From a small scale business to large enterprise, one tool is inevitable and that is… Customer Relationship Management tool.

Salesforce was named as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center for the twelfth consecutive year in 2020. That speaks volumes about Salesforce can be used by companies effectively to scale a business.

“Undoubtedly, CRM is one of the fastest-growing software market segments. Revenue is expected to reach $80B by 2025″

Companies that use Salesforce has witnessed 25% increase in Revenue,  35% increase in Customer Satisfaction, 25% average increase in Marketing ROI. It’s all dependent on the Salesforce implementation and how effectively the Sales, Marketing, Customer support teams use.

At the end of the day if the tool is not used effectively by end users, then the whole CRM project is a failure. Agree ?

In this article, we are going to give some tips as to how to drive Salesforce adoption in your company

1. Cultural Shift

The first step towards the success of Salesforce implementation and adoption is ensuring that the Leadership team is fully on board and committed to this decision. If they start using the tool, automatically the employees will follow. Reports, KPIs and Dashboards can be reviewed from Salesforce by Leadership and this would mandate the employees to maintain right data, activities within the system.

Other important aspect of CRM success is communicating the change to all stakeholders and decision makers. Before using the tool, they need to be first aware of what’s going on.

Lastly, the company can bring in rewards and identify champion who would drive the Salesforce adoption. What’s obvious is Salesforce success is not made within a day, it takes some time and is more often an iterative and a continuous improvement process.

One of Cloudideas customer shares

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“Originally I was against Salesforce because I thought that it would be too much effort to change from our existing system to others. Today I look at all the information that is stored there and the speed of execution, I have to say that the success of Bewotec in recent years was in large part to the fact that we switched to Salesforce – Bernhard Koller, CEO at Bewotec”

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Read the full story here: Salesforce x Bewotec

2. Offer Adequate Training

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“35% don’t feel equipped to use the CRM Software and they ask for more training – especially due to regular software updates”

Salesforce might have endless features, but one organization or employee will not use everything. Sales Reps could record activities with a customer or account, while a sales manager tracks the wins, performance of all sales reps. Priorities for training should be set straight and goals need to set up.

While implementation is an important piece, training is equally important and they should go hand in hand. Follow-up trainings, user guides, videos, demos, doubts session can be really helpful for end users to adopt better to the tool. You could also take help from Salesforce partner companies and our expert consultants.

Find out more about Salesforce training with Cloudideas.

3. Use Digital Adoption Platforms

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Digital Adoption tools can be used on top of the Salesforce products to offer digital guidance. This could help new end users to onboard quickly without having to watch videos, attend training, search in the user manual, etc. The best part is you could customize the training according to the teams, the role they play and their responsibilities. Some of the note worthy platforms are Whatfix, Walkme, Pendo, etc.

4. Test and Pilot Run before Go-Live

This tip is more relevant to medium and large scale enterprises. Before you go-live with Salesforce for 100+ users you could test-drive with a small group of end users. They could test the features, do a set of tasks and give valuable feedback. They know what they are doing day in and day out better. If required, some areas can be customized, workflows could be automated based on the feedback received.

While implementing Salesforce, the companies or consultants should think like an end user. To understand them better they could run User Surveys, Walkthroughs, Workshops, etc.

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5. Salesforce Trailblazer Community

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“Being a Trailblazer is about pioneering a whole new way of doing business – one in which success is inseparable from building a better world”

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“Imagine a future in which CEOs and their companies around the world applied the same focus and innovation they bring to solving their most complex business problems to most complex social ones – Marc Benioff”

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The Trailblazer community is where you could learn, connect and give back together. Salesforce users could discuss features, ask questions and share great tips to each other. It’s a great tool to network with someone from Salesforce world, share for white papers and attend webinars. The whole experience is gamified and the answer leaders are featured in homepage.

You could also suggest ideas at Idea Exchange, join groups in specific location Eg: User Group Charlottesville, US. Salesforce have got specific COVID-19 resources which could help companies understand the market better, utilize right apps. Salesforce and many companies around the world have pledged to give back to the community as well.  

6. Track and Reward

You could track if end users are actually logging in into Salesforce, complete the assigned tasks, etc. Salesforce Adoption Dashboard from appexchange is a great way to track this.

Managers or IT teams could track a set of KPIs or metrics, understand how users are using the software. User login rate, open tasks rate, opportunity status, etc. could be some of the metrics to track. Also checking if the data is accurate will tell you heaps and bounds about Salesforce adoption.

Final Words

You could make job easier for all the teams by offering the right tool at right time. Once they are happy, your customers are also happy. We would be happy to help you succeed in the Salesforce journey, reach out to us with questions.

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