Explore Our 16 Strategies for Improving Salesforce Adoption

illustration of salesforce adoption

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. 

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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 Users can’t be productive with a program that includes outdated or incomplete data.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:

  • 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

salesforce user adoption tips infographic

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

  1. Get Salesforce buy-in from the C-Suite
  2. Share the C-Suite’s buy-in with the users
  3. 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.

Salesforce users in a sales productivity meeting

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

  1. Survey employees on Salesforce activity
  2. Analyze the team’s Salesforce activity
  3. 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

  1. Schedule a company-wide Salesforce presentation
  2. Invite buy-in and users from other departments
  3. 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.

sales manager proving adoption via KPIs

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

  1. Complete your Salesforce Trailblazer profile
  2. Search the Trailblazer Community to answer questions
  3. 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

  1. Work with IT to create a secure, accessible folder
  2. Add onboarding and training materials to the folder
  3. 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.