In the journey of Salesforce, one word that never seems to fade: Adoption.
Users generally are not excited to use products, until they see the benefit of using the product. This is true not only for Salesforce, any CRM which you are using for your company to manage and automate the sales process. Before approaching your reps to use CRM, firstly you need to understand their way of working and how your platform can help them out to ease their daily work. Also, you should figure out why they are not using the CRM. This blog addresses some tips on improving user adoption for Salesforce.
The reasons, why end user may find it difficult to adopt:
- Lack of understanding of the platform and how to use it
- Can’t figure out what good it will bring to their performance
- Too much time being spent to use the platform. Users want to do their job, and will not use the platform if it takes too much time to do mundane tasks.
As a Salesforce admin you need to share the benefits of using the platform with the end users and let them know how they can generate more leads, manage their existing & new customers, and increase revenue with the help of CRM.
When they know the value, the second and big challenge is how they will use it. For that, plan a complete training session. I have highlighted a few approaches later in the blog on how to attract end users to adopt this powerful platform. Apart from that, there are many more tips and tricks which can excite users to use Salesforce. Using the CRM is beneficial for all of the employees whether you are Sales reps, HR, or procurement team. Here’s how?
In this unexpected time, when everyone is working from home, Monday morning sales meetings are not possible. If everyone of your Sales reps start using the Salesforce platform to fill the leads, meetings, and calls data. It’s very easy for you to track the sales pipeline, expected revenue without even having a meeting. Salesforce helps you to maintain transparency with your reps. Now the main point is, what to do with the end users so they start using this powerful platform.
Here are few things which may motivate your employees to adopt the platform-
- Think like an end user-The first step of framing a plan of action for Salesforce adoption is, to think like an end user. You are enabling them to do their jobs in a better way with Salesforce, for that firstly you need to learn what they need in the CRM to do their job easily.
Before you start, let your team know what all challenges Salesforce will address. Also, show them how Salesforce can eliminate many data entry tasks. If users see the platform as a solution to their common problem. It’s easy for them to adopt a new tool to reduce their work.
Understand how they’re currently managing their tasks, what effort they’re putting to get the job done. Analyze at your end, and then suggest some useful automations to them to reduce redundancy and make their work less taxing. Salesforce being very flexible, customize it to make the ends meet. - Invest in training - Salesforce provides trails on it’s multiple features to better understand the platform. You can ask your people to complete the trails according to their jobs, there will be different modules for different profiles like- HR, sales reps etc…
Once the respective trailhead modules are completed, they’ll have much better understanding on how to utilize the system for their benefits and help them reach their goals. Apart from that, you can also train the trainers and some active users. So, they will help the rest of the users to get trained.
Training plays a vital role for every user, so it will be different for different levels as well. Let me explain, if you are a Sales rep, then your training will be for how to add leads, calls, and follow up details. When you fill a correct detail only then you can get the best result out of the platform. And next, if you are a sales manager, you will be trained for how to check reports & dashboards, expected ROI of the quarter/month, No of people logging in per day, and no of Sales calls reps making daily, etc…
And the last, if you are the top executive, you might be thinking that why you need training. Here is the reason, when you are working at the top of the hierarchy, you also need to check which Sales team has better ROI, Product on demand, and less sold product, etc… The next big challenge nowadays is, how will you train your people when most of them are working from home? For that, I’ve highlighted a few approaches below.
Ways to train employees remotely-- Break training into an easier-to-digest segment.
- Set up a meeting with the teams separately.
- Develop an accordant training schedule.
- Make it an interactive learning experience.
- Share all the possible videos
- Give them tasks for better engagement.
- Share demos.
- Adopt Salesforce Chatter - Saying “Salesforce Chatter” an enterprise social network is not wrong. Yes, sharing each and everything with a single or group of people through this is very easy. You can create groups as well. Basically, you keep your people engaged in chatter. Like - sharing coming birthdays, new lead and strong quarter, also you can share a plan of a new sales campaign on chatter. You may think that, how these all things related to adopting Salesforce by the end user. This is! when people will spend more time on the platform & start loving it.
- Customize the platform to make it easy - If the platform is easy to use, you are already one step ahead towards the Salesforce adoption. Let me explain, you ask your sales reps to fill all the details into the CRM. And Platform is not customised as per your business flow, It’ll take too much time to fill the data. Also, it wastes their time & efforts and lastly they don’t even login.
So to avoid all these things, customise your instance according to your business flow so it will be very close to their normal data feeding and handling method.- Communicate- Communication plays a vital role in adoption. Have a cup of coffee with the team, and ask as many questions as you can to know them better. Before asking questions, listen to them carefully and check what types of issues they are facing in the manual process. If you think like an end user, only then you give the best out of the platform.
- Use profiles and personalised the page layouts - Giving users a personal touch also plays a very important role. Provide each user a different format and the right features according to their roles and responsibilities.
- Eradicate clutter & data entry - Use the optimizer to find reports, unused layouts, extra files and other things that distract users and slow performance. And make your team life facile by integrating their email into Salesforce. Salesforce has a free connector for Outlook & Gmail.
- Put everything in one place - Investing in Salesforce is one of yours best investments, so take advantage of it. Put everything your team needs to do its job all in one place and make it easy to access. Think through what information is needed day to day & determine if it can be added into Salesforce.
- Hire a Salesforce Administrator - Hiring Salesforce admin is very important to use your Instance without any hindrance. Suppose, Sometimes people on your team have difficulties in login. And you want to pull a report or Install an appexchange package, add a new user, and more.
Provide Ongoing Support - Admin can provide ongoing support to the end users and show them how to integrate the technology into their daily lives and make it part of their routine. Admin can also sit with the sales leader from time to time to check if there is anything that needs to be automated through the platform. - User Feedback- Ask your people which parts of the current system they like and don’t like. This valuable feedback will help you to develop more personalized Salesforce Adoption strategies.
- Show them the disadvantages of not using Salesforce-When you don’t want to force your people to use Salesforce, creating the disadvantage of not using it can be the effective motivation.
Here are some ways which can strongly encourage to use Salesforce-- Review and manage all the performance and tasks through the Salesforce Dashboards.
- Schedule the meetings through Salesforce.
- Communicate with the team only through chatter.
- Give recognition, rewards - In the Salesforce adoption process, it’s also important to recognize and reward efforts. Recognition can be of incentives, prizes, or even speak out for that particular person in the common platform.
The idea is just to show your employees that you notice and appreciate the efforts they are putting to learn and adopt Salesforce. - Trace the Business performance - When you see that employees are logging in, it doesn't mean they are using Salesforce effectively.
Instead of checking the number of calls & meetings people are making through Salesforce, check the time spent on the particular call, types of calls, and how many calls led to closed deals. When you closely look at the details of every user and action, you can find a way which behaviour leads to success and which missed the opportunities.
Astrea IT can be a part of your Salesforce Adoption Strategy-
Getting a better adoption rate is a continuous process, Astrea IT can assist you in the same. Our experts can provide User training and help you out in customising the Salesforce instance according to the business flow.
Apart from that, we can build many out of the box solutions to meet the needs. Also, we have pre-built many solutions to solve your day to day problems which are available on Appexchange.
For any query, contact support@astreait.com