Let’s start this off with a banger…
Less than 40% of companies have achieved adoption rates of over 90%.
(G2 Learn Hub)
Why is it so difficult to encourage adoption?
It’s because achieving change in an organization requires a relentless commitment to include people and their thoughts in the process.
Plus, when you’re thinking of implementing major changes (even if it’s not about Salesforce), the most important part is the ‘’Selling’’ of it.
Think of when you’re launching a new product or service, do you force it down your customer’s throats or do you sell the benefits first? So why should it be any different for Salesforce adoption?
End users need to understand how that change benefits them!
Here are 5 ways to increase Salesforce adoption:
Find a champion
Amongst the employees that got trained by the implementation team, did one of them:
- Stand out
- Like the solution more than others
- Immediately adopted the new solution
- Clearly noticed the benefits of Salesforce on their day-to-day job
Find that person and make them a ‘’Change champion’’. They should be tasked to become the first level of contact for end-user training.
Your change champion should spread the word amongst their peers. By spread the word, we mean: the benefits of Salesforce and the disadvantages of not using it.
While you do not want to punish your team for resisting the move to Salesforce, highlighting the disadvantages of not using it can be an incredibly effective motivation technique.
And just like when your marketing team shares testimonials or success stories, your change champion could do the same thing to promote adoption.
People are less likely to resist change if their peers constantly share positive feedback about it.
Non-boring training
There’s an old marketing saying: ‘’Whatever you do, don’t make it boring’’.
It’s obvious that Salesforce training is a must if you want to increase adoption. That doesn’t mean that it needs to be traditional, boring training.
Make it fun to be a part of! Maybe incentivize it or make it into a friendly competition.
Despite the approach you decide to take, adoption will be greater if you prepare beforehand by taking advantage of free training resources available on Salesforce Trailhead.
For example:
- You can ask employees in sales to complete Sell Lightning Fast with Sales Cloud
- Employees in marketing can complete Marketing Cloud Basics
Be a lighthouse, not a tugboat.
What’s the difference between a lighthouse and a tugboat?
The lighthouse stands tall, shows the way, leads by example.
The tugboat fatigues itself by going around pushing or pulling other vessels.
This translates to: instead of micromanaging and forcing employees to use Salesforce, lead by example and start using it.
Therefore. the leadership team also needs to go through the same training as end-user. From there, they can also become change champions and evangelize the usefulness of Salesforce.
Change the scenario
Before force-feeding a new CRM to your team, try to understand your end-users.
At the end of the day, you’re empowering them to work more efficiently thanks to Salesforce. So first things first, talk to all end-users to learn:
- What they need on the new CRM
- What they don’t like about the current system
- Which challenges are they facing with the current system
From there you can make a list of all the challenges that Salesforce will address and how it will benefit end-users. Doing this will make them see that Salesforce is a solution to common problems as opposed to another tool they’ll be forced to use.
Now you’ve changed the scenario from “It will benefit the company’’ to ‘’It will benefit you’’.
Simplify to amplify
Let’s get a bit more technical…
Simplicity wins, therefore, make your Salesforce instance as simple as possible.
Here are a couple of technical tips you can already start applying:
- Remove field that aren’t being used (Use free apps like ‘’Field Trip’’ to identify usage rates). The more fields you have, the more confusing it becomes. Remember that if your sales rep or other employee doesn’t see value in putting that information in, it won’t get entered
- Set default values wherever possible. It gives the user one less thing to type in. You can use the 80% rule to determine which field will have a default value, ex: If 80% of the time,this picklist value will be X, we’ll default it to X if no value is entered.
- Removed unused picklist values
- Reduce the number of choices in picklists
- Minimize required fields