How to Enable Kanban View in Salesforce

Salesforce empowers sales organizations to optimize their pipelines by staying data-informed, accessing information in real time, and collaborating effectively across teams. One of the most powerful (and often underutilized) ways it does this is through the Kanban View.

Salesforce Kanban View gives sales teams a high-level visualization of the entire sales pipeline, enabling them to easily see, edit, and move opportunities through its stages, see the number of deals and total dollar amounts tied up in each stage, and collaborate to keep opportunities moving forward.

When used effectively, Kanban can seriously elevate your team’s pipeline management efficiency by powering collaboration, creating accountability, and keeping teams and managers informed at a higher level.

Let’s take a deeper look at the Kanban methodology and how you can start using it today in your Salesforce Lightning platform.

Quick Takeaways

The Kanban Methodology originated in the 1940s and is now a widely adopted system used by software development teams to stay agile and optimize workflow.
Kanban View in Salesforce is a powerful tool that gives sales teams a high-level view of the entire pipeline and empowers better workflow management and collaboration.
Kanban View can be easily enabled in Salesforce Lightning and offers customization tools so it can be tailored to the specific needs of the sales team.

What is Kanban anyway?

Kanban Origins

Kanban is a Japanese word meaning “visual signal,” and the first Kanban system was developed by industrial engineer and businessman Taiichi Ohno, who implemented it as a planning system for Toyota automotive in the 1940s.

Toyota used Kanban to better align inventory and consumption on its factory floors. Today it’s used across many industries and even by individuals for personal time management. It’s most widely known as an agile method used by software development teams to increase flexibility, accelerate output, and stay more transparent throughout the development cycle.

The Kanban Method

The Kanban Method is a pull system designed to optimize workflow and resources. To this end, Kanban is centered around six core practices.

Six Core Practices of Kanban

Visual Workflow – Using a Kanban board (more on that later) to understand workflow; specifically, the steps a product follows from initial request to delivered product.

Limit Work in Progress (WIP) – Limiting work in progress (WIP) to ensure outstanding work is completed before new work is started.

Manage Flow – Observing workflow with the goal of maximizing efficiency.

Make Process Policies Explicit – Clearly defining processes and consistently communicating them to all teams and individuals.

Use Feedback Loops – Meeting frequently to share feedback across the entire team.

Improve Collaboratively – Remaining committed as a group to continuous, incremental change that ultimately becomes evolutionary.

The method itself is practiced by focusing on the parts of the workflow — in general: to do, in progress, and completed. Workflows can be adjusted or built to meet the specific needs of the team.

Kanban Boards

A Kanban board is the visual tool used to actually practice the Kanban methodology. It relies on visual signals (like post-its) to move products and projects through the workflow columns on the board. Boards can be physical or virtual, and while some prefer a physical board, virtual boards offer collaborative 24/7 accessibility from any location that’s integral for many teams today.

The purpose of the Kanban board is to make the workflow visual and standardized so that teams can work in real time to continuously complete tasks, identify and resolve issues, and communicate to improve processes.

Kanban as a Powerful Salesforce Tool

Kanban can be used for almost any object in Salesforce and is a powerful, visual way to bring together teams around initiatives, tasks, user stories, features, or other “work units” to prioritize and report progress.

Planning/managing features in a product release (apps like LEXIdeas by Rainmaker are a great way to source ideas for new features)
Managing development work like user stories (used in agile methodology to describe a feature from a user point of view) and tasks (provide to-do items that need to be completed) in a collaborative way
Collaborating on video or content production within a media production team
Visualizing opportunities within pipeline stages

How to Enable Kanban View in Salesforce

Kanban View provides a high-level visual summary of all opportunities within a sales path and gives sales reps a better ability to manage the entire pipeline and keep deals moving forward at the right pace. Kanban also gives sales managers a way to track performance and ensure reps are on course.

Here’s what it looks like in the platform:

Kanban view is available in Salesforce Lightning and can be enabled using the following steps:

Click the “Opportunities” tab
Select “All Opportunities” list view
Open the “Display As” menu and select Kanban

Once the Kanban view is enabled, card fields can be customized using List View Controls and filters can be added to adjust board parameters. Kanban boards can be filtered by team, user, region, and more.

In Kanban view, opportunities can easily be moved between stages and dollar amounts in each stage will automatically update, giving sales reps and managers valuable insight into the amounts tied up in each stage of the pipeline.

Kanban cards can be edited at any time, and users are prompted to take action when any opportunity has no activity or tasks attached to it, ensuring opportunities don’t get stuck sitting in the pipeline or fall through the cracks.

Users in Kanban view can also create charts or add filters to create different views like, for example, viewing all opportunities in the pipeline for a particular account. And while Salesforce organizes the Kanban board by default according to stage, this can be adjusted for different preferences, too (for example, by deal type or delivery status). Stages can then be summarized differently as well (like by expected revenue rather than deal value).

Leverage Salesforce to Power Sales

Salesforce empowers sales organizations with integrative, collaborative tools and data-driven insights. If you’re looking to adopt Salesforce for your organization or customize your existing Salesforce experience, Rainmaker has solutions that can help. Contact us today to learn more!

How to Enable Kanban View in Salesforce