Creating Community “Buy-In”
The moment of implementation is finally here! You’ve created a fully customized user interface, imported all of the data, you’ve built custom sales forecasting reports, and designed sleek user friendly dashboards and you’ve even gone the extra mile to have ironed out the quirky little kinks and taken every single detail into consideration – overall you seem to have done a wonderful job on ensuring that your Salesforce solution is specifically tailored to individual needs of your valued team members. Kudos! Yet, instead of reaping the benefits of increased time efficiency and employee productivity that you expected your custom Salesforce implementation would ultimately drive, you are left in wonder, scratching your head and trying to figure out why your employees, whom you’ve just laboriously customized this Salesforce solution for, are casting aside this new technology and going back to the old CRM system. This doesn’t exactly call for the congratulatory celebration of gratitude you may have expected and it seems that your efforts & expectations of a successful Salesforce implementation have just fallen flat. What now?
What is it that you could have possibly overlooked?
You are not alone in this and literally, every company faces this issue when Salesforce user adoption begins to take place. These are the growing pains of a growing business. It takes time to adapt to new things and it requires employees to step outside of their comfort zones. Taking the time to learn new things can be daunting for anyone let alone learning a new CRM system. Learning a new CRM like Salesforce stretches a person’s abilities to acquire new knowledge and requests the user to immediately put that newly acquired knowledge to work. This fast-paced, hands-on style of learning can make team members feel like their existing job has just become unnecessarily more difficult. This sentiment is commonly expressed by many during their preliminary encounters with Salesforce. As you know, being the business owner that you are with the vision that you have for your company, the temporary discomforts will be worthwhile. Change is inevitable and uncomfortable– old habits die hard. In fact, almost 65% of end users have a tough time performing core job functions within Salesforce. A few reasons for this difficulty could be because team members do not know how to use the platform and therefore resist the change, are simply reluctant or hesitant to spend their time on learning because they’re unaware of how the capabilities of the system could impact them positively-“what’s in it for me?”, or they may have encountered some bottlenecks in the system that they have had difficulty troubleshooting on their own and just gave up because they don’t know who to go to for help. Whatever the reason may be, Salesforce end-user training is imperative and it’s intended to make a huge difference when it comes to the overall sentiment and moral of your team while going through the Salesforce implementation process together.
What determines good Salesforce user training?
It’s easy to get so wrapped up in the implementation phase that post-implementation becomes an afterthought and companies simply forget about the importance of post-implementation end-user training. Oftentimes, companies will skip past a user adoption strategy because of time constants and an eagerness to begin utilizing those sleek new dashboards, or because they might believe that employees will automatically embrace and look forward to an alternate system and what you see as a more efficient way of doing things. Theoretically, the idea that employees will hit the ground running sounds good, but in real-world scenarios, things become a lot more complicated than that. It’s unfortunate that some of these misconceptions may end up costing business execs greatly, but there is a solution to making this CRM transition run more smoothly, empowering your teams to dive in and fully utilize Salesforce tools creating the “buy-in” you know will impact your business and the lives of your employees in an incredible way.
You know that Salesforce has capabilities that can propel your team forward in phenomenal ways, after all, that is what has sold you on the software, but to create a total “buy in” you have to be willing to work with your teams to nurture them through this transition. “Rome was not built in a day…” right? Comprehensive Salesforce end-user training is the great differentiator between achieving the outcomes you want for your business to set your business up for success, or finding failed attempts and frustrations due to a lack of training.
The bottom line is that if your tactic to creating “buy-in” is simply springing Salesforce on your team with a promise to improve everything as this new miracle technology or giving them a little pep talk and powerpoint highlight reel about the infinite possibilities, then you’ve already underestimated the acclimation process and done the exact opposite of what is required to fully implement and integrate Salesforce into the day to day processes that will improve your team’s daily business functions.
Your team needs hands-on, instructor-facilitated, role-based user training sessions that address the daily tasks and activities for your business. A truly effective end-user training should be tailored and attuned to the specific needs of each Salesforce role that will provide individualized solutions based on a needs assessment for each facet of your business processes and functionalities.
If you ask any employee what the most rewarding part of their job might be, they might struggle to come up with a few examples for a min, then say a few things like “I have decent insurance.”, but if you ask them about the most challenging parts of their job roles, they’ll be ready with several instances and examples and happily share this knowledge with you because of our human nature of fault finding. Chances are that these are the same topics during happy hour that employees bond over because these challenges are a collective burden that affects everyone; oddly bringing others together, but what if finding solutions became the glue that bonds team members together? How might that impact the culture of your work environment?
When customizing training, we need this kind of feedback. No, this isn’t an opportunity to hear everyone complain and bond over their disdain for discomforts in the office. This is an opportunity to pinpoint exact problems and find solutions to the most common issues your teams face which leads to eliminating hurdles and excuses that stand between success and business stagnancy. This is also where Salesforce Solutions come from and this is what will ultimately provide the kind of enthusiasm needed to start understanding what issues need to be addressed and prioritized when customizing training for your team.
In this day of constant technological advances, human interaction can go a long way, so bringing in a certified Salesforce consultant on-site is an incredible way to win “buy-in” from employees. We’ve all been on hold before and fumbled through automated answering services and thought to ourselves, “If I could juuuust get through to a live person this would be a lot easier….” We want to be heard and we want our thoughts, feelings, and ideas to be validated. This same idea applies to Salesforce training. People respond to and are more likely to ask the right questions when a knowledgeable leader is on deck ready to answer the toughest questions and present to help guide teams through the adoption process with face-to-face interaction- reducing the time it takes to wait for an online response and reducing frustrations that hold up the Salesforce adoption process. Employees feel valued and more confident moving forward rather than experiencing the anxiety of feeling like they’ve been thrown to the wolves with all of this complicated tech stuff they now have to use instead of seeing Salesforce as a technology they are excited to use.
Another advantage to having a certified Salesforce trainer on-site is that the whole process occurs organically within the work environment creating perfect opportunities to provide on-the-job training and allowing employees to learn and perform their daily tasks simultaneously. This gives employees a chance to more easily incorporate Salesforce solutions into their existing routines in a more meaningful, natural, and impactful way. Learning on the job saves time, money, and resources and keeps valued team members from feeling like this transition is an additional burden that threatens their productivity and personal time.
To wrap up, make sure to hire a Salesforce Certified Technical Instructor who has a depth of knowledge in domain expertise & is also well-versed in facilitating top-notch, on-site training courses across industries.
Heavy Task is here to help connect you with the most knowledgeable Salesforce customization, and implementation experts.
