1. A Holistic Guide
to Improving
Salesforce Adoption
Benefits of using DAS for Salesforce Adoption
Autonomous
In-App
Self-Help
Contextual
Guidance
Learn in the
Flow of Work
Supriya Goswami
VP Product Marketing
Whatfix
2. 2
Boost Salesforce User Engagement
and Acquisition with Digital Adoption
Software (DAS)
Overview
Disruptive technologies are changing almost every business process.
Salesforce Automation (SFA) is one such productivity-enhancing solution
that seeks to revolutionize the people-oriented sales function.
Salesforce Automation is part of the integrated customer relationship
management (CRM) toolset that can completely transform your sales
everything from sales forecasting, sales execution (i.e. pipeline and
management to sales compensation, digital signature and sales analytics.
Salesforce Automation can give your agile company a real competitive
edge.
sophisticated tool? Are low Salesforce adoption metrics keeping you from
deriving real ROI from the tool?
This is where a strategic Salesforce user adoption and change
management plan featuring a powerful Digital Adoption Software (DAS),
such as , can make all the difference. (Click here for a free trial)
of Salesforce user adoption rates by drastically changing how IT training
is delivered. Thus, this in-app guidance system helps you, help your sales
team, leverage the SFA tools to the fullest extent possible.
2
3. 3
According to Hubspot, 87% of sales
teams are actually with
their CRM software.
And fewer than 46% of sales reps
systems, based
on a CSO Insights report. And what’s
more, just
features, that ,
are actually used.
So, where does the gap lie? What is stopping employees
from embracing CRM software such as Salesforce?
CRM adoption.
User issues not easily resolved: Sales agents are unable
software support.
And such unresolved issues tend to be the root cause of
employee dissatisfaction with the CRM tool.
Lack of awareness: Often enterprise software, such as
Salesforce, are forced down the throats of users. Users
are told to use the tool without sharing any background
as to how it will help make their lives easier. They also
tend to avoid planning and investing efforts on change
not very useful, according to research by ZS Associates.
And it’s a sum-total of all this dissatisfaction that makes
their CRM application.
Roadblocks in
the Salesforce
Adoption Journey
4. Getting a few users to sign up and use the SFA tool once
thousands of sales reps and increasing Salesforce user
engagement is the bigger challenge.
Consider the example of a large multinational company
business tools in the market - Salesforce Lightning CRM.
performance, streamline sales and customer-facing
processes, and optimize every lead.
return log-in rates were really low. And more than half the
sales staff who were using the Lightning tool ended up
This made it look like the system was a productivity sap
rather than a booster.
And it got Tom thinking, “Such poor Salesforce Lightning
adoption shouldn’t have happened, especially considering
maintained, they may never achieve real ROI from their
Salesforce deployment.
dollars down the drain in the form of:
Why Improve Salesforce User Adoption?
And to top it all, Tom had gone out on a limb to secure
this productivity and lead enhancing tool for the sales
team. So, to prove that his efforts were not in vain, he
desperately needed to get to the root of this issue and
course correct.
Training and retraining costs of
$3 Million+ every year
Lowered sales productivity and
performance costs of $8 Million
per year
Sky-high support overhead and
resource cost of around $200,000
per year
Accelerate User
Adoption and Drive
Productivity
Turns out that such low Salesforce user adoption
rates are usually not driven by technical issues, but
people issues.
5. Obstacles to Salesforce User Adoption
According to research by PwC,
transformations fail due to a lack of Salesforce user
adoption and resistance to behavioural change. Tom
maximum results.
Here are some of Salesforce user adoption hurdles that
the company may have encountered:
1.
There is always a tug-of-war
between the IT and the sales department when it
comes to controlling the new Salesforce tool. In this
tussle, the sales reps and the overall organization
IT department was holding the purse strings and
thus were unlikely to understand the real value of
the Salesforce tools. So, they end up spending very
up mirroring how Sales reps actually executed or
wanted to execute the sales process and so adoption
used to come into the picture to push the tool to
deliver more, on lower budgets.
