If you’re familiar with Salesforce, then you know that one of its biggest drawbacks is user adoption. What does that mean? It means companies are investing significant amounts of money to transfer from an old system and migrate to a more innovative, comprehensive, and efficient platform that their employees aren’t utilizing.

The efforts being made to upgrade and stay in tune with the evolution of technology are failing miserably. Although we’ve grown to accept having a CRM tool is worth investing in, the aftermath is where there’s an issue.

Anytime you purchase a novel product, it is likely it will come with a detailed manual of instructions to guide you on functionality – Salesforce is no exception. The company does an excellent job at providing the resources you may need to both implement and learn the platform. Resources such as Trailheads, a library of educational content that you can access whenever you like. That being said, this “manual” is quite elaborate and most will endure great frustration as they try to educate themselves.

Let’s take a step back for a second, and review how we understand the CRM ecosystem to function in today’s day and age. 1) You purchase a licence from Salesforce and the immediate next step is 2) to be put in contact with an implementation partner. The role of the implementation partner is to help you customize your instance to meet your business needs. Here, it is given that you do not possess the technical expertise to be able to do this yourself.

As someone who only learned about Salesforce a couple months ago (allowing for a less biased perspective) – I think this process is incredibly flawed due to one major gap- TRAINING.

We upgrade and migrate to evolve. Companies have an idea of what they would like to yield from the tool, but this perspective is limited to their knowledge of what the tool has to offer. For example, some companies use salesforce for the bare minimum of storing data on one common interface, exercising only a fraction of the tool.

People choose Salesforce because it’s the #1 CRM in the market. It has achieved this ranking due to its vast capacity and functionality. A vast capacity most fail to ever acknowledge or take advantage of. Why? Because they just don’t know it exists, how unfortunate and ineffective.

Circling back to the primary issue addressed, user adoption- this is also due to lack of knowledge. People naturally resist change. Add to that a lack of effective training, and you will see very poor user adoption.

So, why not include this vital step of training that would mitigate these issues? Why not invest in training prior to implementation, so individuals with business context can make decisions on what they would like to get done? Why are people choosing to skip this valuable step? Because it makes for a more effective sales pitch. You are led to believe you can self-learn, and aside from a very select few individuals, most will fail with this method.

Training supports a more self-sufficient and successful migration path. Not only does it ensure you maximize your Salesforce investment by exercising more of its features, but user adoption will actually be achieved. Everyone understands you need help from an expert for the implementation piece, the same attitude will eventually be adopted with training. The disparity between dollars invested in top shelf technologies and return on investment will only be resolved when the masses recognize training is the missing piece of the puzzle.

Be proactive and consider the benefits of training by contacting me today.

Sincerely,

Erum Syeda

  • erum@harrisoncorp.com
  • 416-840-5576 x 11651