Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we have another Lightning Champion Spotlight episode. We talk with Martin Humpolec, a Salesforce Consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. This episode is part five of a six-part series, the Lightning Champions Spotlight, hosted by Kelly Walker, Senior Adoption Consultant at Salesforce. We talk to our amazing Lightning Champions to find out about their career journey, how it lead them to the Lightning Experience, advice on handling change management, and why Lightning Experience is so awesome.

Join us as we talk about how Martin uses Flow to make a big difference for his users, and how you can get started today.

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

Diving into the community.

When Martin was on paternal leave, he ended up with a little time on his hands. He kept on hearing about something called “Salesforce,” and since this was in the days before Trailhead he went over to Salesforce.com to get a free developer instance to play around in and the documentation he needed to get started. “That was seven years ago, and those seven years passed really quickly,” he says. These days, he’s an active member of the community, writing blog posts, speaking at conferences, and getting involved any way he can.

Recently, Martin’s been discovering the magic that is Lightning. “In Classic, we weren’t really able to change the page layout,” Martin says, “but in Lightning with the Lightning App Builder, we are really able to change the screen as much as we want.” With dynamic options, tabs, and prettier reports, you can do so much more for your users without needing developer skills. This can help drive adoption and make a difference in your organization.

How to get started with Flow.

Flow is a powerful tool that can really transform people’s day-to-day experiences. “I use the ability to embed the Flow to the record page itself to show related data,” Martin says, making it easier to pull up key information when you’re working with a particular record or opportunity. For one client, they can display a sorted list of all notes they have about a particular customer on any opportunity that comes up, regardless of how it enters their database. “The client is so happy because it finally makes sense to them and it’s so easy to use and it brings new functionality that they didn’t have before,” Martin says.

If you’re a little intimidated by Flow, Martin’s advice is to dive in. “I hear quite often from people asking how they can start with Flow because it’s so complex,” he says, but the UI has gotten easier to work with and there are even templates you can use to understand everything more easily. Trailhead can also help, with modules specifically designed to help you get off the ground. For additional resources, Martin recommends Jen Lee’s Salesforce Blog and Rakesh Gupta’s Automation Champion blog. One big tip he has is to always draw out what you’re trying to achieve.

Why Lightning is just so darn cool.

Besides Flow, Martin loves a few other Lightning features. There’s Path, which helps you customize what your users see at each stage and helps them decide what to do next. He’s also a passionate fan of the Kanban view, which lets you see opportunities from a different perspective. “When I showed it to one customer he was like, ‘Now I suddenly understand my business because I can visually see how we should move the opportunities from left to right, from negotiation to win,’” Martin says. “That was the highlight of Lightning for him,” he says, “he didn’t need anything else, just the Kanban view.”

Dashboards can also be a big difference-maker if you’re trying to get executive buy-in to make the switch to Lightning. “It’s so sexy,” Martin says, “it might sound cheap but basically that’s the main difference to me.” In Classic, you’re constrained to just three columns with every component taking up the same amount of space. In Lightning, you can adjust the look of your dashboards to really make them pop. “I don’t need anything else,” he says, “it just looks good.”

Resources

Trailhead

• Build Your Consulting Career on Salesforce
• Lightning App Builder: Record Page

Blogs 

• Salesforce Admins: Automation
• Jen Lee: Schedule a Flow
• Rakesh Gupta: Automation Champion

Social

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Kelly: @HeadInTheClowdz

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Full Show Transcript

Kelly Walker: Welcome to the Salesforce Lightning Champion Spotlight on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. My name is Kelly Walker and I am a senior adoption consultant here at Salesforce. I also have the amazing opportunity of working closely with the awesome trailblazers who are passionate about Lightning and have become Lightning champions to evangelize the power of Lightning. In this mini-series, we will be talking to six awesome Lightning champions to talk about their career journey, how it led them to the Lightning experience, advice on handling change management, and to focus on their stories of why Lightning experience is so awesome.