2. Salesforce tools do not operate
well in silos. Tom did not think to properly integrate
other CRM systems. So, the lack of enterprise system
integration led to users having to open multiple
Also, the legacy systems were not retired on time,
which meant that sales reps had no real reason to
switch to the new Salesforce tool.
3. Many a time, the SFA
similar to that which already exist.
cost technology.
Also, there is no “aha’ factor for the sales reps and
managers and they don’t want to adopt the tool as it
offers nothing new.
4.
Salesforce training before and during onboarding.
Also, sales reps were only given high-level conceptual
training and shown presentations on how to execute
hands-on, in-app training. Also, the new sales
sales team inconsistently and improperly used SFA.
Tom and the sales operations team were unable
to rely on opportunity and sales forecasts to make
informed sales decisions.
5.
management plans are designed and implemented
can make or break the Salesforce user adoption
efforts. According to a study conducted by Prosci ,
Alleviate user
frustration from hard to
navigate tech stacks
%
CRM system. (HubSpot)
Poor User Adoption is one of the
(Software Advice)
of sellers use their company’s CRM
(CSO Insights)
6. 6
good change management process, than without.
transformation to manifest:
f.
Salespersons were not clearly mandated to only
use SFA to execute sales tasks. And managers
ended up ignoring the insights from the reports
generated by Salesforce CRM.
g.
Salesforce tends to have a sophisticated
and expansive feature set. And most sales
representatives were not really shown how and
why the Salesforce system can help them achieve
terms of uncertainty in how to use the Salesforce
tool, they fall back to the old ways of doing things.
h.
Since salespeople are human and humans are
creatures of habit, getting them to adopt a new
tool suddenly can be a challenge. It can even
cause ‘technostress’, especially amongst the
older generation. And sales executives and even
business leaders end up reverting to the sales
processes they have been following for years,
because of lack of familiarity. This results in a drop
in productivity, overall performance and creativity.
i.
various regional teams, across the globe All of
these ‘symptoms’ led to low engagement with the
SFA tool.
All of these ‘symptoms’ led to low engagement with the
SFA tool.
who is also worried about poor feedback on the SFA
To address both their issues, Tom and Lena decided to
with a robust salesforce adoption strategy.
6
Streamline Your
Seller’s Digital
Journey across
ALL Applications
7. 4 Steps for a Holistic Salesforce Adoption Strategy
best practices that, if executed smoothly, will ensure that
and they are even likely to fall in love with the Salesforce
solution.
This is the part of the
strategy that most organizations end up skipping. Yet,
arguably, this is the most mission-critical stage in the
Salesforce user adoption lifecycle. Its intent is to, even
before implementing the new tool, set your company
up for success. To get the Salesforce adoption process
started off on the right foot, this is what you need to do:
a. Involve
representative users and decision-makers (across
the sales, operations, and IT hierarchy) in the
software selection and design process. Run them
through the features, reports, dashboards and
seek their perspective on the ideal Salesforce
experience. Their inputs will help determine which
b. Get the sales staff, across
what’s in it for them; and why should they care
about using the Salesforce tool. This could be
can be more assured that they will embrace the
transformation more easily.
c. Always remember
to integrate the new SFA tool with all relevant
Salesforce to productivity, marketing or
collaboration tools, you unite information across
the portals and help managers make more
informed decisions.
d.
are a result of reducing manual steps and data
redundancy. Once the sales staff get accustomed
to using the SFA regularly, effectiveness will also
improve eventually.
So how do you convince your sales team to
take the plunge and diligently use Salesforce systems?
a. The rule of thumb is to assign
one-third of your Salesforce budget towards
adoption activities. This could range from
training to internal marketing campaigns.
We would recommend that you pick DAS to
facilitate affordable and regular training for
your sales force.
b. Senior leadership
needs to makes it mandatory for
salespersons to run all sales meetings and
processes from within the SFA application.
This advisory should be shared and
enforced to ensure users get accustomed
to the tool faster.
c. Start promoting
your new tool early on, after identifying key user
experience issues. Use a mix of engagement and
onboarding methods. You could train change
champions to become experts on Salesforce
usage and then have them spread the word. This
will enable user-driven adoption.
