Boost your Salesforce ROI with effective training and user adoption strategies, including comprehensive programs, advanced features, and continuous support tailored for success.
Despite the power and versatility of Salesforce, it isn’t useful unless you know how to wield it. This is where expert training comes into play. When trained, user adoption increases, as does the efficacy with which users use Salesforce to meet your company’s goals.
Salesforce gives you a central marketing engine and data analysis tool. Many use it to track customer data, foster high-quality leads, and map out prospective customer journeys. On the other hand, without proper Salesforce training, your users may end up with an impressive box of tools without the skills to put them to work.
Let’s dive into the best ways to train users, important considerations to remember while designing your training strategy, some common challenges, and how to overcome them with proven Salesforce adoption strategies.
Planning Effective Salesforce Training Programs
You can build a winning Salesforce training program by following these steps.
1. Assess Your Training Needs
There are multiple ways to use Salesforce, so step one is to figure out what your teams need and the Salesforce tools that’ll help them get there. Another consideration is the experience your team members currently have with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and digital marketing solutions in general. Some may need remedial training regarding navigating between screens and understanding the basic elements of the Salesforce workflow.
2. Get the Right Stakeholders on Board
Once you assess the nature and scope of your training program, it’s time to introduce your high-level vision to decision-makers and key employees. Doing this early in your ideation process gets them on board and in your corner, which could be crucial when it comes time to justify any budget requests.
Some key stakeholders may include:
- Your CMO, a VP of sales, or someone else in the C-suite with the power to yay or nay the initiative
- Sales and marketing managers who stand to benefit from the program
- Sales associates who have workflows that Salesforce can help streamline
3. Develop a Training Plan
Your Salesforce training plan should focus on goals rather than general expectations. In some cases, it may help to develop individual cohorts of people based on their experience with similar products. For example, those without experience using CRMs may be in one cohort, and those who’ve already worked in a similar ecosystem could be in another cohort. In this way, you ensure maximum engagement, and your learners get the training they need.
Another element of your Salesforce training plan involves setting up benchmarks to assess retention of the material. For example, after a day or two of training, your team may be ready to use Salesforce’s dashboards. These are fairly straightforward, so you could have them populate the system with real customer data and spend a few days using the dashboards.
Then, as everyone gets more and more comfortable with the platform, they can move on to more complex modules, such as Salesforce Flow. This is an automation tool they can use to design workflows that trigger based on pre-designed conditions. After they learn how to use this — or another more advanced feature — you may want to give them a few days to exercise their skills with real data and customers.
4. Build a Training Timeline
Your training timeline should, first and foremost, be realistic. Overloading your teams with knowledge is like pouring a bucket of water on a small house plant in a pot of dry soil. Most of the water will go to waste, dribbling away from the thirsty sprout. It’s the same with Salesforce training. It’s better to sprinkle your teams with knowledge than give them a little time to soak it all in. Then you can give them a little more.
This may mean that your timeline ends up being a little longer than you’d anticipated. But the skills they full absorb will make it well worth the wait.
5. Choose the Most Ideal Training Method
Successful Salesforce adoption strategies hinge on choosing the best method, whether self-paced, in-person, online, or a mix. Salesforce training for beginners may often work best via in-person or online training because it allows learners to ask questions and get comprehensive answers live from real people.
However, using a self-paced approach gives your team members the chance to learn skills, stop and practice, learn more, reiterate key points, and continually review as needed.
In many cases, it’s best to poll employees about their preferred learning style, particularly when it comes to working with new software.
Key Components of Salesforce Training
Here’s a breakdown of the different kinds of training you can use to scaffold your Salesforce learning system:
- Basic Salesforce navigation and functionality. This involves training regarding the platform’s core features, such as dashboards, managing records, and creating reports.
- Personalized and role-specific learning paths. This is where team members focus on features specific to their roles. For instance, marketing managers may use different features than mobile sales reps.
- Advanced features integrations. Some features are more advanced, such as Flow and setting up integrations with other apps. But this doesn’t mean only certain people should learn them. You may have to provide extra support around some learning experiences.
- Customizations. Spending some time on Salesforce’s customization options can be helpful because they enable individuals and team leads to craft role-specific workflows.
Strategies for Encouraging User Adoption
Get users on board begins by creating a supportive learning environment. This means you encourage people to be vulnerable, expose themselves to new things, and dissuade teasing and knowledge-shaming. Let your team feel free to make mistakes and be honest about their frustrations.
You also need to get buy-in from leadership, especially because some may need to invest extra time in learning, which could take them away from their regular duties, at least in the short term. It would help if you encouraged leadership to publicly laud the program and offer kudos to learners for their efforts.
In some organizations, gamification may help foster a learning-positive environment. For example, you can have a friendly contest encouraging people to keep track of how many times they use Salesforce to close deals or foster stronger customer relationships. You could reward those who use it the most with a gift card and a public high five.
Your initial training is only the first step to reinforce skills and acquire new ones, and you’ll also need to implement a continuous learning program. This could be a relatively straightforward refresher or more focused training around certain functions.
How to Overcome Common Salesforce Adoption Challenges
While you may have a smooth road in your Salesforce training journey, you may also hit a few bumps. Here are some challenges and how to overcome them:
- Resistance to change. You can overcome initial resistance by outlining exactly how Salesforce adds value in making daily tasks easier. For instance, customer service reps can automate responses to emails, handle tickets, and reply to inquiries — accomplishing each task in a matter of moments.
- Managing change effectively. There may be some frustration, but not to worry. A good Salesforce change management program will help with the transition.
- Ongoing support and troubleshooting. The services of skilled Salesforce experts who can troubleshoot issues and augment user knowledge can be invaluable in sustaining your adoption in the long term.
Measure and Improve Salesforce Training Effectiveness
Setting goals and KPIs have multiple benefits: They enable you to assess the effectiveness of your training program and give team members a chance to quantify their progress.
Some measurable goals could include:
- Closing a specific number of deals using Salesforce workflows over a month or quarter
- Successfully closing a certain number of customer support tickets per week or month
- Tracking the success of Salesforce analytics by measuring the effectiveness of decisions based on tools like Einstein Analytics
You can also use surveys and tools to gather feedback and measure Salesforce user adoption and satisfaction. If users express frustration with certain features, you can augment their learning with additional, appropriate training to help them feel more comfortable.
Regardless of your training techniques and setting, you should regularly assess performance and then use that data to adjust accordingly.
For instance, if users struggle with setting up automatic workflows, your next training session should reiterate the necessary skills.
Maybe their workflows are hitting roadblocks. When they expect certain actions to trigger, nothing happens. This could be due to issues with the event triggering the workflow, whether they’ve set up their thresholds appropriately or their subsequent actions were misconfigured.
Either way, a relatively quick review may address several issues at once.
Get Support for a Successful Salesforce Training
You wouldn’t give an engineer a 3D printer or a mechanic a car lift without proper training. You don’t want your employees to adopt Salesforce without ensuring they have the skills to get the most from the platform.
By scaffolding and segmenting your Salesforce training, you ensure each user gets the necessary skills. And when you get full buy-in from other decision-makers, you get the top-down support you need for a Salesforce-positive company culture.
To get help from experienced Salesforce experts, connect with one of our skilled pros today. Contact us