How to improve Salesforce user adoption?

Salesforce user adoption is one of the significant challenges Sales Operations faces every day. New business processes don’t worth a penny if users don’t adopt them. Change management is the hardest thing to get right. In this post, I share a few tips to increase Salesforce user adoption.

Table of Contents

Reduce data entry

Users adopt tools when they get more than they give. More often than not, users consider Salesforce as a constraint because they spend too much time entering data. Sales Operations must keep data entry to a minimum. Choosing the right tools and mastering them is the key to success. Concerning Salesforce.com, buttons, formula fields, roll-up summary fields, processes, and workflows can save much time. Users should never enter twice the same information, and they shouldn’t fill in worthless data.

Setup powerful integration tools

On the giving part, Sales Operations can invest in data enrichment tools. For instance, Duns & Bradstreet can enrich data concerning companies for sales representatives. There are so many tools out there that can make their lives easier. Even if the ROI isn’t convincing, as long as it is reliable and it reduces data entry, I’d recommend investing. When I worked for a Marketing startup, the CMO invested in Datanyze so the sales team wouldn’t have to manually go to company websites and check for marketing automation and analytics tags. The ROI wasn’t worth it, but sales representatives loved it. They just had to copy paste the website URL, and Datanyze automatically added tags. In the end, we reduced the number of fields to fill by 10, and we balanced the give and take ratio.

Make it simple

Business tools can be quite confusing and complicated sometimes, especially CRM. For each field, I recommend writing detailed “Help Texts” so anyone can understand the meaning of it. If workflows or triggers modify the field, specify it as well. For each Salesforce object, page layouts must be easy to understand. Use sections and blanks to make it readable and clear. As I write, the best way to make layouts simple for sales representatives is the Salesforce console lightning (Cf. Screenshot here below). Salesforce releases many features, and Sales Operations should stay up to date.