It is also possible to turn Salesforce user adoption
into a fun goal-based competition by creating
reward structures and scores. The contest could
be for something as simple as ‘who generates the
most leads’ or ‘closes the most Salesforce tickets’.
Such goals will drive greater usage of the SFA.
And of course, indispensable to driving Salesforce
adoption would be the formal ‘sit-down’ or
powerpoint sales training on SFA processes and
products.
8. d. First off, disable
the legacy CRM tools as soon as Salesforce is
implemented. And if the sales team uses tools
such as excel sheets for sales data tracking then
share with them the many reasons why Salesforce
is a much better alternative.
Digital adoption systems that can be overlaid onto
Salesforce apps and offer automated and continuous
learning are some of the best weapons in your
onboarding arsenal. It ensures that the team’s knowledge
of Salesforce is upgraded the more they use the tool.
That too, in a very short period of time. More knowledge
use SFA in sales processes. These bite-sized training
modules, when run in tandem with traditional training
sessions, deliver the best results.
DAS, such as SCORM and
(click here for demo), can help improve Salesforce
Lighting adoption by:
a. needs With the
algorithmic guidance layer of DAS, you can create
needs and concerns of each Salesforce user
(based on user role or division).
b. It is a well-known
fact that if it takes an app-user more than three
clicks to perform a function, then they are unlikely
Salesforce users instantly receive support with
app-related issues without any lag time. This can
be via smart tips, walkthroughs and contextual
search. So, salespeople don’t need to go clicking
around the CRM app and looking for solutions
anymore.
c. Reinforcing learning
instructions every time your salesperson tries to
perform certain actions (e.g. add data about a new
lead) in Salesforce. Such repeated training makes it
easy to remember how to complete the task.
d.
groups training
content into logical structures. This helps
Salesforce users easily locate help content, as they
use enterprise software.
What you need to do is understand the pulse of the users
by intermittently collecting feedback from them.
Then, channel those commonly voiced views and
issues to inspire improvements and new features in
the Salesforce app. There is nothing more alluring to
software users than knowing that their opinion is valued
and taken on board. This will have them more excited and
willing to use Salesforce than ever before.
With the DAS you could even track what features of the
Salesforce tool is being used and how.
This could include record
etc. Such insight can be used
to understand what Salesforce
features the users need more
help and plug the gap. This
will, in turn, help improve SFA
adoption metrics.
9. Apart from increasing the Salesforce log-ins and making
it possible for salespersons to use the tool effortlessly
friend to your organization and employees:
1. Salespeople can get more
done within the same time, as the DAS helps them
navigate and complete the tasks on Salesforce in
to the software-related learning and forgetting
curves, thanks to the real-time guidance offered
by the Salesforce adoption services. Additionally, it
automates humdrum admin tasks. This means that
salespeople now have more time to focus on selling
and building meaningful customer relationships.
2. At the end of the day, the
most measurable result a DAS can deliver is an
improvement in the sales conversion and revenue
generated. Our research shows that if harnessed
3. DAS makes it possible
to deliver customized training in an inexpensive
and speedy manner. Since it automates and
overheads (training room rent, electricity, paper)
and trainer costs. Since reinforcement training is
also automated, you can even do away with the
employee retraining.
4.
such as tool-tips information entry and validation
tips, Salesforce end-users can easily input new
without any worry of repetition or inconsistency of
data.
5. DAS helps you
measure overall adoption rates and also how
involved people are with the Salesforce product and
how much they use it. This behavioural and unbiased
Salesforce-usage wisdom can be leveraged to further
improve Salesforce user adoption.
Some start out by using the adoption tool to provide
Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Community Cloud. In
Management, Customer Order Management, Sales
Compensation, Sales Enablement, Digital signature
management - in a phased manner or all in one go.
Either way, for larger organizations, it is best to start
this manner, you will have Salesforce adoption metrics
available to you from day one. Then, based on Salesforce
Lightning adoption insights and engagement metrics
experience.
So now that we have established how essential
DAS is for successful Salesforce user adoption, let’s
get down to understanding how to deployment this
adoption platform.Every organization has a different
approach towards adoption of DAS and they execute
it in different stages of the Salesforce Lightning
adoption lifecycle.
