How To Improve Your Salesforce Adoption And Increase Business

Salesforce is an incredibly beneficial platform for businesses that want to better connect with their customers and provide excellent customer service. Still, there seems to be a trend of difficulty when it comes to Salesforce adoption.

Let’s take a look at what Salesforce is, the issue of Salesforce adoption, and how your business can better implement the platform.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution used by businesses in virtually all niches and industries. It is essentially a wholly integrated CRM platform that helps all departments within a business get a view of every customer.

With Salesforce, businesses and their departments can:

• Create more engaging marketing and send targeted and personalized messaging.
• Increase sales force productivity and overall revenue
• Track all customer interactions
• Automate admin tasks and redundant tasks
• Connect the B2B and B2C buying experiences
• Utilize personalization through AI
• Improve agent response time
• Manage all channel with a single dashboard view
• Unify communications, such as email, social, phone, and chat support
• Easily build simple apps

Salesforce can integrate all of a business’s teams and technologies around one single CRM platform. This way, every employee can interact with customers like a whole single company, rather than a series of different disjointed departments.

Clearly, there are a lot of benefits to Salesforce adoption. So why are businesses struggling to do so?

The Problem of Salesforce Adoption

Many companies will see the value of Salesforce and purchase it but will be discouraged to find that staff in relevant departments aren’t adopting the CRM in everyday work activities.

It makes sense why. Adopting a totally new platform is so much more than simply buying CRM software and tossing it into your departments. There is always a learning curve involved, and employees need to see the value of using the technology as opposed to what they are already used to. They need to see the benefits of the software not solely for the benefit of the business, but for the benefit of their workflow and job quality.

Luckily, Salesforce adoption can be remedied in a handful of different ways. The five different ways we believe Salesforce can be better adopted and implemented aren’t mutually exclusive, either. We recommend implementing all of the following steps to better equip your teams to adopt Salesforce.

Four Ways to Improve Salesforce Adoption

1. Consider Bottom-Up Feedback

You want your company to use Salesforce, you yourself use Salesforce, and you’ve purchased Salesforce for your staff. One cannot just throw new software at a team and tell them to use it. In that same vein, one cannot force staff to find value in a new CRM platform if they do not know the intimate details of what that particular department’s staff does.

It’s critical to know what your team needs and what they do. Salesforce should be a solution– not a hindrance.

Asking for feedback is a great way to see why your team may not be so accepting of Salesforce and how that can be remedied. Invest in scheduling user committees so that whole teams of users can talk about what they’re struggling with when it comes to adopting Salesforce. Also, consider implementing user surveys (anonymously) and adoption dashboards. If your team feels heard and there are ways to work around roadblocks they may be experiencing in Salesforce, company-wide adoption can become a reality.

2. Use Salesforce Adoption for Simplicity

A solution is a solution because it makes the act of doing something easier and more efficient. Salesforce should make your staff’s jobs easier, not hard.

When implementing Salesforce, remember that less is more. Customize each user profile you plan to implement according to their job– don’t settle for out-of-the-box basics. If you’re creating a profile for a sales manager, include elements in their profile that only sales managers will need. Essentially, you should eliminate all clutter and data entry before deploying Salesforce in your departments for more ease of adoption.

3. Build Healthy Competition

Healthy competition always has a place in the workplace. One way to inspire teams in your business’s various departments, especially sales, is to implement leaderboard technology.

Spinify is a leaderboard platform designed to engage staff and encourage them to perform. After purchasing, implementing, and training your employees on Salesforce, you can encourage their actual use of the platform by posting leaderboards. Leaderboards will show off who is reaching sales goals and offer incentives for greater performance.

Spinify can help improve Salesforce adoption by making your data visible. Employees don’t want to fall behind on public leaderboards, so they’ll change their behavior accordingly. Leaderboards can also add a bit of fun to otherwise mundane or repetitive tasks completed in any one department.

4. Get Your Leadership Team On Board

When your department leaders are invested in Salesforce and know the ins and outs of the software, it’ll be much easier for Salesforce adoption to be staff-wide.

Leadership buy-in is so important for success. Start by making sure your leaders (or you, if you run a small startup) understand the value of Salesforce as well as how to effectively use it.

In addition to this, it is vital for your leaders and managers to demonstrate the actual strategic value of Salesforce and demonstrate their own personal investment in the software. That means show employees how to use the tool on a daily basis through example, workshops, training, etc.

Leaders can start showing off Salesforce’s value by encouraging collaboration and basic communication in the Chatter function, as well as requiring review analytics to be administered via Salesforce, rather than through Excel reports or other outdated means.

Build Salesforce Adoption Through Motivation

Improving the user adoption of Salesforce will help both your management team to understand the health of your customers and your reps perform better.

Using Spinify’s gamified sales dashboard, you can engage, appreciate, and coach your sales representatives to improve on their usage of Spinify and overall performance.

It’s an excellent way to exceed every quota on your path.

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