Did you know thataround 77% of sellerscannot efficiently complete their tasks? Lack of productivity can result in lost sales, poor customer relations, and inability to complete everyday tasks.
Many organizations devote a large portion of their budget to tools and programs designed to streamline their operations. However, one of the main hurdles facing CEOs and sales executives is failing to onboard their teams adequately. As leaders, we need to take the time to invest not only in new programs but also in bringing our sales team up to speed.
Don’t get discouraged if your sales team is stuck with an overflowing pipeline of non-converting opportunities. Exploring Veloxy is an easy way to help your team as long as you support them.
Where Salesforce Laggards Become Champions.
Watch your sales team sell easier, smarter, and faster with Veloxy.
Imagine it – you’ve purchased Salesforce and implemented it into your organization. You’re ready for the program to transform the way your sales team does business. You automatically assume that your time and monetary investment will start to pay off immediately.
However, you don’t see the results you’re expecting. The dashboards and reports within Salesforce are patchy at best. Your sales team has started reverting to off-platform and old ways of completing their jobs.
Your Salesforce data quality will tank without users inputting updated and new data into the program. Users can’t be productive with a program that includes outdated or incomplete data. Eventually, your sales team will lose faith in Salesforce.
Help Your Team Incorporate Salesforce Into Their Daily Routine
Salesforce adoption refers to the extent to which your sales team members have incorporated the program into their daily tasks. It also includes how well the Salesforce admin and dev teams have customized and configured it to fit your needs.
Tracking:Gathering qualitative and quantitative metrics for how your sales team interacts with Salesforce
Onboarding:The ways new users use Salesforce
Optimization:Making automation and interface changes to improve user productivity
Why You Should Focus on Salesforce Adoption
Failing to follow through on Salesforce adoption can have numerous adverse effects on your business. Some of the reasons why you should focus on Salesforce adoption include:
Improving your data and reporting
Automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks
Close more deals faster
Increase your ROI
The 16 Best Salesforce Adoption Strategies
1. Get Buy-in from the Top Down
If one person is responsible for getting users to adopt Salesforce, your business shouldn’t expect overly optimistic results in the short term. Users need their colleagues and senior-level managers to demonstrate buy-in early.
Let’s not exclude the CEO from this strategy. When your executives are excited about Salesforce’s promises, they’ll take personal responsibility for improving morale and enthusiasm around the platform.
Another key to getting buy-in is to empower end-users to host a lunch and learn. Often, it’s the users who discover Salesforce’s most useful job and industry-specific features.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #1
Get Salesforce buy-in from the C-Suite
Share the C-Suite’s buy-in with the users
Host Lunch and Learns to demonstrate benefits
Why it works: We live in a society that balances leaders and followers. Rest assured, if you have a core of enthusiastic early adopters, you’ll soon have a team of high-performing Salesforce users.
How Veloxy helps: Non-selling activities are the most significant roadblock to adoption. Veloxy helps automate and eliminate 90-95% of data entry, admin tasks, and more.
2. Reporting for Accountability and Success Rate
Before onboarding a new user to Salesforce, have them complete a bi-weekly survey. Ask them how much time they spend manually prioritizing leads or creating new contact records. Tracking and sharing their progress will give users a great sense of accomplishment.
Alongside this reporting, collect and summarize how each user compares to their sales colleagues. Share how other users are succeeding with time savings and pipeline velocity. They’ll ask the leaders in time savings for tips and share their valuable insights with laggards in different categories.
This is one of the quickest ways to improve user adoption across sales teams and the organization.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #2
Survey employees on Salesforce activity
Analyze the team’s Salesforce activity
Share the results and generate achievable KPIs
Why it works: While users may initially be hesitant due to a sense of micro-management or big-brother fears, they will quickly realize the reporting is intended not just to help them, but to acknowledge their successes.
How Veloxy helps: User adoption metrics are centralized into a simple dashboard that sales managers and salespeople can review together. Veloxy helps reassure salespeople that the platform and Salesforce are improving their revenue and overall performance.
3. Invite Marketing and Human Resources
Don’t stop there! Using Salesforce can also benefit customer service, product management, and buying. But this isn’t just about creating a collaborative experience for your sales team. It’s about creating a collaborative sales experience for your customers.
As we found in our State of Field Sales Survey, most buyers want a personalized, value-added buying experience. One way to achieve this is by inviting other personnel resources into the sales process.
