Imagine you buying a CRM for your sales team after taking time to evaluate, test, and negotiate with the vendor and not use it eventually. That’s when you realize the importance of training and user adoption.

Salesforce is a widely used SaaS tool by businesses and sales teams. Undoubtedly, learning Salesforce  plays an important role in increasing your business profit, ROI and lets your sales team be prepared to face the customer. 

 In this article, we will cover the importance of Salesforce training, offer useful resources to get you up to speed. 

Importance of Salesforce Training

Sales is an extremely competitive field to be in and being prepared to face customers could give you a competitive edge. You could gather and store all customer data in a CRM like Salesforce, but you will need to know how to access and extract information from it. 

Learning how to use a CRM plays a major role in utilizing the CRM to its fullest potential. 

 ““Learning new systems and processes is not mandatory...but neither is staying in business”

― Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin - Living Large In Geiggityville”’

Salesforce training usually involves four parts namely: 

• Telling Sales reps about what CRM entails and its features
• Showing them how to do it in real-time
• Letting the Sales reps test how it can be done by themselves
• Checking how the Sales reps are doing and see if it matches the expectations

The main benefits that you will realize once you teach your employees to use Salesforce are as follows:

1. Return on Investment - Once you coach your employees, overall team productivity increases, sales reps will hit or exceed the targets, and ultimately your profit and ROI increases 
2. Track performance - Once your employees know how to use the CRM, they will start logging the information correctly, and thereby you can understand whether as a company you are performing well and where you are lagging. Sales reps can take notes, collaborate with other teams, save documents and meeting details, etc.
3. Shorter Sales cycle - Sales processes can take longer depending on various factors. When you start maintaining all data in one place and record information accurately, then you could close deals faster too.
4. Effective pipeline Management - You could think along the lines of what can be done differently to close more deals. This data will be readily available within Salesforce for Sales managers and reps.
5. Process and Workflow Automation - You could implement and automate a process for your sales cycle and educate your employees accordingly. You could also place controls within the system itself. For eg: a discount above 30% needs to be approved by the manager before releasing a quote, etc. 
6. Alignment between all teams - You could onboard all your teams, not only your Sales team to use Salesforce. This way there is consistent record keeping and smooth operation between teams. Ultimately, the customer is going to get a better experience
7. Data Security and privacy - You could save all the customer and sensitive data in one place, run compliance programs, reports and also delete data easily when requested by a customer
8. Employee Satisfaction - Your employees are going to avoid writing multiple emails, checking multiple tools or files when they start using CRM. They will wrap up their day faster and be productive with the best results.

By now you would have realized the value of learning how to use Salesforce for your business. If you are an individual looking to seek Salesforce jobs as well, it’s a pretty lucrative and interesting opportunity to pursue. 

For both businesses and individuals who have an interest in Salesforce, we have gathered a list of useful resources, have a look.

Salesforce Training - Useful resources 

It can get tricky to understand Salesforce as it’s loaded with features and they are releasing new ones constantly. DIY learning can be an option and you could also opt for professional courses or seminars from Salesforce partners 

“A study by Whatfix found that 35% of sales reps feel they need more training to use their customer relationship management platform (CRM) effectively”

Here’s a few resources to get you started with Salesforce:

1. Salesforce Trailhead Academy 

Salesforce lets you learn at your own pace from their collection of virtual and in-person courses called “Trails”. They have made it further interesting by offering badges and credentials. 

They also maintain a trailblazer community wherein you could ask questions, collaborate and network with your peers from the same industry.

Salesforce has 5 roles, 30 certifications, and 100+ learning resources, check the guide to certification paths.

2. Salesforce In-App Guidance

Have you ever noticed prompts popping up while using Salesforce? Walkthroughs can guide your team to perform a specific set of actions or steps and prompts can guide you to complete a step inside Salesforce.

You can create custom walkthroughs too or install pre-built packages from Salesforce Appexchange. The next big name in the Digital adoption platform space specific to learning Salesforce is WhatFix. 

3. Salesforce Youtube, Blog and Guides

Salesforce offers detailed user guides, tip sheets, use cases/success stories, etc for its user, developer, and admin ecosystem.

Salesforce’s youtube channel is a great place to learn for video lovers. It’s filled with webinars and informative interviews. 

Needless to say, Salesforce Blog is a valuable resource with a wide range of topics from AI to Digital transformation to Future of Work. Other notable blogs are Salesforce Ben, SFDC99, Salesforce Codex, Salesforce Weekly, Admin Hero, Automation Champion, and so on.

Salesforce Discussion forum is a safe space to ask questions, seek guidance from the wider Salesforce community. It often comes to the rescue for developers.

4. CloudIdeas Training Program

Last but not the least, CloudIdeas Salesforce Experts offer a customized online/offline Salesforce training program. DIY learning can be a pain when it comes to Salesforce due to its large array of features, so this in-depth course can be handy. 

We offer online and onsite Salesforce coaching, seminars, and classes for users, administrators, and developers. We will assist you in realizing the benefits of Salesforce and maximize user adoption within your company. Just book a call today and get started.

Salesforce Learning Environment 

Salesforce made the job easy for admins, developers to play around with the tool by giving an option of creating a sandbox environment and scratch orgs. 

Sandboxes are just a carbon copy of production where you can try implementing a change and if it works fine you could move to production.

Developers and admin have all the freedom to test, implement new features with this Sandbox.

Learning Tips

Before you get started with Salesforce courses, have the following in mind

• Decide the goal, timeline, and roadmap for Salesforce coaching
• Understand the sales process and come up with a teaching plan specific to your company with a focus on day to day activities of Sales teams
• Regularly communicate to your sales teams about the change that’s happening within the tool and processes
• Gamify the usage of Salesforce or promote rewards initially to increase the adoption of tools
• Ensure the management team is fully committed to the implementation and change process. If sales manager enforces the usage of CRM and extracts reports, usually the Sales Reps starts working on the CRM too

Final Thoughts

Sales operations are equally important as maintaining relationships with your customers and learning how to use Salesforce properly plays a vital role here. Who says no to increasing sales and profits.

Are you in dire need to maximize the ROI on your Salesforce investment?

We highly recommend hiring a Salesforce consultant and coaching your employees. They tend to learn about the business process first and create a customized curriculum. It all comes from experience working with different users and customers from different sectors.  

Just book a call today and get started with our Salesforce Experts.

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