Ask the Experts: Salesforce

Question: How Can My Company Improve the Way it uses Salesforce?

Many of our customers have purchased Salesforce licenses, but are unsure how to make the most out of their investment.

Although Salesforce can dramatically improve your lead times, help your sales team to close their opportunities more quickly, and support your customers more effectively, you still need to invest in the adoption of Salesforce for your employees. Here are the steps we recommend:

1. Spend time understanding Salesforce before you purchase it. There are many free online training courses available on the Salesforce website to help you to understand the basics and how it can work for you. One of the best new tools available is Trailhead, allowing you to work through activities, learning as you go. Click here to take a closer look.

2. Once you have purchased Salesforce, ensure you have a trained system administrator. You will need to customise Salesforce to fit your own requirements. Salesforce is a very easy tool to customise, but you need to know how! The best training courses available are the Administration Essentials for New Admins workshops for the edition you purchase. Although they are quite expensive, you will reap the rewards as the course is excellent and your administrator will be able to make the application work for you! Contact us for class dates and discounted bookings.

3. Next step – your administrator needs to work with your key business users and gather your requirements. Customise the application to meet your needs which will improve the adoption of Salesforce once you go live. Data quality is critical, so clean your data up before you migrate it to Salesforce.

4. Training! We cannot overstate how important it is that you develop a training course for your Salesforce teams. Training should be hands-on and interactive, and developed specifically for each role in your business. Deliver training to your users as close to go-live as possible, and set up floor walking and user clinics to help them in the initial weeks. Develop specific training for super users who will help your users with the application, and specific manager training on how to use the application to manage their team’s performance to achieve key performance indicators.

5. Business as usual: Adoption of Salesforce won’t happen in a day. You need to continuously improve Salesforce so that it continues to meet your needs; plan business as usual training for new features or new employees, and measure your adoption and KPIs.