Customers don’t want to speak to one person every single time. If they have a question about technical specifications, invite a product manager or engineer to the correspondence. This will improve CSAT scores and the salesperson’s reputation as an advisor and partner in success.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #3
Schedule a company-wide Salesforce presentation
Invite buy-in and users from other departments
Pair non-sales staff with sales staff on Salesforce
Why it works: Trust is a big part of the game, and the less your buyers can question your consultation, the better. Inviting more players into the sales process helps in this regard.
How Veloxy helps: With a centralized view of each account and contact, Veloxy users can quickly review sales collaboration efforts before meeting with their customers.
4. Engage with the Trailblazer Community
According to Salesforce, when you’re an early adopter who maximizes the functionality of their platform, you’re not just a high performer—you’re a Trailblazer!
Salesforce’s online Trailblazer Community is where users can ask troubleshooting questions, answer other users’ inquiries, request future features, and more. All humans long for a sense of community, and if you’re looking for a strategy to improve adoption, this one is a dark horse.
In addition to sharing struggles and successes, Salesforce users have made long-time friends and connections in the Trailblazer Community. In many cases, users have found customers. Lastly, Salesforce encourages users to join everyone at Dreamforce to meet each other in person.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #4
Complete your Salesforce Trailblazer profile
Search the Trailblazer Community to answer questions
Build your reputation and network with potential clients
Why it works: It replaces the stigma that Salesforce is a mere platform or tool because it’s also a community of like-minded sales professionals.
How Veloxy helps: It’s common for users to ask for help streamlining or automating Salesforce in the Trailblazer community. You can make a quick friend by suggesting a trial of Veloxy!
5. Create a Salesforce Training Folder
Once a company starts reaping the benefits of Salesforce and Veloxy, it must hire more salespeople! This means more Salesforce users who may or may not have experience with the platform.
There’s no better time to start documenting all onboarding and training materials. Our customers follow the best practice of centralizing all materials in a single accessible folder within their network. Videos, how-to guides, and lunch and learn schedules are standard content in these folders.
By creating this user destination, you will be a hero to your Salesforce users and look really good in the eyes of your CEO, CRO, and CFO.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #5
Work with IT to create a secure, accessible folder
Add onboarding and training materials to the folder
Task users with creating or improving materials
Why it works: Binders and filing cabinets are a thing of the past. Keep all content in one location to ramp up new users and help them generate revenue faster and more efficiently.
How Veloxy helps: Thanks to Veloxy’s Salesforce automation, several manual processes that require training are removed from the user’s responsibility, keeping them on-task and engaged with customers.
6. Design a Before and After Document
This may be the easiest of the ten strategies. As you collect data on Salesforce usage, pick out the five to ten eye-popping KPIs that convey the platform’s before-and-after benefits.
How many hours was your team spending on data entry before Salesforce?
How much shorter was the average sales cycle after Salesforce?
How many people exceeded quota before and after Salesforce?
Having just a handful of these numbers presented in an eye-grabbing way on a single piece of paper can go a long way to guaranteeing adoption at your company. Work with your graphic design department to throw something together.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #6
Analyze team KPIs and pull the 5 best
Design a handout or poster that shares the KPIs
Update the document every month or quarter
Why it works: A picture is worth a thousand words. Get the point across why Salesforce adoption works without having to say anything. You’ll be surprised how fast it works.
How Veloxy helps: When you deploy Veloxy alongside Salesforce, two to three numbers can be tied to benefits, including time-savings at night and on weekends.
7. Recognize the High Performers
If quota crushers and customer satisfiers are acknowledged in sales meetings, why not Salesforce adopters?
Being hyper-efficient and productive with your day is something to be celebrated. Salespeople who have succeeded in life have learned from their preceding high-performers. Recognizing the top users of Salesforce is another way to leave breadcrumbs.
Review the reports above to discover your high performers, and be sure to share these acknowledgments with the C-suite.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #7
Recognize 1 to 3 users for the highest adoption metrics
Update the recognition every week or month
Have consistent high-achievers present their best practices
Why it works: Most users must wait for recognition from an uptick in sales or CSAT scores. By creating another source of achievement, you can improve morale faster.
How Veloxy helps: The more salespeople use Veloxy, the faster and higher their Salesforce performance metrics will rise. Veloxy helps users maximize Salesforce usage from the comfort of their inbox or smartphone.
8. Track Data Quality and Sales Intelligence
Salesforce doesn’t necessarily guarantee data quality and accuracy. Relying on users to accurately type in their leads’ names and contact information is definitely not a best practice.
