For most of my 40-year career in technology, I’ve searched for a CRM system designed around the specific needs and habits of a salesperson. In my experience, corporate CRM systems were usually little more than a glorified Rolodex – a place to store Account and Contact information. And poorly kept ones at that, with incomplete, duplicated and conflicting data.
Salesforce was a major step forward in the evolution of CRM, forsaking the misguided notion of storing a personal sub-set of the database on the desktop/laptop (with all the ensuing chaos around data synchronization) and instead moving the entire system to the Cloud.
With a “No Code” philosophy, Salesforce overran the entrenched vendors like Act on the desktop and Siebel in the datacenter with its new cloud platform. But the initial offering was essentially just fields on a database that you could arrange in two columns, within a set of standard tabs (Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, etc.) arranged across the top of the screen. Like Henry Ford said, “You can have any color you want, so long as it’s black.”
So when the Lightning User Experience was announced in 2014, it was a breakthrough in cloud UI design. Sticking to its No Code philosophy, Salesforce came up with a clever strategy of moveable components (not unlike many current dashboard systems) that provided a world of flexible UI control while still avoiding the need for procedural coding.
But its multiple software layers and independently rendered components made the Lightning UI a little clunky. Many users found it more difficult and less efficient to use than the original version (now called “Classic,” like the original Coca-Cola) because it often required more clicks to accomplish a task. And complaints about its performance took up many pages in the Salesforce online communities. In 2019, a Salesforce Product Manager told me that the company had only just passed the 50% adoption mark for Lightning in Q3 of that year, over five years after its first introduction.
So the announcement in 2019 of Salesforce’s next-generation architecture – Lightning Web Components, or “LWC” – made a lot of sense. With a reasonably mature set of Web 2.0 industry standards finally in place, including a robust HTML5 model that distributed a large part of the processing to the client browser, Salesforce was taking a giant leap by allowing third-party developers to create applications with their own user interfaces for the Salesforce platform.
Think about that for a minute. What other major application vendor has ever allowed the market to create an independent UI for its own proprietary engine? I imagine there are examples that are beyond my experience, but when I discovered LWC I realized that I would be able to implement my own vision of a CRM UI that was optimized for salesperson usability. And it could run on the most functional and widely-used CRM engine on the market – right alongside the standard tabs!
In the three years since, LWC has made that goal possible. By enabling powerful UI techniques like multi-level pop-ups, drag-and-drop actions, default edit mode, smart cursor actions and virtual “next step” designation, LWC allowed Leaping Fox to create an extension of Lightning that is still fully Salesforce, but provides a bevy of usability features that can make the difference between salespeople using Salesforce in just a minimal fashion, and “living in it” to do their jobs.
That product is called The Express Console for Sales Cloud, and it is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.