06 Apr The Key to Salesforce Adoption – Don’t Give Up
As a continuation to our post on the Salesforce Adoption Maturity Model, let’s discuss Basic Adoption in detail. Basic Adoption is usually attained when the entire team is tracking sales activities and managing prospect and customer relationships within Sales Cloud. The key to Basic Adoption is consistent usage – everyone is using the system on a regular basis and following similar processes. It’s not about perfection, it’s about consistency. Most companies in the Basic Adoption phase have made modifications for their specific business processes to help track important information about the Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities they are engaging.
Indications of being at this level are that you have mastered the navigation and core functions of the system, your team uses it regularly (the team is always in the system – just like with email), and it supports management decisions (management is logging in to review activities, dashboards, and reports). You may not have hit a home run yet, but you are seeing a return on your investment and it is becoming part of your day-to-day business.
At this stage we see conditions like this:
- The system is configured to mimic your key business processes.
- Users log in daily and use Salesforce to drive their activities.
- Basic Salesforce components are used – Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Quotes.
- Reports, Views, and Dashboards are set up and management is reviewing them regularly.
- Basic modifications are in place to track Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and market-specific data.
- Basic screen layouts are in place,
- Tasks/activities are recorded and managed.
- The team is following consistent processes within the system.
- Chatter is used to record discussions about Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities.
- Managers regularly review data quality dashboards and activity dashboards to reinforce user adoption.
- Sales meetings are conducted using Salesforce dashboards to drive the discussion.
- The culture is starting to change and rally behind the mentality that “if it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen.”
With a focused effort, basic adoption will be attained within a month of launch. If it takes much longer than that, you need to re-visit what you’re doing and plug any gaps. At Basic Adoption, you are starting to get a return on your investment. Basic Adoption is like a good workout program – it will hurt some at first, but you must push through the early, hard days in order to realize the benefits. After a few weeks, everyone will start seeing some of the benefits. The Basic Adoption phase is the time to stick to your plan and not give up – major returns on your investment are just around the corner.