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Salesforce Gives Its Core Sales Platform A Long Overdue Facelift

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After a slew of new products that have looked to bring it into mobile and analytics, Salesforce is finally giving its core product a facelift. While Salesforce now wears many hats, its most important customer is still a company’s sales team. On Tuesday, Marc Benioff’s company has announced that those salespeople are getting new dashboards more befitting the bleeding edge of sales software.

The announcement is for Lightning, a rebranding and overhaul of the Sales Cloud platform within Salesforce’s portfolio. It builds off of Salesforce’s mobile platform announced in 2013 and an update it announced at its annual conference last October, also called Lightning, which made it much easier to customize and build apps for mobile. Now Salesforce has essentially taken the same strategy and applied it to its desktop experience as its own version of application, with a new, more dynamic, homepage and the ability to more easily surface charts and data within individual leads or internal chats.

With Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event just a few days away, it’s somewhat surprising that the company’s preempted its own big reveal by announcing Lightning in late August. But Salesforce executive Mike Rosenbaum says that the company wanted it publicly available as soon as it was ready, and with more runway up to the company’s major October software update. Lightning is now available in preview ahead of that launch for the company’s 150,000 sales cloud customers.

While Salesforce has had 147 updates to its sales software over the years, the company will be telling customers and Wall Street that this one is different. “I think this is the most important release we’ve ever done,” says Rosenbaum. “This is a brand new Salesforce across every single device.”

Salesforce has been working fulltime on Lightning for nine months, and partners like Apttus, DocuSign, Financial Force and and Accenture are already playing with building new components or bringing it to customers.

Salesforce1 Lightning was critical for the user experience with Salesforce as the company moved to a mix of mobile and web use, says IDC analyst Bo Lykkegaard. Adds his colleague Micahel Fauscette: “UI and overall user experience is more important than ever for driving adoption and use of any tool.”

It would make sense, then that Salesforce bring the best practices from that effort back into its original staple, its Sales Cloud desktop experience. In a demo before the announcement, product marketer Lynne Zaledonis showed Forbes the new dashboard. It looked sleeker, with charts more prominently displayed and able to be played with, and a task management bar below to help a user plan their workday.

Zaledonis, a former sales manager, said that the new design better fits how a salesperson wants to do work. “When I open the page, I want to do things. Book calls, create tasks, check progress. We redesigned the experience to lay out best practices for what sales people actually do.” For internal communications, users can now embed charts into the group chat flow, and can hover over customers to get a breakdown of their account. “That way I make sure I’m not walking into a burning building.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that CEO Benioff and other Salesforce executives will spend a lot of time at Dreamforce showing off early uses of “Lightning Experience,” but now customers so inclined will have some early perspective and feedback to give when they show up at the event, San Francisco’s largest trade event of the year. In advance of it, Salesforce also announced another new product: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, what it’s billing as its industry-specific product.

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