How to Maximize your Salesforce Adoption
Director of Client Success, Melissa VanDyke shares her strategy to achieve maximized Salesforce Adoption within your organization.
If you play any role in the success of your company’s Salesforce implementation, you know there are so many different activities you could be doing to further maximize your Salesforce adoption and grow the usage of the platform that it is hard to focus on just one thing.
The Critical Link Between Adoption and Success
Ultimately, no matter how great the functionality is in your Salesforce org, if your team members are not using it appropriately (or at all), it is guaranteed the system data will be unreliable and your employees will be frustrated. With low adoption it is hard to get buy-in for ongoing improvements, and so the cycle goes, spiraling until a drastic decision is made at the highest levels of your organization and everyone loses.
The worst part is that your customers are likely paying the price one way or another as well. The good news is, everyone wins when adoption is maximized. So, let’s consider the best areas to focus your energy so you can build momentum within your company: business value and outcomes.
Focus on Business Value and Outcomes
Your company, (all companies), plans initiatives and projects to deliver the business value you are looking for to meet strategic goals. You will work to get these goals met no matter what. It is how you survive and grow. Your focus should be targeted to understanding these goals and translating them into measurable outcomes. Here’s why:
- Outcomes by nature are specific changes in human behaviors that bring different results (more-or-less an action that a customer, prospect, employee, etc., is doing today).
- If you can define the outcome that maps back to the business value leadership is looking for, you can get the buy-in to move forward with your ideas.
- Outcomes are not the “how”, they are just the end result. This is why outcomes should be what you shout from the rooftops, rather than the how or the features. So, your next job is to hypothesize about how you can get that shift in human behavior (hint: likely with Salesforce + process changes).
- Leaving out the “how” opens up collaboration among technical solution teams so everyone can be creative and hypothesize their ideas to come up with solutions.
- In the end, because you are bringing value and talking outcomes, you can put measurable success criteria around everything to help managers and teams see the results of the behavior changes happening — which directly targets your ultimate goal of maximized adoption.
5 Steps to Building Your Pitch & Achieve Buy-In
Once you are clear on the outcomes defined by the business value, you are ready to take action to build the story you will need to tell to achieve buy-in and ultimately maximize Salesforce adoption.
- Talk to leadership to make sure you understand the strategic goals and business value they are looking to achieve in 2024.
- Define impacted personas (customers, partners, etc.).
- Pinpoint key experiences these personas have as they interact with your company.
- Talk to people who interact with these personas and understand their ultimate goals for the interaction (what does a successful interaction look like?) and understand the pain points in the current process.
- Take everything you have learned and visualize it into talking points, telling a story of what you have learned that identifies areas you think a behavior change could impact. Be sure to relate this back to what business value leadership is looking for (and why — but again, not HOW).
Once you have buy-in that the outcomes you have fit the right value, then you can move into creating a list of potential solutions that would need to happen to reach the future state, conduct an impact analysis, etc., so you can get approval for a project.
Continuous Improvement and Advocacy
These are all things anyone can do within their organization, without much disruption and in between regular work. The greatest part is that the effort put into these activities will not go to waste even if you don’t get approval at the end, because it is all data you can use for your next try and for continued advocacy of your goal to maximize the success and adoption of your Salesforce org.
– Melissa VanDyke, Director of Client Success