Salesforce Rollout Guide

User Adoption

Your Salesforce rollout doesn't stop the day you introduce the application to your users. To be successful with CRM, you have to instill the value of CRM into your company's culture. This section highlights some of the best practices to help drive user adoption.
   

Communicate the importance of the initiative
The number-one reason for failed CRM implementations is a lack of executive sponsorship. Senior leadership needs to regularly communicate the important role that Salesforce plays in the company's strategy and proactively manage to the application. This can be done during company meetings, via a monthly newsletter, or though one-on-one interventions with those resistant to change.  

Solicit user feedback
When educating users on the application, ask them what they'd like changed. Often times there are unused fields, cluttered page layouts, or terminology that doesn’t make sense. Whenever possible make changes on the fly in front of them to show them how responsive you can be with Salesforce.  

Communicate the value proposition for reps
Whether it's consolidating key sales collateral in the documents tab or importing leads directly from the website into Salesforce, find ways to make this a win-win for users and management. One of the biggest challenges is that reps view Salesforce for a tool for managers and loose sight of how it can make them more successful.   
Use dashboards to run your team meetings
When your team sees that you're managing to the application, usage tends to take a dramatic rise. Open up Salesforce in team meetings and highlight the dashboards which you track. When appropriate, drill down into the details and confirm that the information is accurate. If data is missing tell your reps that, “if it isn’t in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.”   

Tie compensation to the application
There are a number of ways to tie compensation to Salesforce, the most popular of which is to only pay commissions on opportunities which were created in the application. You can also create spiffs which are directly tied to dashboards inside the application.

Leverage adoption dashboards
There are several adoption dashboards available on the AppExchange which you can install in a matter of minutes. These dashboards allow you to track login activity and new records added by user. Some customers have set up what they call “the wall of shame” to highlight outliers and enforce compliance. Adoption dashboards can also be used to improve data quality. For example, you can create a dashboard element which says who’s not filling out required fields.

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1 Comments

Van
October 30

i am a project mgr and recently i got some problems there.

your article here really helps. thx a lot.