Salesforce is a user-friendly business tool with many amazing features that can help your enterprise teams deal more effectively with the potential leads and ultimately sell more.  Not just in terms of sales management, but Salesforce can also help complete your development projects much easily and quickly. Salesforce is a scalable tool, which means the small businesses can start at a minimal level and then scale up the services as they grow.

Of course, Salesforce is an expensive tool if you pay for it and do not use it. Salesforce pricing may be around $25 and $300 per user per year, and if your users are not leveraging its features, you are at a complete loss. There are many reasons why the users may resist going on this platform or otherwise called low Salesforce user adoption. In fact, if you are on to it, there are many ways to engage your team members to get motivated to use Salesforce more by enjoying it.

Studies have shown that usage of Salesforce can positively impact your revenues by adding about 28% more to it and giving a hype in success rate by 26%. It is also noted that teams’ sales productivity is increased by 38% as per a survey. However, in terms of understanding the roadblocks in Salesforce usage, one must be more precautious, and the approach of prevention is better than cure is ideal. May it be organization-wide CRM adoption or for a particular business unit, some critical people-process alignment areas should be considered for better value-addition to end-users. Let us explore this model of ‘Salesforce User Adoption’ in detail.

Salesforce User Adoption

As per a Forrester report, about 22% of all the problems reported related to Salesforce adoption were people-related or otherwise Salesforce User Adoption. Even though many people tend to cite the technological difficulties in the adoption of Salesforce, the actual challenge may mostly be winning over the hesitant non-believers. So, the primary consideration should be to ensure that people-process alignment to technology is well addressed at each agile implementation stage.

Why Salesforce User Adoption important?

User adoption is a critical factor in terms of using Salesforce effectively. Low user adoption may ultimately impair productivity as the employees and the organization as a whole will not be able to benefit from the configurations, which may hamper your team’s productivity as aimed through Salesforce.

Also, low Salesforce user adoption may lead to inaccurate and non-quality data in your systems. Say, for example, as put forth by FLOSUM, even if some of the members in your team track their customer details in MS Excel or keeping it locally on their laptop, these numbers will not get added to Salesforce and cannot be tracked in terms of evaluating the process effectiveness. If you cannot run a report to see how many opportunities and deals you had over a specific time period, you miss out on these prospective deals.

Above all these, you are also paying a lot of money to the users in terms of accessing Salesforce. So, lower user adoption ultimately means that your money is wasted without ensuring any return on investment.

Causes of low user adoption

While assessing the importance of allocating the efforts towards developing winning products or services, you need to ensure that people are motivated to achieve it. If you are onto a Salesforce project, then you should be aware of the facts that this will lead to a bit of cost implication due to the following reasons:

• If you try to involve the users after most of the products are already delivered, then you are losing largely on the feedback you receive from the users at the time of implementation.
• It is the primary tendency of a human being to resist changes, and when it comes to changing the systems which may affect your daily operations, it is important that the users involved are aware of these changes well ahead of time and they get enough time to review it and cross the non-acceptance curve.
• No matter how effective your tools and implementation you bring in are, the adoption rate sometimes looks to be dull at the end, and the actual delivered by the change cannot be effectively measured.
• There are, in fact, many ways to check and identify if your team is using Salesforce effectively as you want them to be. At the first point, you have to determine the actual metrics which matters to the team. Identify your success metrics as like:
• Does the success is in terms of completing the activities on time?
• Is success to be measured in terms of gaining a high percentage of opportunities?
• Does success mean more sales and returns?

Once you defined these metrics, you can create the reports to gain insights into the actual User performance.

Salesforce surveys

Another very effective way to identify where your users are having trouble with Salesforce adoption is by asking directly. You can use some standard Salesforce Surveys or the Salesforce Chatter feature to create some customized polls to gather user feedback. The pools can be made anonymous, or you can get personalized responses to how many people answered and what opinions each of them has. However, do not make it a compulsion or pressure on them to participate in the poll with which you may not get a whole-minded approach it.

You need to remember that complete success in terms of Salesforce implementation is a long-time taking process, which may range from 3 months to 6 months or one year based on the size of the team and the organizational goals. Here are some things you need to keep in mind when trying out a Salesforce User Adoption strategy.

Be it an organization-wide adoption of business unit specific; Salesforce implementation can have a big impact on the users on a day-to-day basis. So, it is very important to support all while driving Salesforce projects by ensuring user adoption. First, have all the senior leadership and key executives well communicated about the benefits of Salesforce implementation and ensure you gain all confidence.