Given the nature of the position and the pressure to hit challenging targets, often sales users are the lower adopters of Salesforce in most organizations. According to this Salesforce blog,
"CRM systems are too often conceived and implemented with little or no consideration given to how sales reps will use them, much less how they could be configured to deliver the kind of value that would encourage reps to use them." Investing the time in developing and understanding the daily activities as a foundation for how you look for and pursue an implementation of CRM. The User Culture results in the end-user feeling like they have more ownership of the process of finding the right solution to meet the needs of the sales organization. The most common ‘sales conundrum’ is where “top-performing salespeople are sometimes the worst offenders of not keeping their data current” – According to Teri Ship of Shipp Consulting (a salesforce.com implementation and CRM consulting firm)
Steps to action on today to help increase adoption among sales reps-
1- ASK THEM!!! Ask them how they use salesforce today? According to the 2016-2017 Bluewolf State of Salesforce report, 275 of users were enter dating to satisfying reporting and 79% said they entered data into multiple systems. Does this hold true for your organization? If it does, its a problem that needs to be fixed! “Salespeople need to constantly be moving and in motion to keep the deals coming in the door. Requiring little but impactful information that will allow them to close more deals and your business to make decisions is key. Advocating for your users and having a true understanding of what they do will improve your adoption.” – Bill Powell
2- FIND THE VALUE TO THE USER- WIIFT- What's In It For Them? It's nice to think that all users will comply because someone tells them to, but the reality is that users have a core task or job to do and if the technology is not supplying the value to complete that task or do their job better than they are going to seek way to minimize their use of it. This is often a challenge that sales users face. Salesforce certainly does provide them value in the customer data, but it doesn't always help them do their job better or most efficiently.
3- DEFINE USER WORK HABITS! Where do you users spend most of their time and does it vary based on the type of sales user? Are they in the field, inside sales, customer sales? Sales Support?
“A great way to promote adoption is to start by assigning a small, measurable, and manageable responsibility to business users in Salesforce. This activity may be tracking weekly appointments or entering opportunities to provide familiarity, demonstrate executive support, and show value.” – Liana Trigg
4- PINPOINT ONE PROCESS TO CHAMPION! Once you have defined the work processes, identify one process that sales reps will have to do. Example, updating pipeline. Perfect how that process will flow to the users and build up trust and champions by ensuring the process seamless for the users. If you can show them how an everyday process they know and already have to do can be easier, faster, better- you will gain champions much quicker!
5- LEVERAGE TOOLS! Once you have defined the users work habits, you can determine where they spend a majority of their time. Are they in the field and have a high dependency on mobile apps? If so then you need to focus on exploring mobile tools that they can leverage. Are they in a high-volume customer setting and need the quick and efficient use of Salesforce with the utmost elimination of manual steps? Or are they primarily at their desk working inside of Salesforce and need a better user experience which could lead to exploring options to use lightning.
[Above Image From the 2017 Southeast Dreamin Houdini Admin Presentation]
