I’m good to share here, I will give you a look right, right now. We’ll do for the entire screen confirmed to me if we can see that. Looks good, Larry. Yeah, so this is the Familiar Lightning. This is the lightning everybody’s, been using for years. And it does have the flexibility.

Salesforce had an interesting premise. What is it? I guess eight or nine years ago now. When they created Lightning was to do a no code capability to. Move, resize and position components are out on a screen. Great idea. And you can argue, you could argue that in combination with being first to the cloud and flexibility, that’s what has gotten them a number one position in the marketplace larger than the next, four or five vendors out there.

Who talks about, who even knows who number two is, right? It’s it’s such a massive difference. They came up with a very interesting idea. Unfortunately, they did it a little bit before Web 2.0. Standards were out, so it was a little slow, a little clunky. It was a misnomer lightning back in the day because it was really slow.

It was much slower than classic. Pretty much everybody knows that. That’s no secret. They had sped it up. I don’t know if it’s the same speed as classic is these days, but it does give you that flexibility with, what they had called no code. They’re now calling low code. If you want to do some, some special things, some flows and so forth, but it gives you u you know, user interface that looks pretty much like this.

And you’ll just see this is the opportunity tab, regular lightning opportunity tab. Now a couple issues with it. First of all, they’ve architected it so it could squeeze down into a a, an iPad, right? So there’s a lot of wasted space. So if you take a look, you’re looking at 40% of the screen here, and you get to see what six con six activities, not, in a lot of white space.

If you want to take a look at stage history here it gives you a little bit of a history. You can go out to view all, but gives you a a huge. Grid that it’s hard to pick out the difference of what, like what actually happened from time to time. So taking, taking this as the base, which is, it’s usable, but from my perspective, it’s not ideal.

I created the express console. I. As you can see, it’s a much cleaner, more compact user interface than you get in regular lightning. Now, very importantly, it just shows up as another tab. So if if you’ve got a bunch of tabs, which everybody does in your lightning setup all you gotta do is just add this tab in, put it wherever you want it.

All the other ones still work just fine. Opportunities are still there. But the the express console is a tab and it focuses just on opportunity management. So I’ve taken I’ve got a couple of different views that I’ll go through. We’ll start with the pipeline view, ’cause that’s where most salespeople live.

If you think a day in the life I. Salesperson comes down in the morning and go, okay, where am I with all these deals? What have I gotta do? Which rocks do I have to push uphill today to try and get towards a deal? And this actually parallels the manual process that I used for years, which is just an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper that had all my deals.

Down down the one side with tasks associated with it. And it gave me some sense of where I was in each one of the each one of the deals. So what I’ve tried to do is mirror that to a certain extent, but with a an electronic approach to it. So the basic idea here is you can see two screens.

Like act, 25 years ago if you click on something on the left, you get the details on the right. Very simple. And I, so I, what I’ve tried to do is take a, again, a more compact view of this. So if you take a look at a given deal, and I’ll pick the edge one. You get, you can you’ve got a section here for products where you can add products. You’ve got a stage history. Now you compare this to the one I just showed you in lightning. And I don’t know if you can see on the Zoom, but there is a, there’s a highlighting behind each change that was made to the deal.

Sales managers love this, ’cause they can look very easily and see what the progression of a deal was. Key tasks. So if your sales methodology uses. Tasks for a for opportunities and like key ones to switch between or to move from one stage to another. These, very easy to fill in here.

Then they’re recorded for anyone’s review. I built in contact roles here. One of the issues that I always ran into with regular Salesforce is you have for an opportunity, there’s just way too many activities in a deal, and it’s hard to pick out between emails and left messages and all that.

Flutter out there. So what I’ve done is I’ve made it easy to assign roles here. You just jump right out to the regular Salesforce role assignment. And this is this is very typical of this, the express console. It’s built to interoperate with all the rest of, lightning. So it’s easy to jump out to.

A different page, a regular lightning page, and then with a single click, and in about a quarter of a second, you’re right back to where you were. Hey Larry, can I pause you here because Oh, sure. I think you’re talking about something that is interesting for everybody, and I know Shauna managed or. M Shauna me messaged us, told us about how she’s using an application that helps to track Kappas.

And so I think this is a good time for us to pause and just talk strategically or philosophically about what is the difference between using having a Salesforce native application, the Salesforce sort of standard view and standard objects. I framing in an integration that sends you out.

And I think this is really critical to the adoption conversation. And if you wouldn’t mind, Larry, just talking to us a little bit philosophically about, the way that you can build on Salesforce and then specifically how you chose to build express console so that it sat natively inside of Salesforce.

