Critical thinking meets accountability

If you don’t have a champion, get one. Your champion must have a vested interest in your success, which means Salesforce needs to align with their personal performance goals and vision for the business. It’s up to you to understand the vision and goals and map out how Salesforce will help make it all happen. Expect to meet frequently to review progress, talk about next steps, and strategize about how to work around obstacles, and make sure to reserve time at each meeting to give your champion hands-on exposure to Salesforce. After all, if they can’t easily navigate through the system, how can they review performance and make sure others are using it properly? Also, never forget that the right champion can greatly magnify your effectiveness by rallying additional resources, including hiring new headcount or consulting partners or clearing paths to develop new super users and junior admins internally.

Even with a great executive champion, culture can be a huge impediment. If this is your first CRM initiative, you may be asking people to do things they have never done before, such as logging calls. To them, it just means more work with no benefit to anyone but management—and when management isn’t using Salesforce, rank-and-file adoption becomes an even harder sell. Management should be looking at Salesforce DAILY to underscore its importance—and each line manager will probably need several customized dashboards to properly monitor and drive performance. If you are the admin, you should expect these dashboards to go through many rounds of changes, and that’s OK. When managers start their meetings with a review of Salesforce performance dashboards, you will know you’re on the right track. When they review the dashboards prior to those meetings and come with next-level questions, you’re well on your way. 

There are lots of things that can be achieved out of the box by standing up the basic functionality of Salesforce, but much of it is simply moving work from one place to another, typically from spreadsheets into Salesforce. This definitely has its benefits, but those benefits accrue more to management than to the rank and file. To drive user adoption, your implementation will need to be customized—not only for your organization’s unique and changing requirements, but also for the various job functions of your users. These high-impact, next-stage projects (think onboarding, contract automation, systems integration, etc.) may require significantly more effort than the initial implementation and may need to be completed over time. However, they can go a long way toward making Salesforce a must-have system in the minds of your team members.

As a Salesforce admin for a busy organization, there’s no way to do it all—and it’s hard to drive adoption when you can’t keep up with requests. When adding headcount isn’t an option, identify internal candidates who have the desire and acumen to do more with Salesforce and ask your executive champion(s) to help pave the way to carve out time for Salesforce on their schedules. Now, as you evaluate your list of requests, consider which ones could also be used to train those people on the skills they need to become junior admins.

Too often, management expectations of what employees should be doing in Salesforce go unspoken. It’s relatively rare to find performance guidelines clearly spelled out. Take the initiative here and compose the first drafts. The very first one will be the hardest, but it will get easier after that. Once you’ve completed the draft, schedule a meeting to review it with applicable line manager(s) and be prepared to own the edits for a while. Continue with the meetings through the finished product and until you can show objectively (via Salesforce reporting) that people are following the performance guidelines.

However much training you are doing today, you probably need to be doing more. To the extent possible, training sessions should be conducted in person in a hands-on learning format. Rather than spending lots of time showing them the application, give them a set of exercises with step-by-step instructions. The exercises should be customized to include everything they should be doing in Salesforce on a daily basis. Have them work through each exercise and answer their questions as they come up. Their questions will guide you on how to revise the exercises going forward.ion