Salesforce is a very powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software platform that
can integrate all the teams and technology applications of a sales organization or business
enterprise. It’s now used by more and more businesses operating in practically almost all
business sectors and industries.
Additionally, Salesforce is quite a powerful data engine and communications platform that
unifies everything that a business is doing. It helps focus all the efforts and action on clinching
the sale and providing great service to the customer.
As with most technological advances, however, Salesforce typically encounters resistance if not
intolerance from old-time sales teams of any business enterprise. This often makes it hard for a
company to adopt Salesforce across the workflows of all its teams.
You can check out the discussion in this post if you want to gain a better understanding of how
to use the best integration tools in Salesforce to make it easier for your sales teams to shift from
what they’re currently using. For additional information about the best integration tools, click
here.
The Problem With Adopting Salesforce
It’s said that more and more enterprises are getting Salesforce and adopting it for their business
and sales operations. They know that Salesforce would be of great help in amplifying and
multiplying the strengths and capabilities of their sales teams.
Salesforce is already shaping the way the latest technologies are going to be used and deployed
by businesses to optimize their sales operations.
But a lot of entrepreneurs also become disappointed when they find out later on that a good
number of their own different departments and teams aren’t using the Salesforce CRM in their
actual work operations everyday. This is becoming quite a common experience among sales
organizations. They buy Salesforce CRM software and install it for everyone’s use, only for the
leadership and management to find out later on that their sales force and teams aren’t making use
of it the way they’re supposed to be doing.
One of the primary reasons why this happens is when a lot of people in your sales force don’t see
the value of dropping what they’re currently doing to use Salesforce as a replacement platform.
Some of them just don’t see why they would be better off if they use Salesforce as compared to
what they’ve been used to for perhaps a number of years or for some maybe even decades.
It’s important for the company leadership and management to present and demonstrate the
advantages of Salesforce not just in terms of the bottom-line, but also in terms of less measurable
things such as the smoothness of the workflow and the quality of the work output.
Use The Best Salesforce Tools For Better Corporate Adoption
The good thing is that there are a number of tools and ways to tweak your Salesforce platform in
a way that would make it easier for your teams to adopt it in their work processes. You don’t have to pick either of these tools and ways, you can adopt and implement all of them if you like. Salesforce administrators would even recommend that you make the most of all the tools and functionalities that you can use to ease your company’s adoption process.
1. Make Sure You Get Feedback From The Ranks
One of the best ways to ease or hasten the adoption of Salesforce by your business
organization and sales teams is by making sure that you get feedback from your rank-
and-file employees. Some of them would be your frontline sales teams who generate
leads, reach out to them through cold calls, and visit them for face-to-face sales
presentations or product demonstrations. These are some of the workers in your
organization who would benefit the most if they adopted Salesforce in everything they do
at the workplace.
But you know better that it’s not that easy to make everybody use something new in place
of all the systems they’ve become accustomed to for the past several years. Your
frontline sales teams would probably not take the time and effort to adopt Salesforce if
you just imposed on them without training them on how it works, and providing support
on how they can make the most of it to make their work easier or more efficient.
Salesforce would most likely have a way or functionality that could help them make their
work easier or faster, but you should keep in mind that they’re not going to go out of their
way to find out on their own good time how Salesforce can make them better at what
they do. Here are some of the things that you should do to make sure that the best
Salesforce tools are deployed to ease company adoption:
● Gather your sales teams and give them the proper training on how Salesforce can
help them at work.
● Make sure you identify the work roles and functions of each member and come up
with a list of sample features and functionalities that they can use to make their
work easier or faster.
● Give them enough time to talk about their challenges at work, before presenting
the specific features that can help them overcome those challenges.
● After giving them some time to try and use Salesforce, ask them to provide
feedback on their experience with the Salesforce implementation. Ask them if
they’re facing some difficulties or struggling with how to use Salesforce or some
of its features and functionalities.
● You can use the adoption dashboards and anonymous survey tools of Salesforce
to have a more organized feedback information gathering system.
2. Use Salesforce Adoption To Simplify Workflows
When you deploy Salesforce to your sales teams, it should simplify the workflow rather
than unduly complicate what were otherwise simple tasks. This is one more area where
you can use the Salesforce tools and functionalities to simplify the various tasks and
processes of your entire workflow.
Keep in mind that there are multiple Salesforce tools which you use to make all of the
things that your teams are doing a little bit easier and more efficient.
Whenever possible, you should configure the Salesforce profiles of your individual team
members according to what their role and functions need. They should have everything
that they need to do to perform their roles and functions. Don’t include those things
which they would most likely not need or would have very little or seldom use of.
For example, if you’re going to create a profile for a Sales Supervisor position, you
should include everything which is essential for the sales supervisor to perform their roles
and functions, nothing less and nothing more. In other words, put in all the essential
elements but make sure to take out the clutter. This would help ease the way your
individual team members would adapt Salesforce to their work.
3. Use Salesforce Tools To Automate Tasks
Another practical way by which you can ease out or smoothen your company’s
Salesforce adoption process is by using all the available tools on Salesforce to automate
tasks which can be automated. Not too many business organizations may have noticed,
but sales teams spend only about a little over thirty percent of their entire work hours
doing actual efforts to sell the products of their company.
They spend the rest of their time doing other things which have little to do with selling,
such as administrative tasks and encoding data to their lead and customer database files.
This is clearly a waste of their precious time which they could’ve spent calling new leads
or following-through on prospects with whom they’ve already made sales presentations
or product demonstrations. These tasks are part of the workflow but they don’t have to be
the ones doing this.
The good thing with Salesforce is that it has tools which can be used to automate tasks.
This would make sure that the entire workflow process from beginning to end is
streamlined. You can use Salesforce’s documentation integration tool to automate most
of your repetitive tasks and smoothen the company adoption process.
This can be done through the one-click integration part of the onboarding process. This
will enable automatic mapping of your documentation to the exact location where it
should be placed within your workflow.
The great thing about Salesforce is that you can automate practically everything in your
workflow that involves rote and repetitive tasks. Case in point, you can automate the data
transfers from an email chain into the software application. You can even automate
knowledge embedding in the framework used for everyday processes and tasks.
4. Use Leaderboard For Healthy Competition
Another great Salesforce tool that you can use to ease company adoption is to implement
leaderboard technology to build healthy competition among your sales teams. Since most
sales organizations are divided into several teams covering different market segments or sales territories, this would be a great way of inspiring your different sales teams as well as their individual members to boost their sales performance.
Sales is one of those business aspects where instilling and nurturing a culture of
competitiveness would help your business thrive rather than impede any
accomplishments. This is because sales is a highly goal-oriented and performance-driven
business activity. It doesn’t give too much emphasis on the process but rather on the
outcome of pushing your products and clinching that sale. At the same time, though, your
sales teams still have to do their part of the workflows and processes that track their sales
performance.
Salesforce is a great way of driving better sales performance among your sales teams and
at the same time enhancing your various workflow processes and reporting tasks. By
putting leaderboard technology in the middle of all this, you drive your sales teams to
outperform each other in terms of sales closed. And you do all this with the use of
something which ironically isn’t essential to the selling process but acts as an impetus for
higher sales revenues and better reporting.
Conclusion
Salesforce is an incredibly great CRM platform that a business can deploy to power its efforts to
generate new leads, follow through on hot prospects more effectively, and clinch more sales. It
also has tools which are highly useful in enhancing customer service. But any sales organization
or business enterprise should consider how to use the Salesforce tools in such a way that would
ease or smoothen the company’s Salesforce adoption process.
