Every year, Salesforce rolls out a comprehensive update for its platform, but this year that update is more substantial than ever. Launching as a pilot at Dreamforce and scheduled to be available in Propertybase by Spring 2016 is the Lightning Experience for Salesforce – a fundamental reimagining of the Salesforce interface and its core features as a modern, visually stunning CRM.
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##Salesforce Lightning Interface is Great for Propertybase Clients
This change is going to revolutionize the Salesforce user interface, once again establishing force.com as the number one platform for business apps in contact management, sales, marketing, and business intelligence. Sales Cloud, the flagship platform for Salesforce’s numerous CRM and marketing tools, is dated. As part of a 16-year old platform, it’s no surprise that, while powerful, the experience leaves something to be desired, especially when compared to the robust and visually stunning software products currently on the market.
The changes in Lightning are based on direct feedback from Salesforce’s 150,000 customers, and as a result, the experience is highly customizable within the new modern user interface. On the backend, the Lightning App Builder and Components are designed for easy optimization and customization, a perfect fit for anyone with object-oriented programming background. It’s opening up new opportunities for anyone to customize the platform to fit their needs, while unifying the mobile and desktop experience.
The resulting Sales Cloud revamp offers 25 new features including aggregated information from Account Insights, relevant news updates for accounts and prospects and a new Assistant feature that will recommend actions even if those actions have not been previously scheduled.
Users will be able to email and send files to contacts from within Salesforce, and the new four-column dashboard allows for high levels of customization and easy access to the most important information in the system. The bottom line is that this new platform is a great fit for Propertybase customers because it represents so much of what you have been asking for from Salesforce. The resulting Salesforce for real estate platform is a representation of those needs.
##Propertybase Takes Lightning One Step Further
Despite the launch of the new Lightning Interface and updates to the app building blocks, Salesforce is still missing some important features that make your use of the CRM as easy as possible. These include:
###A Lightweight Single Page Application for Ultra Fast Navigation
The improvements in Lightning make the interface vastly better than its predecessor, but the fast moving world of UI has shown us through recent trends that “single page applications” can provide, for certain tasks, an even faster user experience.
Propertybase offers this extra life of accessibility within the Salesforce Lightning Interface, combining the best of both worlds. It’s now possible to quickly flip through a list of contacts using your keyboard, check off tasks as you would in a simple to do list like Wunderlist, and then quickly switch to the full heavyweight Salesforce view to see a comprehensive record for a contact. That level of ease and flexibility is a must.
###Smart List Views for Intelligent Interaction with Your Data
Because many agents have limited access to the report builder and other data aggregating tools in Salesforce, accessing data from multiple objects has been challenging, bordering on impossible. Imagine a query like “all contacts who haven’t been called in the last four weeks” or “accounts with purchases in excess of $XX last year”.
If these are essential and you are trying to teach your average user how to build them with a grouped report, things get challenging fast. Even then, what do you do with that data – print the report? You can’t within the standard setup.
Through Propertybase browsers, building lists is easier than ever – allowing users to work with data interactively, calling individuals, sending personalized emails to the contacts in a list, etc. Standard Salesforce doesn’t allow this level of easy interaction, even within the new Lightning interface.
###A Personal Email & Print Campaign Tool with Pixel-Perfect PDF Generation
Salesforce campaign tools are powerful, but not every agent has access to them. As such, sending personalized emails to multiple recipients, while possible, was not very easy. These tools are designed for the marketing team and result in unwanted overhead and excess feature bloat, when all you really wanted to do was send a quick reminder to anyone who attended last week’s open house.
There are other features that required equally bloated add-ons like Conga Composer. If all you want is a simple signup form for your next event or a handful of postcards or letters to go out, it could turn into a complicated, time consuming process that required multiple tools to make happen.
Combined with the smart lists that are generated in Propertybase, allowing agents to build these lists with just a few clicks and export them for mail merge or personalized emails, Lightning makes all of this much easier and requires far less excess input from unneeded third party add-ons.
##How Lighting Will Impact Your Salesforce Experience
The new Lightning Experience for Salesforce moves the user interface and overall platform in the right direction, but leaves key questions unanswered. Propertybase for Lightning addresses a number of these questions, especially for those in the real estate industry.
With what we believe is the fastest and smartest interface for agents to navigate data and interact with their contacts, Propertybase is a good fit for both new and existing Salesforce users who will be delving into Lightning and its collection of new interface and features with the coming updates.
