7 Best Strategies to Increase User Adoption of Salesforce

CRM software image for article 4339399393

In any organization, it has been found that approximately 52% of salespeople use the power of Salesforce. 31% of underperforming salespeople don’t use CRM. the CRM improves the performance of salespeople and they become able to:

  • Using CRM helps salespeople understand whether or not they have sufficient resources to meet their sales goal
  • Sellers can quickly identify critical offers that can help achieve the goal quickly
  • Can effectively close the opportunity with timely planned actions
  • Salespeople can collaborate more effectively with their colleagues and teammates

It has been found that even after successful implementation, companies still struggle with effective adoption of CRM by their employees. As a result, the benefits of CRM are reduced and sales decrease. However, organizations can increase user adoption in their organizations with a few tips.

Here we are going to appeal to some of the practical and proven tips that are adopted by organizations. These tips have successfully increased user adoption:

1. Show the power of CRM to your employees

Salespeople need to know the difference when working with and without CRM. Organizations need to show them how easily they can get their jobs done if they use CRM. For example:

  • Align CRM configuration and functionality with current business process
  • Show the effectiveness of CRM for this, you can also use third party applications
  • Design and configure the CRM according to the business process and customer requirements
  • Salesforce’s discussion tool can help them collaborate effectively with their colleagues

If sales reps know the true benefit of Salesforce, they’ll embrace it comfortably.

2. Highlight the cons of not using Salesforce

Even after knowing its benefits, sellers still may not use it effectively. So organizations should also show the downsides of not using Salesforce CRM. The disadvantages can be communicated as follows:

  • Manage the discount approval process only through Salesforce CRM
  • Share messages and communications only through Chatter
  • Use Salesforce dashboards to inform about meetings and performance reviews

This way, you can show the benefits of Salesforce to the sales team.

If you want to take your career to the next level and become a professional in Salesforce, then sign up for “Salesforce training”- This course will help you achieve excellence in this field.

3. Use Insightful Metrics to Know and Measure Salesforce Adoption

Measuring connection rates may not be enough to determine actual user adoption. There are many other powerful metrics to determine the exact level of CRM adoption by the team and individual employees. Some of these measures are:

  • Number of new contacts created
  • Number of leads closed in the last few days
  • Number of activities such as phone calls, notes or recorded meetings
  • Number of chat messages

These are some of the indirect metrics that can help to understand the level of engagement or adoption of Salesforce.

4. Planned and Managed Salesforce User Adoption

Based on user adoption levels, organizations can segment users. They can then manage each segment appropriately using user adoption metrics. Now let’s see how you can create user categories or segments:

Salesforce adoption can be categorized as follows:

  • Willing and Capable: People who already use Salesforce successfully may fall into this category
  • Need to Learn: Some people who want to use Salesforce but are unable to do so due to lack of understanding may fall into this category. Just make sure these are the people who may need more training.
  • Can be useful but requires some motivation: From a managerial point of view, just try to focus on such a group of team members. Just highlight what they want from them and post adoption steps and success stories. Make some processes difficult for sales reps to do if they’re not using Salesforce.
  • Cannot and Cannot Use: Aren’t the employees technically sound? Do they need advice on adopting Salesforce? Or is there some other reason? Identify the real reason and resolve it in a timely manner.

In this way, you can easily find out the real problem of user adoption and solve it to increase adoption.

5. Use the dashboard and reports to measure sales performance

Well-organized and formatted reports and dashboards give sales managers and people clear visibility to sellers. They can quickly learn about flaws in the process and improve performance. To do this, you can adopt the following steps:

  • Get full visibility of sellers by creating appropriate dashboards and reports
  • Help people locate important information quickly
  • Certain Salesforce features such as “Run as logged in user” can make the process of viewing information that may be directly required of them easier.

6. For newly implemented features, create short how-to videos

Sometimes it is difficult to train staff face to face as staff may not be available on time or you may have a busy schedule. For this, you can create short videos and demonstrate the new functionality through these short videos. For that, you can follow the steps below:

  • Use an open source screen recording tool to create the explainer video of the new features
  • Videos should be edited by professionals. You just have to communicate the value through these videos, so create point-to-point clips and upload them to the portal.
  • Use professional hosting to find out who watched the training videos
  • Take a small survey to resolve questions and answers or user queries related to this new tool or feature.

7. Track and compare sales revenue with target

Dig deeper into dashboards and reports. Measure seller performance versus individual seller. You can take the following step to achieve this:

  • Use a dashboard gauge to communicate performance to members against their assigned target
  • To measure target tracking and sophisticated forecasting, you can use the Forecast tab
  • Build a personalized solution that can be directly linked to opportunities and generate appropriate sales.

Final words

Lack of full adoption by users can halt business benefits and their investment can fail. So if you apply the best user adoption practices, it can increase your sales. To meet the goal of implementing Salesforce, you should always try to increase adoption at all levels of the organization. In this way, the sales and performance of the organization can improve quickly.


Interesting Related Article: “What To Look For In A CRM For Your Business”