Switching to Salesforce CRM will be one of the most significant investments you’ll make for your business. This cloud-based tool has the potential to scale your sales to new heights.
However, that’ll only happen if the software is correctly introduced to your workforce and correctly integrated with your company’s existing sales processes. That is, if you’re investing a pretty penny on an elaborate new CRM, you must also invest in its proper company-wide adoption, otherwise you won’t fully benefit from the software in the long-run, leading to wasted ROI.
In fact, poor user adoption is a huge challenge for companies wishing to leverage Salesforce today. It is the reason why many companies fail to meet their sales expectations from the platform and realize tragically low ROI.
If you don’t want your company to be one of them, make sure to implement the following four tactics in your Salesforce adoption strategy:
Start By Explaining the “Why” to Users
As with most things in life, start with “why”. Making it crystal clear to your team as to why Salesforce is the way forward can be a big boost for the actual platform adoption.
Elucidate to your users why the company needs a new centralized sales software, and how migrating to Salesforce will change and improve workflow at an individual level and the overall business performance.
Of course, it’s only natural that many employees would resist change. Irrespective of how inconvenient or inefficient the old processes are, your staff might have learned how to be productive with what they’ve been working with. A new tool means stepping out of the comfort zone and learning new things — something that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
But if you show the guaranteed benefits and positive outcomes of Salesforce adoption (using case studies and even anecdotal evidence), and win every team member’s buy-in, rest assured that you’re off to a great start.
Provide Proper Training
Of course, creating and implementing a proper training program would be key to Salesforce adoption success. While the platform is known for its beginner-friendliness and ease-of-use, keep in mind that this is an entirely new tool for your team and they will need to gain knowledge to properly use the platform.
Every member of your organization should receive structured training on Salesforce basics and for other related tools that’ll be used in the sales process (email system, calendar/appointment setting, VOIP phone system, and so on) before they receive detailed training on specific parts of Salesforce that will take them to the next level.
For instance, users will appreciate saving time using chatbots and Einstein Voice, or killing manual data entry after syncing with the calendar.
If you can’t create custom training programs tailored to your company, then Salesforce’s very own Trailhead program is an excellent way to provide structured training to your teams. Specifically, get your employees to complete the basic trail in order to quickly turn them into fairly skilled users.
You can also use this trail to accelerate Salesforce adoption in under an hour.
Now, everyone has their own learning pace. Let trainees feel comfortable by getting help from experts in their own department. So, if possible, assign experts in each team, people who previously had experience with Salesforce or those who are picking things up quicker than others. You can even encourage quicker-learning trainees to prepare shareable cheat sheets or whatnot with their own tips and tricks for using Salesforce.
Organize a Salesforce Hackathon
Once the training sessions have been completed, it is time for users to put their skills to test and for you to find out who’s lagging where. Otherwise, what’s the point of investing all that effort into training your employees in the first place.
Essentially, a hackathon is a collaborative software contest wherein a large group of people, such as all the prospective Salesforce users in your company, come together for an intense period of time (such as a few hours or days) to experiment with the software and find out how to get the best use of it.
A company-level hackathon is a great way to gamify the training assessment by providing incentives to the top-performers of the contest. So, for example, you can create a points system for rewarding specific activities, such as creating sales dashboards or on-site demos. Participants can cash-in the points they earn for prizes such as a raffle ticket for an extra paid day off, a gift card, or a small bonus.
Such gamification activities are a proven way to boost motivation and Salesforce engagement among all employees, including ones who aren’t keen on adoption.
You may host a hackathon as a one-time tool to get your teams used to the feel and customization of Salesforce, or you may use hackathons regularly (such as annually) to re-engage employees on how to make the most of Salesforce for customer success.
Make Salesforce Easy-To-Use for Users
It can happen that you get carried away with the tons of features Salesforce has to offer, even when only a fraction of those features are useful for your company’s requirements. It is likely your teams don’t need advanced features, or only a small percentage of your workforce needs them.
So, instead of overwhelming new users with an abundance of features right off the bat, try to build a system that makes their lives easier and actually encourages them to make the switch.
Simplicity is key. Consider what elements can be customized for better efficiency and engagement. Create separate user profiles so each user has relevant features and options based on their role and eliminate any clutter that could lead to a lag in daily tasks.
Moreover, if your employees use other third-party tools like Dropbox and Slack, integrate these apps to Salesforce as add-ons. It helps reduce clicks and improves productivity.
Also, making Salesforce user-friendly means automating as much as possible so users can move onto contacting prospective clients and other profitable aspects of their duties. Sales reps can’t sell much if they’re busy entering data in the CRM.
So, tedious tasks such as data entry, backup creation, and order tracking should be automated by admins by creating workflow rules, processes, and flows that can route records to their respective destinations.
Over to You
Getting everyone on board a new enterprise-level software like Salesforce is never going to be straightforward, but with the right strategies, it isn’t that complicated either. Follow the aforementioned four core tips for a smoother Salesforce adoption that results in a quicker and better ROI.
