Salesforce Implementation: What To Do When The Sales Tool’s Adoption Goes Wrong

It is no secret that a CRM solution helps you boost your business to its top performance!
While it helps you and your team achieving sales goals, a CRM also allows you to proactively work on customer relationships. You can manage customer data, plan and engage your team with the next work steps, all in one single place. Your sales tool’s adoption process must be smooth and easy!

However, if you’re reading this article, it’s most likely somebody already convinced you about using a CRM tool. Or maybe you already implemented a sales tool in your company. In fact, if you’re here now, you are facing or anticipating some issues that might come with the adoption of this great tool. And you’re right in concerning about it! Like any software implementation, you can find a lot of benefits, but there might be some issues to tackle.

This article will explain to you a brief guideline to predict some of what can go wrong while implementing a sales tool. It also provides some information on how to solve these issues. Check the summary below:

1. The top 5 implementation mistakes
2. How Salesforce can help

The top 5 implementation mistakes

It is clear that a CRM solution has great potential for any sales business. But, due to its complexity, the CRM implementation has to be carried carefully, assuring all your tool goals are achieved successfully. Failing to correctly plan and execute a guideline may lead to an inefficient platform and, ultimately, to a big waste of money in your sales tool’s adoption.

So, here’s the top 5 mistakes that can lead to an incorrect adoption of your CRM or sales tool:

1. Not knowing the selected tool

When you search by “sales tool” on Google, you’ll get endless pages of results about this type of solution. And, unfortunately, they all seem the perfect choice at the first sight, wrapped in excellent content that sells each one. But you have to question each solution to avoid making an impulsive decision.

An impulsive decision can only lead to taking up space and cost to you. Instead of looking for which sales tools are trending, or the most relevant for the opinion-makers, list your real struggles and then find the tools that seem more promising to mitigate the identified issues. You’ll find it helpful to research the tools more convenient for your needs, which are its alternatives, and the downsides of each one first.

2. Not prioritizing the tailored needs of your business

Picking the perfect tool for your business is hard already, but the journey doesn’t stop there. Besides the fact of most tools run smoothly, they allow for business customization. And this is a must-have, whatever the solution you choose to implement if your goal is to increase efficiency and your team’s productivity. For this to happen, get your teams together in the process of deciding the sales tool: ask them about what are their most common use cases and work with a tool expert to help optimize them.

3. Not getting your teams involved

Implementing a sales tool is a business decision. But knowing that your teams will be its main users, don’t miss their opinion. Engage them in the process from the beginning and collect feedback from the team before deciding on a tool or another. Once you select a tool, communicate it and explain why you believe that it is the best choice. Make your people fall in love with the sales tool, proving that the implemented technology is there to help and not to replace them. Finally, collect their feedback when using the tool and spot potential improvements on it.

4. Cutting on training

“User-friendly” or “easy to use” are some of the most common buzzwords when you’re looking for a sales tool. But don’t be fooled by this: there’s a difference between investing in a three-month training course and providing basic introductory sessions. If you’re introducing a new technology in your company, you should never assume your employees will understand it right away. It’s better to put aside some hours, making sure your teams are familiar with the tool. It reduces the possibility of the user fails that can cost you a lot, due to just some incorrect clicks.

5. Not monitoring your data

So you implemented the tool, and you took into consideration tailoring and even invested in training. It seems you did everything right, so let’s just allow things to take their course, right? Wrong! Just like you need to list your struggles before selecting a tool, you also need to define how you are going to track its improvements. Set concrete performance KPIs and goals, and check them regularly. Most sales tools are equipped with monitoring features that allow you to keep track of what’s important, generating alerts if anything goes wrong. Take the time to plan where your business is at the moment and where you would like it to be, using this new data to help you make business decisions if necessary.

How Salesforce Can Help

In case you haven’t noticed, we tend to write a lot about Salesforce, so of course, we couldn’t miss the chance to show how the #1 CRM may help in this topic a well. Like any other, Salesforce sales tool’s adoption may not always work as planned. The good thing is that we have some tips on how you can improve your experience.

Here are some key tips on how to improve our Salesforce sales tool’s adoption:

Focus on customization

If you didn’t invest or you’re not satisfied with the current org customization, you can still make changes to it. Starting by the basics, Salesforce allows you to align your business processes using standard Salesforce configurations (having an Administrator will definitely help for this).

If you feel there’s something missing but you don’t want to invest in heavy customization you can check what third-party applications are available and compatible with Salesforce (use the AppExchange website to check options, pricing, and reviews).

Finally, if you want to upgrade your org, invest in a specialized Salesforce team that helps you customize anything.

Across these 3 suggestions, your end-user should always be at the center, not the managers.

Focus on Motivation

Rule your team by exemplifying and inspire them to use Salesforce to get all sorts of information. They can prepare meetings using dashboards, be creative when using reports, show them metrics that matter. Hear what your teams have to say and involve them. If any problems are raising, prioritize their fix and consider suggestions and improvements. Finally, introduce healthy competition strategies by implementing a leadership board, setting up goals and promoting engagement. Define champions among the teams that can help and encourage them to be their best.

Focus on Training

Salesforce provides several online courses that are fully free and cover the main Salesforce functionalities, the Salesforce Trailhead. Motivate your teams to complete modules and gain badges, based on what’s more relevant for your company. If you invested in org customization, create your own training material using Salesforce Articles. You can provide explicative content, with screenshots and videos (also, enable Suggested Articles for Cases to accelerate your case resolution). Communicate who are your team’s champions and ensure they are available, providing a time slot for users to discuss queries.

Focus on Monitoring

Understand if your org is healthy or if it needs to be worked on. Define what key areas you should monitor (e.g. User adoption, Data quality, User efficiency, and others) and establish metrics that can be checked regularly. Get your stakeholders and managers involved to help you understand what is more important. The number of users that haven’t logged in on the last 7 days, how many opportunities were created during the last week, what’s the average number of opportunities closed on the last 7 days by user, or what’s current quarter expected revenue, among others. These are some examples of metrics that can be created in your reports.

Alternatively, you can also find pre-built dashboards that can help you analyze your data (such as the Salesforce Adoption Dashboards app, available on the AppExchange website).

I hope you have found this article useful and that you are ready to leverage Salesforce and ensure the best sales tool’s adoption possible! Subscribe to our Blog Knowledge Center and keep up with the latest news in the technology, CRM, and Salesforce environment! 🙂