Strategies and Best Practices to Improve Salesforce Adoption

Salesforce’s number of users has exceeded 150,000, making it the most popular CRM system in the world. Implementing Salesforce can transform various processes of your organization for the better. Salesforce user adoption is a key metric that often gets overlooked after an implementation. What good is an implementation when the end-user is not utilizing the system at its fullest potential? In this blog, we highlight why Salesforce user adoption matters and how you can improve it. 

Why Does Salesforce User Adoption Matter?

Enhanced Data Management

If the rate of Salesforce user adoption is low, it means that employees are not using Salesforce and managing their data traditionally. This is not a good practice if you want to jump on the digitalization bandwagon. Proper Salesforce adoption ascertains better data management, increases the accuracy of processes, and keeps your team updated on the latest tech. 

Increased Productivity

Customer service agents who use Salesforce have witnessed a 34% increase in productivity. There are many more statistics that indicate the impact of Salesforce on productivity. Hence, when your entire team switches to Salesforce, imagine the productivity boost! 

The Cost of Implementation 

Salesforce investment and implementation is a costly affair. Therefore, low user adoption is proportional to a loss, and it’s important to think about a strong user adoption strategy right from the start.

Best Strategies to Boost Salesforce User Adoption 

Review User Needs

Asking your employees to make the sudden switch to a new way is a big ask. So take the necessary measures to include employees in the implementation process. Provide necessary training and take the time to address the concerns they may have related to Salesforce’s impact. Create a group with key users from every department and team. Furthermore, conduct surveys of all users to ascertain what they need from Salesforce and make them understand how it can deliver the same. 

Get Stakeholders’ Support 

No matter the scale, implementing Salesforce will impact the end user on a daily basis. Therefore, it becomes crucial to get the support of executives to boost Salesforce user adoption. When senior leadership and key executives communicate the benefits of Salesforce, the end-users are more confident about the value the new system will bring in and trigger better acceptance. 

Bring in a Long-Term Strategy

Salesforce implementation timelines are based on the size and spread of the organizations. Hence, there will be a need for ongoing efforts to ensure proper adoption. Additionally, not all training may turn out to be successful. You will constantly need to step back and review the current scenario and adjust your strategy accordingly. Track and analyze each effort that promotes adoption. This way you can map out various training tools that can streamline the training process and set relevant milestones. 

Declutter your System 

Decluttering the interface will allow users to easily navigate to Salesforce. If old tools are now redundant, what’s the point of having them? While removing legacy systems, ensure to do so in a phased manner. Since your team is used to them, you want to ensure that their productivity is not hampered. 

For instance, Salesforce Sales Cloud is a consolidation of a number of tools that reps already use. This way you can eliminate many existing tools such as auto dialers, activity tracking tools, online meeting schedulers, etc. 

Investing in Upskilling

Salesforce is constantly evolving to keep up with changing user needs. If you want to increase Salesforce user adoption, you must invest in constant upskilling. This will allow users to garner the necessary skills to create a personalized and productive work environment. Furthermore, on the Salesforce AppExchange,  there are many add-ons for organizations that help boost user adoption. 

Focus on the Right Integration

Salesforce integrations bring some powerful and sought-after features. It combines Salesforce data and functionality with third-party apps and services to streamline working on a centralized platform. Integrating the right solution with Salesforce will allow your team to realize its prominence. You must show them how bringing two solutions together can make their tasks easier. When they realize how many arduous tasks can be eliminated, they’ll be more likely to switch to Salesforce. 

Achieving the optimal adoption rate is going to be a time-consuming process, but you can make it less labor-intensive with the right strategies.