Using B2B databases like ZoomInfo can be a helpful remedy; however, leads and contacts can change email addresses or jobs without notice. With all this being said, tracking and maintaining data quality and account intelligence is extremely difficult.
This is where using one or more Salesforce AppExchange apps can be helpful. Apps on your smartphone or integrated with your inbox can automatically detect changes in every contact’s correspondence and news moments, thereby improving data quality and buyer signals over time.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #8
Track bounce rates for your team’s email campaigns
Use ZoomInfo to track and update records in real-time
Create an initiative to acquire mobile numbers
Why it works: Placing the responsibility of data quality and real-time insights on the shoulders of salespeople is not the best practice. Be sure to take the necessary steps to automate Salesforce data and intelligence.
How Veloxy helps: Veloxy automatically updates contact records when a change is detected in an email or an incoming phone call. Furthermore, it centralizes sales intelligence from multiple sources, including social media.
9. Encourage AppExchange Window Shopping
Forcing users to adopt Salesforce and follow rigid guidelines doesn’t always work. Empowering all users to take an active role in improving their adoption and the adoption of the company is a much better approach.
One of the most popular paths to empower users is to encourage them to browse Salesforce’s AppExchange app store. This store is filled with apps that enhance the user experience of Salesforce by function, role, department, and industry.
There are 1,000s of apps on the AppExchange. If you empower each salesperson to choose and trial one app, how much better off will your adoption rates look this time next year?
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #9
Empower every user to search the AppExchange and demo apps
Have each user trial an app and present it for consideration
Invite reps from the app companies to present best practices
Why it works: Users want an active role in improving their adoption of Salesforce, let alone their colleagues’ adoption. Incorporate them in the decision-making process.
How Veloxy helps: Veloxy is a five-star application on AppExchange and is extremely popular amongst field sales representatives. Users can expect to have their annual subscription paid off in one to three months.
10. Buy a Salesforce Trophy
I once worked at an organization that struggled with Salesforce adoption. Many of the sales reps were old-fashioned and stuck in the process of spreadsheets and Rolodex cards.
As I walked by one of the higher performers’ desks, I noticed a large rooster statue on his desk. He told me it was for satisfying the most Salesforce KPIs last month. I thought this quite strange, but once other sales reps won the rooster, it became a friendly and fun competition.
You don’t have to buy the same rooster statue. Instead, inform your team about the friendly competition and have them agree on a trophy. You won’t regret it.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #10
Survey your sales team for trophy ideas
Search Google for potential products to buy
Personalize the trophy with your company name or logo
Why it works: This is the perfect way to help staff think of user adoption as a friendly competition, not a metric addressed during performance reviews.
How Veloxy helps: Salesforce has a fixed number of out-of-the-box features. Veloxy unlocks over 30 new features that were inspired by salespeople. You’ll have a hard time telling them to put down their phones because they’re likely using our software.
Did you know that around 77% of sellers cannot efficiently complete their tasks? Lack of productivity can result in lost sales, poor customer relations, and inability to complete everyday tasks.
Many organizations devote a large portion of their budget to tools and programs designed to streamline their operations. However, one of the main hurdles facing CEOs and sales executives is failing to onboard their teams adequately. As leaders, we need to take the time to invest not only in new programs but also in bringing our sales team up to speed.
Don’t get discouraged if your sales team is stuck with an overflowing pipeline of non-converting opportunities. Exploring Veloxy is an easy way to help your team as long as you support them.
Where Salesforce Laggards Become Champions.
What is Salesforce Adoption?
Imagine it – you’ve purchased Salesforce and implemented it into your organization. You’re ready for the program to transform the way your sales team does business. You automatically assume that your time and monetary investment will start to pay off immediately.
However, you don’t see the results you’re expecting. The dashboards and reports within Salesforce are patchy at best. Your sales team has started reverting to off-platform and old ways of completing their jobs.
Your Salesforce data quality will tank without users inputting updated and new data into the program. Users can’t be productive with a program that includes outdated or incomplete data. Eventually, your sales team will lose faith in Salesforce.
Help Your Team Incorporate Salesforce Into Their Daily Routine
Salesforce adoption refers to the extent to which your sales team members have incorporated the program into their daily tasks. It also includes how well the Salesforce admin and dev teams have customized and configured it to fit your needs.