Yeah. And that is crucial. The, I don’t I’m not sure on the, app you were talking about though, that it was track watch, right? If it’s a, if it’s a Salesforce app, I’m guessing that it shows up in the same way the express console does as just more tabs, or do you have a completely different user interface?

Your interface that I’m viewing here looks very similar to what I’m working off of. Ah, okay. Okay. So you would have, you had, you would’ve tabs for the various track watch functions across the top here in the same way that Lightning does? That is correct. Okay. Yeah, so I think, what was important in our design was that the problem with third party apps, there’s a lot of apps that connect to Salesforce and you live in sales in that app, and it just accesses the data in Salesforce, admins have gotta maintain that, and those integrations break all the time.

You have different releases. Most of them say that it’s a major pain for them, to have, to maintain those. Plus you have a completely different user interface. What I’ve shot for here is if you, you notice all the icons, the fonts, the colors, everything here is pretty much the same as regular Salesforce.

So it’s gonna be familiar. Tool rep as they come in, it’ll just be easier to use and it could coexist with any other applications that you’ve got that use the same approach of just inserting their own tab. Does that make sense?

Yes, it truly makes sense. Although some of the components here that you’re mentioning are not things that we use on my platform, but i, it I am understanding where you’re going with this. Yeah. We’re one of your reps, they use opportunities, right? They track opportunities within Salesforce?

No, we don’t. Like I said, it’s just a repository for management of Kappas. We track the. Creation, the establishment of the Kappa and the process, the workflow along the way of managing the Kappa. That’s pretty much all we do in this platform. Oh, okay. But did they, within Salesforce, did they manage opportunities there?

The sales people? So I don’t know what other departments or other functional areas use sales, use the platform for. I can only speak to my small component of work. Okay. Okay. The, the best practice out there certainly is to use opportunities for the salespeople. If they’re chasing deals typically the opportunity is the container for that.

And what I’ve tried to do is make it much easier for you to manage that. So if you take a look at most sort of forecast screens. They’re most people still using Excel. Some people are using the Salesforce forecasting app now, but it’s basically a grid, that, that looks like this.

And what you get is, you get certain columns and, you may or may not be able to sort on those. But basically it’s just what are the numbers, right? And the innovation that I’ve tried to do. With the express consoles to say what, what, if you could actually look into that opportunity and see the last, I don’t know, four or five, six, maybe even as much as 10 different activities that have gone on with that that opportunity.

And then within those wouldn’t it be great instead of going off to a different screen if you got a popup by hovering on any one of them and you could just very quickly investigate different. Activities like that. And then wouldn’t it be great also if that ended up if it opened in edit mode?

Because one, one of my, the biggest pains that I’ve got with regular Salesforce is you have to go find the thing you wanna edit, and then you gotta go into edit mode. It’s another response time cycle, and then you gotta save it. And it’s just, it’s too long for either notes or or different activities.

So what I’ve done here is that all of the popups. In this app show up in edit mode, so I can just type and it takes me to the end of each section. And then if the various fields have already been filled in status, priority and everything, and I’ve done an edit, it takes me straight to save and I can just save it very quickly.

So it, it makes editing of different items within Salesforce much easier. You’ve also got the situation that I mentioned before where Salesforce, every time you click on an object. A contact an opportunity or an account takes you off to a different screen and then you’ve gotta come back. So what I’ve built into this is the ability for for cascading.

So within the contact, if you want to take a look what’s an email and send a quick email, you can do it right there much easier. If you, I want to take a look further at the company. I’ll get some company information here and then I can use the right hand side of the screen to expand out and that company pops up on the right side.

Larry, can you talk to us about the cascading, because I don’t know that I’ve seen this in any other application, and I am interested in the way that you can stay in one screen without, having to open new ones. Is that something that, is it native? Is it something that we could do to other apps that we’re using?

It’s funny and I’ll, you can pin it here. I showed this to a Salesforce user experience product manager four years ago. I kept looking inside lightning for, something to show up and I finally, about a year ago, found the first cascading popup. I think it’s the future of user experience here.

Yeah. Not to overstate it, but personally I am tired of going off to different screens, having to come back, going off to different screens and having to come back. Yeah. I think users don’t anytime you take a user out of the environment that they’re in, it becomes frustrating and, challenging to follow along with.

And as you’re showing this, I’m like, wow, I would really to, I would really to have this in everything I use in Salesforce. And even beyond, if you take, I got this original idea from Wikipedia of all places. If you take a look at a Wikipedia page and it’s got all these hot links that you can hover on and it gives you the top five or six lines of the article that it would take you to.

