9 Salesforce Adoption Best Practices
This is the first in a two part series on Salesforce adoption. Click here to read part two.
Salesforce is the world’s leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, enabling organizations to streamline processes, enhance customer relationships, and drive overall growth. However, the true power of Salesforce can only be harnessed when it is embraced and effectively utilized by every member of your team and organization. Salesforce adoption is about transforming the way your organization operates. To ensure successful adoption and maximize its potential, consider these nine best practices:
1. Remove Friction
Nothing will frustrate your users and cause them to log out quicker than encountering friction within your instance when they’re just trying to get the job done. It’s important to keep this in mind when building out new processes within Salesforce. Actual end users should always be involved in requirements gathering and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Whether implementing a new Sales Process, building out new page layouts or LEX pages, or considering new Validation Rules, continuously gather feedback from the users who will actually be impacted.
End users can also feel frustrated if they don’t have or can’t build the reports and dashboards that they need, if a custom process is constantly throwing errors, if they’re often encountering duplicates or incorrect data, or simply if they’re having trouble logging in or don’t have the permissions they need.
Be in constant communication with your end users and keep all possible points of friction in mind.
2. Provide Value to End Users
Along with removing friction, providing value to end users is possibly one of the most important considerations in driving adoption. As Salesforce Admins, we ask a lot of our end users in this data driven world, often because they are one of our most valuable sources of data. If you’re going to ask sales reps to record every call or CSMs to update important Account roles, you need to make sure they’re getting something out of it, too.
So ask your end users, “What aren’t you getting out of Salesforce that could make your life easier?” This could be something as simple as reports or custom homepages, something you hadn’t considered yet like intent data for new leads, or something fun to build like a custom button that opens the customer’s record in your external billing system.
Always look for ways to provide value to your end users, because when Salesforce is making it easier for them to do their jobs, they’re going to use it.
3. Automate Whenever Possible
One great way to reduce friction and provide value to your end users is to automate routine business processes. After all, this is the promise of pretty much every platform in your RevOps tech stack. And “automate everything” includes “integrate everything” (of course, the “everything” in both of those phrases should be taken with a grain of salt).
Work with your end users and practice Database Administration by Walking Around (DABWA) to identify those routine and mundane tasks that could be automated. Are your CSMs manually creating renewal Opportunities? Automate it! Are your sales reps manually logging demos? Integrate it! Auto-sequence Leads in your Sales Engagement platform using your existing routing solution. Populate data from existing systems that your users might be manually updating.
The less buttons your users have to click, the less fields they have to populate, the more willing they’ll be to click the buttons and populate the fields you really need them to click and populate.
4. Test, Test, Test
Nothing will frustrate users faster and make them lose trust in the system than processes that throw errors or don’t work as expected. And frustrated users that don’t trust the system will not use Salesforce unless they absolutely have to. This is why testing is so important when building out new processes, making changes to permissions or metadata, establishing new integrations, or even building out new reports and dashboards.
Always test everything you build as thoroughly as you possibly can. Document scenario testing with expected outcomes and run through everything while logged in as different types of target users. Bring in end users and have them perform UAT testing before going live. End users never fail to find creative ways to break a process even when you thought you’ve thought of everything.
Ensuring that nothing goes wrong with new processes will drive adoption by reducing friction and building trust in the system among your users.
5. Squash Bugs Immediately
That being said, you’re not bound to catch everything, so… Squash bugs immediately! Again, bugs will cause friction, frustration, and a loss of trust, which will negatively impact adoption. Dropping what you’re working on to deal with a bug can be annoying. But this can be a classic “quick win.” You can probably fix the bug quickly, and if someone reported it they will be happy.
You should quickly respond to bug reports from your end users, but it’s even better to be proactive and catch bugs before anyone notices. Exception reporting, error handling, and automated error alerts should be considered a required part of any project. Every flow should have fault paths for error handling. Every integration should be monitored with components in your admin dashboard. You should build “Wall of Zero” reporting into that dashboard as well to flag records in a non-ideal state that could indicate issues with automations and integrations.
