How to Increase user Adoption in Salesforce CRM

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Salesforce is, no doubt, one of the most powerful CRMs in the market today and unsurprisingly so. A report from Springengage shows that when using Salesforce, customer satisfaction is increased to 35%, company revenue rises to an average of 25%, and productivity in sales goes up by 44%. Due to its powerful cloud storage and diverse features, it is recognized to be the “most used” CRM software, but from the end-user’s perspective, is it?

The whole point of having a CRM is to deepen customer relationships and increase sales, but before this happens, the sales teams’ participation is required. Ironically, ease of use for the end-user is often not a priority. No matter how sparkly the CRM is, if your users do not or cannot use the system, results won’t show.

Yes, Salesforce in itself is remarkable, but when applied to a real-life company setting, learning curves can be a bit steep, and the unwillingness to change may overpower the excitement of using something new. Therefore crm adoption can be on the slow side, which also leads to slow results or worse, failure. This is why having a long term Salesforce CRM adoption strategy is very important and here are some key tips to boost your CRM adoption:

Incentivize the use of Salesforce

This can be simplified into three words: Recognize, Reward, and Repeat. Let your users know that when they use Salesforce to the best of their ability, utilizing its functionalities, and making an effort to learn more about it, they will be recognized and rewarded. CRM adoption brings value to the company, and therefore, the user that strives towards it deserves to be praised. Having incentives encourages the users to adopt the system into their workflows.

Aside from rewards, you can also make it hard for your users to ignore Salesforce, not in the form of giving verbal punishment or demerits when they don’t actively use it, but by shifting the company’s activities and aligning it with Salesforce. Hold team collaborations or send files through Salesforce, communicate through Chatter, and use the system on mobile. Integrate all the necessary platforms needed to collate processes using your CRM. Make it so that not using Salesforce becomes a loss for the end-users.

Measure your team’s Salesforce usage

In relation to the first tip, you need to find a way to measure exactly how much your team uses Salesforce, especially how they’re utilizing it. End users could simply log in to Salesforce, yet not do anything. This shouldn’t count as “using it”. Instead, focus on each user’s activities, as well as the amount and quality of data they entered through Salesforce. This can be the number of times they communicated using the email integration, or the contacts that they have saved, the sales opportunities updated through the system, the use of CRM analytics to create sales reports, etc.

The bottom line is: being able to measure real CRM usage allows you to assess where your team is at in regards to CRM adoption, as well as give appropriate incentives to high-performing individuals.

Make Salesforce training convenient

The importance of CRM training has been asserted over and over again. It is one of the foundations of CRM adoption. However, what most people miss is how the training should be done in a way that is convenient and easy for the end-users. If they feel like this new shift is a cause for them to feel like they’re back in school, dreading going to classes, and completing assignments, then expect a discouraged team that resents the Salesforce altogether, even if it’s the number one CRM in the market.

Companies should focus on creating a training strategy that makes learning easy and convenient. Also, don’t forget to communicate with your users beforehand. Know their preferences and what medium they want to use for training. Here are some examples of convenient training methods:

  • Do virtual or zoom training sessions.
  • Create short video tutorials for common procedures that users can easily look back to for reference.
  • Gamify the training experience to make it fun.
  • Have regular open group discussions to discuss what they have learned as well as their difficulties in using Salesforce.

 

Get a Salesforce admin

It can be tempting to expect one’s users to be able to fix technical problems on their own when they arise. After all, they have been trained, and a large Salesforce community is available for users to ask questions to, but remember: it is not their job to be an IT professional, and fix software issues. Instead of allowing salespeople to focus more on selling, CRM becomes an added burden and something that the users would rather not use.

To prevent this, consider hiring a Salesforce admin or developer, but if you already have someone on your team that is an expert on Salesforce, even better. You also have the option to train an employee or two, regarding the inner workings of Salesforce, but that’s a different set of things to deal with as well. The best and easiest way would be to hire someone who already knows what they’re doing.

 

Make use of Technology Advancements

Salesforce used to have Einstein Voice, an AI-enhanced voice assistant for CRM users. It allowed users to speak commands and Einstein voice would respond accordingly, and would even suggest the next steps. Imagine Siri or Alexa, but used specifically for CRM. The goal was to utilize voice technology to make CRM usage and data entry easier. Unfortunately, Salesforce pulled out Einstein Voice and briefly announced its retirement last July 2020.

However, despite the loss of such an amazing tool, there are alternatives out there that would fill in the gaps that Einstein Voice left. Voice to CRM integration has been evolving from service to actual artificial intelligence that would be able to assess your recordings properly and accurately.

Utilizing Voice to CRM makes it easier for users to adapt. it removes the toughest barrier to a full Salesforce CRM adoption: Manual Data entry.

In Conclusion: To ensure that your company reaps the full benefits of Salesforce, as well as to make the most out of your costly investment, create a strategic CRM adoption plan. Prioritize user adoption from the onset and make it easier for users to apply the system to their work.