The ecosystem has a lot of opinions these days, but ask around at Dreamforce this year, and we all agree on one thing: the biggest obstacle to using the platform isn’t AI or the new cast of product names – rather, it’s getting users to enter correct data, on time.
Prompt data entry unlocks Matthew McConaughey’s promises: a real-time, on-the-ground view that lets the business make quality decisions, fast. Instead, to start our decision-making, we need to ask around and make sure ‘everyone has updated Salesforce’.
So why do data entry problems persist, and how can we solve this? Let’s take a look at how our team is working through this problem, and how your team can do the same.
The Problem With Data Entry
Consultants, accountants, lawyers, and other professional services practitioners are the best data-entry team on earth: for one system, their timesheets. Timesheets are directly tied to billing, utilization targets, and often to compensation. Miss one, and leadership notices immediately.
On the other hand, updating data in Salesforce carries no such consequence.
It’s Friday afternoon, and a consultant has two things left to do before logging off: update an opportunity that moved forward on today’s call and finish the deliverable due to the client tomorrow morning. Only one of those tasks is billable. Only one of those tasks shows up on a utilization report. Only one of those tasks affects what happens at their next review.
They finish the deliverable. The opportunity update waits until Monday, if it happens at all.
This is the moment when Salesforce adoption actually gets decided in professional services firms. A hundred small tradeoffs like this one, made every week by people who are doing exactly what they’re incentivized to do.
(From here, we’ll use ‘consultant‘ as shorthand for anyone who trades services for money – whether at a consulting firm, an accounting or law firm, a marketing or digital agency, or a staffing firm.)
The Client Feels It First, Even if They Can’t Name It
They experience a firm that knows them intimately in the room and barely at all on paper. The consultant remembers every detail of the relationship, but the CRM (and the professional services company) remembers almost none of it.
So when that consultant rolls off the account – or gets hit by a bus, wins the lottery… pick your workplace metaphor – the handover starts from a blank page.
The client doesn’t see this as a Salesforce problem. They see it as a firm that seems to forget them the moment someone new picks up the file.
The Consultant Feels It in the Same Room
It’s now Tuesday morning, and a client is coming in for a follow-up on an opportunity they raised last week. Their usual point of contact is on vacation, so someone new is walking into the meeting holding an account history missing notes from last week.
Whatever the last consultant knew – the shifting priorities, the offhand comment about a second business unit, the one detail that would have made this meeting go differently – never made it into the record.
The consultant nods along, trying to reverse-engineer a relationship, hoping the client doesn’t notice they’re starting from scratch. It’s an awkward moment.
They’re the one who looks unprepared in front of a client they’ve never met. They’re the one rebuilding trust that should’ve already been on paper. And the next time they roll off an account, they’ll hand the same blank page to whoever walks in next.
Management Finds Out the Hard Way
Management is at the center of all these moments without being in the room: a real opportunity to do right by the client is missed. Every piece was in place, except that nobody had a reason to log it in Salesforce (but you know every minute made it to the timesheet).
The Enablement Audit
Here’s the good news: none of this is mysterious. There are only four places where workplace friction hides, and once you’re looking for them, you’ll find them.
The first place to look is incentives. Pull whatever your firm measures weekly. It’s likely utilization numbers, milestones hit, invoices, whatever your scorecard tracks. Does updating Salesforce feed any of this data? If not, you don’t have an adoption problem. You have a firm asking people to volunteer effort it doesn’t track, reward, or notice.
This will create silent resistance that leads to communication debt: every skipped update is a small loan against the next person who needs that information and won’t have it.
The second place to look is duplicate data entry. When the same fact has to live in Salesforce, the project plan, and a Google Sheet from 2023 that everyone trusts, and if the Salesforce update is the one with no consequence for skipping, it’s the one that doesn’t get made.
The third place to look is workflow and process. Watch where someone’s eyes actually go for an hour: inbox, Slack, doc, project plan. If Salesforce is a tab they open only when asked, it’s a process gap.
The fourth place to look is WIIFM: what’s in it for me. When a consultant spends eight minutes documenting a client conversation about an opportunity in Salesforce, what do they get back? Usually nothing. The data flows up to a leadership dashboard and never comes back down. Firm leadership can see the ROI of clean data, but the consultant, mid-project, usually can’t.
The answer here could be as simple as paying a consultant a commission to identify and work toward a sale before it reaches management’s desk. Incentive? Check. Data entry and process? Worth it. What’s in it for me? Dollars and cents.
A Quick Diagnostic
Next time Salesforce adoption stalls on your team, ask three questions before scheduling additional training:
| Do people know how to do it, but choose not to? | Not a training problem. |
| Are they duplicating the same entry elsewhere, or leaving it to their main workflow? | Data entry and process problems. |
| Is there no connection between doing it well and how they’re measured? | Incentive problem. |
With your Salesforce implementation, aligning incentives with the workflow is usually where the real return on investment lies.
Final Thoughts
End users act rationally. We all respond to what our firms reward, track, and pay for. Fix the workflow, and the real-time, on-the-ground view takes care of itself. Skip this step, and you’ll keep settling for a lesser version of the promise: asking around to see if anyone updated Salesforce.
The good news: it’s diagnosable, not mysterious. And you don’t have to run the diagnostic alone.
If this pattern feels familiar, you’re not alone. Join the Artichoke team at First Friday: a free, monthly community of practice for change management practitioners in the Salesforce ecosystem. No pitch, just people working through the same problems out loud.
Season 3 kicks off in November. Register for the sessions here!