10. ROI from Using
DAS for Salesforce
User Adoption
As they say, proof of the pudding is in
the eating. Similarly, you know if the
DAS has really worked its magic in
improving salesforce user adoption
when you see tangible ROI.
delivers. It was found that if a large company
improve Salesforce adoption metrics, it is
form of faster and easier content creation
and customer satisfaction, reduced support
What’s more, the DAS delivers in terms of
admin tasks, it frees up salespersons’ time to
focus on more selling and customer-facing
reps time saved across the entire salesforce!
It was noted that of all time-saving initiatives,
reducing time spent on content updation
11. Challenge:
Change management for each Salesforce
Unscalable Salesforce adoption training on
Trotec’s LMS
helped Trotec create real-time helped
Trotec create real-time interactive walkthroughs
on their Salesforce Lightning
Result:
Reduction in training content creation
Reduction in Salesforce training
Trotec’s LMS
ROI from Using DAS for Salesforce User Adoption
Challenge -
Low recall of Salesforce classroom training with
sales reps
Lack of resources to create training & help
content for the customized Salesforce instance.
Delivered digital training at scale with interactive
guidance & task lists
sources in the enterprise
to deliver effective and reusable training
Results:
Adoption time reduced from 3 months to
Challenge:
Sophoss in
Offered self-help widget, tasklist and smart tips
to aid Sophos employees in better navigating
Salesforce UX.
Result:
functions) saved
Here is a snapshot of these success stories:
over 550 people worldwide
One of the largest printers in the U.S,
over 1000 employees
British security software and hardware company
with over 3,319 employees
12. The Dublin-based company, Experian, had prudently
invested in a heavily customized Salesforce system
to improve the productivity of its sales teams. It even
based training) training sessions to boost Salesforce
issues were lack of data quality and compliance.
Challenges
Upon interacting with the highly insightful and self-
following issues faced by their sales function:
1.
platform
2.
sessions for all the teams, across geographies -
causing 2-3 months delay in complete onboarding
3.
devise and deploy a personalized solution for Experian’s
Solution
contextually and easily addresses Salesforce users’ ‘how-
Experian could now limit traditional onboarding methods
is important’ to each individual. This helped save
thousands in Salesforce user adoption costs.
each users’ role, language and instance (customised per
the SFA onboarding are:
1.
that help users navigate the Salesforce usage. There
is also an always-on self-help menu that offers
contextual support. And the on-screen guidance that
2.
training modules, creating content becomes really
Case Study
solutions company
Outcome
platform, Experian developed the capability to launch
the Salesforce system in its new business units in under
erstwhile 2-3 month lag time. Salesforce user adoption
time to create the training content. All of the automation
hours back, thus improving productivity.
now Experian sales leaders can track the sales team’s
progress and set sales targets and forecasts accurately.
From 2-3 tp 2-3 months
From 19 to 6
Up by 20%
Down by 50%
Down by 60%
From days to mins
6.2 hours/User
13. All things considered, the personalized,
great means of improving your organization’s
Salesforce adoption metrics. Here are the top
5 reasons why most enterprises prefer the
1.
your employees will be shown the right training
content at the right time. Using intelligent
contextualizes all your enterprise knowledge
(knowledge bases, web-based content or
inside-documents) and surfaces them in-app. Then,
users receive the personalized training and support,
over various channels, for a seamless experience.
across the enterprise.
2.
existing systems or choose from best third-party
systems. In fact, it integrates with the highest
tools, chat tools, chatbots, knowledge bases, LMS,
survey and session recording tools.
3.
content can be auto-generated and auto-published
and made available to users based on their in-
parameters. It also offers no-charge onboarding
4.
Apart from being easy to deploy and implement,
applications and in real time. Unlike traditional
a more interactive means of learning. It also tracks
speed up the learning curve.
5.
ranked as a Customer Satisfaction leader in the G2
segment? The adoption platform’s customer care is
time of the closest competitor and reduces support
6.
do not capture unnecessary data on the users. We
help companies measure the effectiveness of their
content in driving application adoption and provide
insights into how content could be improved. Also,
add-on fee.
14. Click here for a free trial
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