Salesforce user adoption refers to these three main areas:
Why You Should Focus on Salesforce Adoption
Failing to follow through on Salesforce adoption can have numerous adverse effects on your business. Some of the reasons why you should focus on Salesforce adoption include:
The 16 Best Salesforce Adoption Strategies
1. Get Buy-in from the Top Down
If one person is responsible for getting users to adopt Salesforce, your business shouldn’t expect overly optimistic results in the short term. Users need their colleagues and senior-level managers to demonstrate buy-in early.
Let’s not exclude the CEO from this strategy. When your executives are excited about Salesforce’s promises, they’ll take personal responsibility for improving morale and enthusiasm around the platform.
Another key to getting buy-in is to empower end-users to host a lunch and learn. Often, it’s the users who discover Salesforce’s most useful job and industry-specific features.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #1
Why it works: We live in a society that balances leaders and followers. Rest assured, if you have a core of enthusiastic early adopters, you’ll soon have a team of high-performing Salesforce users.
How Veloxy helps: Non-selling activities are the most significant roadblock to adoption. Veloxy helps automate and eliminate 90-95% of data entry, admin tasks, and more.
2. Reporting for Accountability and Success Rate
Before onboarding a new user to Salesforce, have them complete a bi-weekly survey. Ask them how much time they spend manually prioritizing leads or creating new contact records. Tracking and sharing their progress will give users a great sense of accomplishment.
Alongside this reporting, collect and summarize how each user compares to their sales colleagues. Share how other users are succeeding with time savings and pipeline velocity. They’ll ask the leaders in time savings for tips and share their valuable insights with laggards in different categories.
This is one of the quickest ways to improve user adoption across sales teams and the organization.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #2
Why it works: While users may initially be hesitant due to a sense of micro-management or big-brother fears, they will quickly realize the reporting is intended not just to help them, but to acknowledge their successes.
How Veloxy helps: User adoption metrics are centralized into a simple dashboard that sales managers and salespeople can review together. Veloxy helps reassure salespeople that the platform and Salesforce are improving their revenue and overall performance.
3. Invite Marketing and Human Resources
Don’t stop there! Using Salesforce can also benefit customer service, product management, and buying. But this isn’t just about creating a collaborative experience for your sales team. It’s about creating a collaborative sales experience for your customers.
As we found in our State of Field Sales Survey, most buyers want a personalized, value-added buying experience. One way to achieve this is by inviting other personnel resources into the sales process.
Customers don’t want to speak to one person every single time. If they have a question about technical specifications, invite a product manager or engineer to the correspondence. This will improve CSAT scores and the salesperson’s reputation as an advisor and partner in success.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #3
Why it works: Trust is a big part of the game, and the less your buyers can question your consultation, the better. Inviting more players into the sales process helps in this regard.
How Veloxy helps: With a centralized view of each account and contact, Veloxy users can quickly review sales collaboration efforts before meeting with their customers.
4. Engage with the Trailblazer Community
According to Salesforce, when you’re an early adopter who maximizes the functionality of their platform, you’re not just a high performer—you’re a Trailblazer!
Salesforce’s online Trailblazer Community is where users can ask troubleshooting questions, answer other users’ inquiries, request future features, and more. All humans long for a sense of community, and if you’re looking for a strategy to improve adoption, this one is a dark horse.
In addition to sharing struggles and successes, Salesforce users have made long-time friends and connections in the Trailblazer Community. In many cases, users have found customers. Lastly, Salesforce encourages users to join everyone at Dreamforce to meet each other in person.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #4
Why it works: It replaces the stigma that Salesforce is a mere platform or tool because it’s also a community of like-minded sales professionals.
How Veloxy helps: It’s common for users to ask for help streamlining or automating Salesforce in the Trailblazer community. You can make a quick friend by suggesting a trial of Veloxy!
5. Create a Salesforce Training Folder
Once a company starts reaping the benefits of Salesforce and Veloxy, it must hire more salespeople! This means more Salesforce users who may or may not have experience with the platform.
There’s no better time to start documenting all onboarding and training materials. Our customers follow the best practice of centralizing all materials in a single accessible folder within their network. Videos, how-to guides, and lunch and learn schedules are standard content in these folders.
By creating this user destination, you will be a hero to your Salesforce users and look really good in the eyes of your CEO, CRO, and CFO.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #5
Why it works: Binders and filing cabinets are a thing of the past. Keep all content in one location to ramp up new users and help them generate revenue faster and more efficiently.