Resolving bugs as quickly as possible will minimize their impact on your users, which will drive usage and adoption while building trust.
6. Clear Communication & Training
Clear communication and training is another way to build trust and avoid friction and frustration. No one wants to be surprised by new page layouts, MFA requirements, or Sales Stage exit criteria when they’re in the middle of trying to get something done.
So, even if the change is minor, like removing an LEX page component that you’re sure no one is using anymore, communicate it to your users. And if the change is major enough, be sure to train your end users. This can be as simple as emailing documentation or recording a video, or as formal as holding one-on-one or group training sessions.
Whether it’s just a quick heads-up in Slack or a full blown training session, communication and training will drive adoption by keeping users engaged and informed, and might even make them feel like they’re a part of the Salesforce roadmap.
7. Buy-In From Leaders
It’s important to acknowledge that this one can be a luxury. Some Salesforce Admins will simply find themselves in a position where they are responsible for an instance at an organization where leadership is not too invested in Salesforce. But if you’re fortunate enough to have leaders who are invested in Salesforce, or you have the time and ability to win their buy-in, it can have an incredible impact on adoption.
Leaders have the authority and resources to inspire others to care about Salesforce adoption. They set the organization-wide goals, after all. A sales rep might “forget” to fill in that required field with an actual value after you ask them to. But they’re much less likely to forget if their Sales Manage, VP of Sales, or CRO tells them to.
Leaders can also set adoption goals, sign-off on additional tools to encourage and monitor adoption, sponsor fun challenges that gamify adoption, include adoption related goals in performance reviews, or add Salesforce related responsibilities to job descriptions.
8. Maintain Data Quality
Maintaining data quality in your instance ties into two of the above points: reducing friction and providing value. Bad data and duplicate records can have a negative impact on user experience, which will create friction and negatively impact adoption. It can also make reporting more difficult and less accurate, which means Salesforce will be providing less value to users giving them less reason to use it.
You want to make sure that you’re monitoring data quality in your instance so that you can identify and correct the root causes of the bad data. A “Wall of Zeros” is a dashboard where every component is filtered to catch incorrect records. So when you load the dashboard, you want to see all zeros. For example, a Lead report filtered to show all new leads where Lead Source is null should pull in zero records. If it pulls any in, you can troubleshoot why the Lead is missing its Lead Source and correct the problem at its source.
Matching rules and duplicate rules can also be set up and reporting built to monitor the creation of duplicates. Duplicates should be merged on a cadence, and root causes of duplicate records should be identified and corrected. There are many great third party tools to help battle duplicates as well. Every database will always have duplicates, but a responsible admin should have robust duplicate mitigation processes in place.
9. Monitor and Measure Success Metrics
Finally, you need to be able to actually measure usage and adoption. Salesforce is a huge investment for most organizations, and being able to measure adoption provides actual data around the ROI of implementing or maintaining SF. Being able to monitor usage and adoption can also help admins, developers, and decision makers focus their efforts where it’s needed.
Out of the box usage and adoption reporting in SF has never exactly been robust. Most admins will create a dashboard with a collection of reports showing things like total logins by profile by week, number of new opportunities, number of modified cases, and other metrics that can loosely give a sense of usage and adoption. The out of the box “Lightning Usage App” also provides some aggregated active user data.
Getting creative with this type of reporting can help provide metrics on users logging in, creating records, and editing records. This can give a broad picture of usage and adoption.
Go Further With Usage and Adoption Reporting!
As Salesforce professionals ourselves, we have always been passionate about driving adoption of Salesforce. In the past, we found ourselves tasked with tracking and measuring usage and adoption in Salesforce, and were always limited by Salesforce’s out of the box functionality.
That’s exactly why we created RecordWatch! RecordWatch is a fully native Salesforce solution available through the AppExchange. RecordWatch allows admins, devs, analysts, and leaders to monitor which records in Salesforce their users are actually viewing at the individual level or the aggregate. Create robust reporting to see where your users are active in your instance, or drill down by individual users or even individual records.
To learn more about RecordWatch, watch our on-demand video or reach out to us at hello@oniic.io.
