5 Tips to Boost your Salesforce Adoption Rate

“Only 50% of CRM functionality is used by companies that are paying CRM customers .”
Source: TechnologyAdvice.com

The most significant risk is ‘slow user uptake ‘, insufficient attention to change management
and training, and difficulties in aligning corporate culture with new ways of working .

In our experience, low uptake in a company is due to the following factors:

1.FEAR OF BUSINESS PERFORMANCE EXPOSURE
Sales reps don’t usually push for more exposure. Or at least the less successful ones don’t. Keeping information on opportunities and sales forecasts in a spreadsheet minimizes this exposure.
What if you got them to have a fresh look at the business dashboard? In reality, the indicators are there to guide their actions and show them the
way. Targets, on the other hand, are simply benchmarks, indicators of effectiveness. Finally, when creating a dashboard for a team, think about what the
managers want to see at first glance. Just like a newspaper, focus on the essentials, before going into the details.

2.MANAGERS DON’T KNOW HOW TO RUN A PIPELINE REVIEW IN SALESFORCE
Using reports and dashboards to conduct an effective pipeline review or create a sales forecast requires a certain know how. A Harvard Business Review study
found that 61% of executives believe their sales managers are not properly trained in pipeline management, which can lead to lost revenue.
A good pipeline will result in a high sales rate, a short sales cycle and a high conversion rate. The problem, however, is that too many sales reps rely on first
impressions (and not enough on data) to determine the status of leads in the pipeline. Setting up a sales routine in which the sales team reviews these dashboards is an opportunity to redefine objectives (if necessary) and get additional coaching.

3. NO PIPELINE REPORTS OR DASHBOARDS CONFIGURED
We are finding that many companies that have implemented Salesforce still do not have pipeline reports and dashboards in place, or at least no relevant
reports that provide meaningful insight into sales performance. If managers cannot get the exposure they need in Salesforce, they will keep
the information on opportunities in their Excel spreadsheet.
Contrary to popular belief, your dashboard should allow you to limit the amount of reporting work and the number of meetings with your sales force.
Carefully selected and limited KPIs (over 10 KPIs is too many) will allow you to limit internal information flow, and select only relevant information.
Guaranteed to save time!

4. SALESFORCE IS TOO COMPLICATED TO USE
Salesforce users often find it too difficult to create and update an opportunity on the platform throughout its lifecycle. Sales reps will, with good reason, take
an easier route by reverting to Excel based management. If it is difficult to manage transactions and produce TEXTE MANQUANT
Our recommendation for improving business uptake will be to look very carefully at the way your staff work with the tool. Are all the fields really
necessary? Can the number of mandatory fields be reduced? Are there too many validation rules?
Salesforce implementation must provide value to users, such as automation, alerts, relevant dashboards, … that allow them to save time and achieve their
objectives.

5. MANAGEMENT RELUCTANCE TO USE SALESFORCE
Finally, for successful Salesforce uptake, project owners need to engage the company’s decision makers to define clear strategic objectives and identify the
key barriers to their execution. This allows you to priorities requirements and apply resources to the right challenges.
But involving top management in setting clear strategic priorities is easier said than done. First of all, leaders are not always clear about what they want…
Moreover, different stakeholders communicate in different ways. Without a clear understanding and agreement on priorities, it is very difficult to communicate effectively with staff.
Managers are key assets in influencing user uptake