User adoption: how to follow up your Salesforce implementation

If your company has decided to implement Salesforce, it is highly likely that the need to increase profit, reduce manual tasks/costs as well as ensuring the smooth import and management of data are among the short to medium-term objectives for the deployment.

As a Salesforce administrator, you're also tasked with ensuring that the entire implementation process is as seamless as possible for all end-users, which in turn will lead to increased productivity and an improvement in overall business metrics.

The key, therefore, is to make sure that all new users of Salesforce not only know how to navigate the system but that they actually use it. It doesn't matter how well the implementation has been designed if the teams don't make good use of it.

So, in addition to the entire implementation process, it's important to also monitor what happens after the project is launched.

Understanding the level of investment behind the implementation of a Salesforce solution, it is essential to track the activity on the platform, provide support to all departments that use it and give them the tools to understand and manage it without falling into frustration or chaos.

So why is user adoption such a big challenge for companies today?

To be successful, fundamentally, you must plan the launch strategy with the same care, attention and dedication that you gave to design, development, and testing.

Advice to administrators

Support and train all end-users

It is essential to provide support to all of your teams and give them the tools they need to manage Salesforce. No matter which the solution they will use, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud, they all need training before using the software.

Having previously survived through conversing with prospects on the phone or email, then tracking progress via Excel spreadsheets, your sales team may not see the need for change.

But to remain efficient and gathering valuable data into your Org, sales managers need to realise how important it is to work with Salesforce and ensure that they're making good use of it.

Highlight the value of Salesforce

This is the most effective way to tackle the challenge of user adoption.

Ensure that your end-users really understand the value of the system and all the benefits it will bring to them.

Demonstrate how using Salesforce will make their lives easier and save time on a large variety of manual tasks, creating tasks, and managing their pipelines.

Make it mandatory for the job

Create new ways of working within the company to get everyone on board and gently force them to use Salesforce for all their daily activities.

For example, make it clear that sales commissions will only be calculated on sales recorded on Salesforce.

Make sure that every team member has access to Salesforce using a unique ID and password, so they can use it daily.

Create access to dashboards and reports

One of the advantages that any Salesforce user finds in the platform are that you can access charts and download reports instantly.

Therefore, you must make sure that all users consistently upload their information, so there’s a holistic and real-time view of business performance.

In short, the most important learning to make your Salesforce implementation successful, and adopted by all the users in your company, is that you should plan and work closely with the members of each team.

Listen to them, see where they can improve their day-to-day processes, and see how they can be aligned with Salesforce. In particular, focus on the managers or leaders of each team.

Overall, it's these people you need to spend time with, to get them on your side, and to adopt Salesforce as the best way for the company to achieve its goals.

If you want to learn how you can improve your Salesforce adoption process, contact us!

You might also want to see “Salesforce User Adoption Best Practices w/ SalesforceBen”, our former MD in London and founder of the most visited Salesforce blog: SalesforceBen.