How Veloxy helps: Thanks to Veloxy’s Salesforce automation, several manual processes that require training are removed from the user’s responsibility, keeping them on-task and engaged with customers.
6. Design a Before and After Document
This may be the easiest of the ten strategies. As you collect data on Salesforce usage, pick out the five to ten eye-popping KPIs that convey the platform’s before-and-after benefits.
How many hours was your team spending on data entry before Salesforce?
How much shorter was the average sales cycle after Salesforce?
How many people exceeded quota before and after Salesforce?
Having just a handful of these numbers presented in an eye-grabbing way on a single piece of paper can go a long way to guaranteeing adoption at your company. Work with your graphic design department to throw something together.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #6
Why it works: A picture is worth a thousand words. Get the point across why Salesforce adoption works without having to say anything. You’ll be surprised how fast it works.
How Veloxy helps: When you deploy Veloxy alongside Salesforce, two to three numbers can be tied to benefits, including time-savings at night and on weekends.
7. Recognize the High Performers
If quota crushers and customer satisfiers are acknowledged in sales meetings, why not Salesforce adopters?
Being hyper-efficient and productive with your day is something to be celebrated. Salespeople who have succeeded in life have learned from their preceding high-performers. Recognizing the top users of Salesforce is another way to leave breadcrumbs.
Review the reports above to discover your high performers, and be sure to share these acknowledgments with the C-suite.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #7
Why it works: Most users must wait for recognition from an uptick in sales or CSAT scores. By creating another source of achievement, you can improve morale faster.
How Veloxy helps: The more salespeople use Veloxy, the faster and higher their Salesforce performance metrics will rise. Veloxy helps users maximize Salesforce usage from the comfort of their inbox or smartphone.
8. Track Data Quality and Sales Intelligence
Salesforce doesn’t necessarily guarantee data quality and accuracy. Relying on users to accurately type in their leads’ names and contact information is definitely not a best practice.
Using B2B databases like ZoomInfo can be a helpful remedy; however, leads and contacts can change email addresses or jobs without notice. With all this being said, tracking and maintaining data quality and account intelligence is extremely difficult.
This is where using one or more Salesforce AppExchange apps can be helpful. Apps on your smartphone or integrated with your inbox can automatically detect changes in every contact’s correspondence and news moments, thereby improving data quality and buyer signals over time.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #8
Why it works: Placing the responsibility of data quality and real-time insights on the shoulders of salespeople is not the best practice. Be sure to take the necessary steps to automate Salesforce data and intelligence.
How Veloxy helps: Veloxy automatically updates contact records when a change is detected in an email or an incoming phone call. Furthermore, it centralizes sales intelligence from multiple sources, including social media.
9. Encourage AppExchange Window Shopping
Forcing users to adopt Salesforce and follow rigid guidelines doesn’t always work. Empowering all users to take an active role in improving their adoption and the adoption of the company is a much better approach.
One of the most popular paths to empower users is to encourage them to browse Salesforce’s AppExchange app store. This store is filled with apps that enhance the user experience of Salesforce by function, role, department, and industry.
There are 1,000s of apps on the AppExchange. If you empower each salesperson to choose and trial one app, how much better off will your adoption rates look this time next year?
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #9
Why it works: Users want an active role in improving their adoption of Salesforce, let alone their colleagues’ adoption. Incorporate them in the decision-making process.
How Veloxy helps: Veloxy is a five-star application on AppExchange and is extremely popular amongst field sales representatives. Users can expect to have their annual subscription paid off in one to three months.
10. Buy a Salesforce Trophy
I once worked at an organization that struggled with Salesforce adoption. Many of the sales reps were old-fashioned and stuck in the process of spreadsheets and Rolodex cards.
As I walked by one of the higher performers’ desks, I noticed a large rooster statue on his desk. He told me it was for satisfying the most Salesforce KPIs last month. I thought this quite strange, but once other sales reps won the rooster, it became a friendly and fun competition.
You don’t have to buy the same rooster statue. Instead, inform your team about the friendly competition and have them agree on a trophy. You won’t regret it.
How to Implement Salesforce Adoption Strategy #10
Why it works: This is the perfect way to help staff think of user adoption as a friendly competition, not a metric addressed during performance reviews.
How Veloxy helps: Salesforce has a fixed number of out-of-the-box features. Veloxy unlocks over 30 new features that were inspired by salespeople. You’ll have a hard time telling them to put down their phones because they’re likely using our software.
11. Establish Clear Adoption Goals
Setting specific, measurab