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10 Salesforce Adoption Tactics & Why They’ll Work for You

10 Salesforce Adoption Tactics & Why They’ll Work for YouPhoto from Unsplash

Originally Posted On: https://veloxy.io/salesforce-adoption-tactics/

 

Veloxy is a powerful Salesforce automation platform for streamlining the sales process and accelerating sales cycles. It includes a Salesforce inbox sidebar, smartphone access, sales engagement, and Ai-power lead qualification.

In fact, Veloxy has been found to reduce or eliminate non-selling activity tied to Salesforce by as much as 90%.

This makes it popular among sales managers and engineers, especially those most interested in improving Salesforce adoption.

As a sales leader, you need more than a Top 50 sales software to improve user adoption of Salesforce.

You need proven tactics that improve sales rep morale and their overall productivity. That’s why we’ve organized the 10 best Salesforce adoption tactics for companies of any size and industry. Check them out below.

Be sure to read our sales manager’s guide on Salesforce Automation.

Salesforce Adoption Tactics

  1. Get Buy-in from the Top Down
  2. Reporting for Accountability and Success
  3. Invite Marketing and Human Resources
  4. Engage with the Trailblazer Community
  5. Create a Salesforce Training Folder
  6. Design a Before and After Document
  7. Recognize the High-Performers
  8. Track Data Quality and Sales Intelligence
  9. Encourage AppExchange Window Shopping
  10. Buy a Salesforce Trophy

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 positive results in the short-term. Users need their colleagues and senior-level managers to demonstrate buy-in at an early stage.

Let’s not exclude the CEO from this tactic. When your executives are excited about the promises of Salesforce, they’ll take personal responsibility to improve morale and enthusiasm around the platform.

Another key to getting buy-in is to empower end-users to host a lunch and learn. More times than not, it’s the users that discover the most useful job and industry-specific features of Salesforce.

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 greatest 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 you onboard a new user to Salesforce, have them fill out 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 they’ll share their own useful insights with laggards in other categories.

This is one of the quickest ways to improve user adoption across sales teams and the organization.

Why it works: While their may be initial hesitancy due to a sense of micro-management or big-brother fears, users will quickly realize the reporting is intended to not just help them, but acknowledge their own successes.

How Veloxy helps: User adoption metrics are centralized into a simple dashboard that sales managers and salespeople can review together. Veloxy especially 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! Customer service, product management, and buying can also benefit from using Salesforce. 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, the majority of buyers want a personalized value-added buying experience. One of the ways that you can achieve this is 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 not only improve CSAT scores, but it will improve the sales person’s reputation as an advisor and partner in success.

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’ online Trailblazer Community is a place 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 tactic 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 on the Trailblazer Community. In many cases, users have found customers, too. Lastly, Salesforce encourages users to join everyone at Dreamforce so they can meet each other in person.

Why it works: It replaces the stigma that Salesforce is a mere platform or tool with the fact that it’s also a community of like-minded sales professionals.

How Veloxy helps: It’s a common occurrence that users will ask for help around 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 to reap the benefits of Salesforce and Veloxy, it realizes it needs to hire more salespeople! This means more Salesforce users that may or may not have experience with the platform.

There’s no better time than now 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 common content in these folders.

By creating this user destination, you won’t just be a hero to your Salesforce users, but you’ll also look really good in the eyes of your CEO, CRO and CFO.

Why it works: Binders and filing cabinets are a thing of the past. Keep all content in a single location to ramp up new users so they can generate revenue faster and easier.

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 tactics. As you collect data from Salesforce’s usage, pick out the five to ten eye-popping metrics that convey the true before and after benefits of the platform.

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.

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 of those numbers can be tied to benefits that include 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 done so by learning from their preceding high-performers. Recognizing the top users of Salesforce is another way to leave breadcrumbs.

Review the aforementioned reports to discover your high performers, and be sure to share these acknowledgements with the C-suite.

Why it works: Most users have to wait for recognition from an uptick in sales or CSAT scores. Improve the morale faster by creating another source of achievement.

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

One of the things that Salesforce doesn’t necessarily guarantee is data quality and accuracy. Relying on users to accurately type in their leads’ name and contact information is definitely not 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, the mere job of tracking and staying on top of data quality and account intelligence is extremely difficult to do.

This is where using one or more Salesforce AppExchange apps can come in handy. Apps on your smartphone or integrated with your inbox can automatically detect a change in every contact’s correspondence and news moments, thereby improving data quality and buyer signals over time.

Why it works: Placing the responsibility of data quality and real-time insights on the shoulders of salespeople is not 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 during 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 guidelines that are set in stone 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 sales person to choose and trial one app, how much better off will your adoption rates look this time next year?

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 reps. 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, stuck in the process of spreadsheets and rolodex cards.

As I walked by one of the higher performer’s desk, 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. Rather, inform your team about the friendly competition and have them agree on a trophy. You won’t regret it.

Why it works: This is the perfect way to help staff think of user adoption as a friendly competition, not a metric that is 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 phone because they’re likely using our software.

Feeling inspired by these Salesforce Adoption tactics?

The Salesforce adoption tactics above showcase how powerful a few automations, lunch and learns, and inner-office engagements can be for your sales process. Consider how faster and easier your adoption would be if Veloxy was used to automate dozens of Salesforce tasks.

Start today by trialing our Salesforce inbox extension and our Salesforce mobile app.

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