And I just thought that was great. But, then I was thinking between the three contacts, accounts and opportunities, I’m always wanting to switch back and forth and see the key information. Like with, what’s the title? What’s the email address, so forth. And then I built in some flexibility here that says if the information that I want to see is not here, got a little lightning icon and it will take you straight out to the default page layout for that object.

So this is my default for contact Sean Forbes. And you’ve got the, the typical sales force. You gotta choose one. The other here. But then you can go very quickly and I’ll say when I hit click so you can see how fast this is. So click and you are literally exactly back where you were in the express console.

And the other piece of that, this dual sort of dual display mode is I can do a completely different search over here on the right side and jump into a contact. Totally independent of the left side. So they’re not tied. Anything you click over here shows up on the right, but you can do an entirely independent.

And then there’s, within that any object that you want to click on, you can go to that one and it gives you the little breadcrumb trail here. So the original idea for this was for laptops back in the day when people, salespeople went out on the road and they were in a hotel room one morning getting ready for the day.

What I try to do is make, put the most functionality into basically a single laptop screen. So that’s where the dual comes. So you can, you, this one can operate as a completely separate display, or it can be a slave to the one on the left. And any of the objects, as I mentioned before that you’ve got here, can be expanded out to the right side if you wanna see more details.

So I’ve been thinking this is where, when you say 50% fewer clicks this is how this application is much easier for salespeople to use than, you might you might find in regular lightning. And it’s got a, it’s got a number of different, shortcuts in it. Like I’ve got a little expand here.

One of my pains with Salesforce is that there’s always a a scroll or you get this tiny little space that you have to drag and drop. So what I’ve built into it is a quick ability to go to almost full screen height. When you’re taking a look at a note add something in, go right to save.

And you’ve updated the the note so you can it’s much easier to operate with as a salesperson because one of the, one of the issues, if you’re in any kind of a complex territory, there’s a lot of to-dos. There’s a lot of things to keep track of. So what I also built into this app is an integrated to-do list.

This is basically any item that has today’s date on it. So you put a, activity with today’s date or as you come into a new day, anything that you put out into the future that has this date, shows up right here with the same, ability to, hover and cascade. If I wanna make a I wanna make a phone call and I’ve got telephony set up.

I could just click on this and make a phone call. It’s a, whoops, it’s a much easier way of managing your tasks and something you might not have seen in Salesforce before, but drag and drop, what do you say? So what I’ve done here is I’ve got all the calls I’m gonna make today, all the other tasks that I need to do, and then if I’ve got my calendar integrated I’ve got my events and lightning web components lets you do some interesting things like.

Salesforce does not itself have a separate call activity. It’s a subtype, but there’s no way in regular Salesforce to distinguish between calls and salespeople like to say, you know what? I gotta block an hour and I’m gonna make some calls this morning. And wouldn’t it be nice to be able to put these all in one place?

So the way we’ve done it is that within the code, if the first word of inactivity is call, it shows up here and. You can be clever about it. It doesn’t, there’s no redundancy in in terms of call jack. Call Edna. Call Bill. We can actually strip that out for this display and just say you’re making calls and this is who you’re calling and what you’re calling about.

So it makes to-dos much easier and it. It begins to incent salespeople to actually keep their tasks inside Salesforce, which is a huge bonus for sales management. Could gi, it gives an order of magnitude more, more view, more data for a deal. Sales manager can see a lot more of what’s going on inside a deal.

If all of the tasks, for that deal show up, right here within the application and also stripped out. You can do things like. Hide email activities. ’cause there’s a lot of dreck, in any activity list of Salesforce and most of it is emails that were, are con establishing and confirming meetings.

There’s 50 of ’em there. You ready? No change time. No change time. Everybody in? No, I’m in. No. Can we change the time? You want to cut all that out so you can dig right into exactly what is going on? What are the, the logged calls. And the activities going on with a given opportunity.

Let me pause there, see if we can, yeah. This is awesome, Larry. I think you, what you’ve shown us is a lot of the art of the possible, the things that could be done in Salesforce that, would help to drive user adoption. I think you’ve really been thoughtful about the end user and a lot of times we see gorgeous technology that sort of forgets about the user experience and yeah.

Time you drag down on somebody’s. Process. It really it makes them more hesitant to use the platform. And I think, express Console is a, is the future of opportunity management. And as a sales user, I would absolutely love this. I think, just before we wrap. I do wanna invite everybody to let me know if there’s a topic or a speaker that you want.

I can reach out to the Salesforce community and Salesforce themselves to help us bring on the people that we would love to hear speak. I do wanna remind everybody that we do have this meeting typically once a month at 11:00 AM Eastern on the second Friday. Our July speaker on July 11th is gonna be Brian Murphy, who is gonna talk us, talk to us about architecting for Success and using discovery as a consultation tool when thinking about Salesforce architecture, which is gonna be absolutely incredible.

So I invite everybody to join for that. If you yourself. Have a topic that you’d like to bring. We’d love to hear it. This is the community for those of us in the life sciences who are using Salesforce. So while we love and respect our friends in healthcare, we are specifically focused on the life sciences disciplines here.

The Pharma MedTech, clinical Research, diagnostics, genomics that is the tribe that we are looking for and looking to attract. So please do invite your friends. We would love to have them here. I think it is exciting to be in this growing community of people who are here to answer your questions.

You can’t necessarily call your competitor and say, Hey, friend over there what are you doing? But this is a group of people who are willing to be helpful and share. Larry, I appreciate so much you giving us this demo today and sharing. I know I’ve got one interesting question that. I think everybody might be curious to know about.

And that is when you were looking at the security review process, when you submitted Express Console to Salesforce, how long did it take for them to approve your application? It was a couple of months and because frankly, my app broke the security application, they were not set up to, evaluate lightning web components.

Wow. I was probably the first big application to go through the process and it broke it and they came back and said no, you failed. You gotta change it. You gotta take this, and this out. And I said, yeah, those are the key functions in the application. We’re not taking those out. And I actually I had an excellent partner at a company called Extension.

And literally the general manager of Extension knew the head of the app exchange and called him up and said, Hey, it’s me. We’re not trying to fake anything here. You’re, you can’t evaluate a Lightning web components app. Trust me, this one’s good. And it got it through, but that’s literally what it took.

It took months. That’s so cool. Thanks for sharing that with us because, looking at the group that we have today, I know everybody on here is now or was an end user first, and I think we’re always wondering what happens behind that big green curtain at Salesforce. It’s absolutely necessary.

They’ve gotta, they gotta vet it ’cause they’re letting you inside. I don’t have to have a data center. My data center is Salesforce’s data center. And so it’s a very valid process, but they’re the automatic, the algorithm, they’ve got to evaluate they need to keep it up to date so that they can evaluate things like lightning web components.

Larry for everybody who’s watching this recording, and I think the people who we’re on now, I think we’re always curious about like where to find the next kind of like big idea in Salesforce. So you’re like obviously a really plugged in person a ton of people in the ecosystem.

So like where are you going to learn about some of the awesome new products that maybe people aren’t hearing about. I do I peruse the app exchange. I’m always looking at, competitors there. That’s a, that, that’s the obvious place to look. I’ve got some Google searches out there on, Salesforce announcement, but it’s usually events, yeah. I take a look at their release notes. I was, before I even envisioned doing the express console here, I was always excited about like what do they, what do they got new in terms of user experience? And I found that each, you know what three releases a year? There was almost nothing like they, they froze lightning and they said it is good enough for demos.

We’re not gonna make it do a lot of innovating. Now they’ve sped it up and they’ve done some interesting things and they do, I can’t even remember where that cascading popup is, but they did have the idea of trying out a cascading popup. But I, I look at the notes for Salesforce and then I, I’ve got a bunch of, google search is out there in terms of what else new, new is coming along, and certainly there are some, but Salesforce has a lock on the, the CRM business here, and I typically look to them first for innovations and I don’t see a lot in terms of user experience.

I think events definitely makes sense. But it’s gonna be an interesting next couple years, that’s for sure. Larry thanks for answering my question. I appreciate you. Sure. One, the one quickie there is artificial intelligence has absolutely buried everything for the last year.

Mark Benioff said, thou shalt not speak about anything agent Force about nine months ago, and. It’s funny, I went to one of the last world tour in New York back in November, and I walked up to a number of booths and said, so show me your agent force demo. And there was like five seconds of awkward silence.

And I finally said, just kidding. I know nobody’s got one yet. And they all laughed and said, oh yeah, you’re right, God, we’re working on it, but we don’t really have anything yet. So I’m still waiting for that. Is it the future? Absolutely. I’d love to be able to talk to Salesforce and say, bring up my three deals with these three conditions and not type anything.

That’d be super. And I’m gonna follow on. I’m, frankly, I’m looking for what, what’s the first killer AI app or function that pops up? And the nice thing about lightning web components is I can build that right in. I can put a button someplace. It’s easy, but I haven’t seen a consensus yet on what’s, what people consider usefully cool. I love that. Usefully-Cool. Sounds like a band name. So catch Larry and his band Usefully. Cool soon. Thank you so much, Larry, for presenting today. Thank you everybody for joining. I wish everybody a beautiful restful and unremarkable weekend and I will see you all soon.

Thanks for joining!

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