Data reveals that the average employee using Salesforce only uses 50% of the CRM’s features due to poor Salesforce adoption and training. This means organizations are failing to find ROI in their Salesforce investment – and have unoptimized, underperforming sales orgs.
Sales leaders must address the following challenges to break unproductive behavior and empower sales teams to become Salesforce power users.
Power users leverage the Salesforce platform to boost their productivity, day-to-day. They discover new, more efficient ways to accomplish a task, know where to find reports for insight, and champion Salesforce among their teams, too.
Given the vast capabilities of Salesforce, why are sales reps not proficient in the tool? What is holding them back from becoming power users? Here are 5 tips to develop your sales team into Salesforce power users.
5 Tips to Develop Your Sales Team into Salesforce Power Users
Salesforce experts are a critical part of the overall digital adoption process, as they support roll-out, training, and post-launch questions that come with a new SaaS implementation.
But how do you turn novice users into proficient Salesforce users? By following these tips, you’ll empower your sales reps with the learning and support content they need to master Salesforce’s advanced feature set quickly.
- Create In-App Guidance Content
- Centralize Data for Faster Content Discovery
- Smart Nudging & User Diagnostics
- Improve User Engagement
- Leverage a Digital Adoption Platform to Improve User-Proficiency
1. Create In-App Guidance Content
With demo and sandbox environments being different than the actual, customized Salesforce instance that will be deployed to your sales organization, it’s difficult to apply learnings from your onboarding and training content into practice. Salesforce identified this user-adoption gap and developed their in-app guidance functionality to guide users with interactive flows.
However, Salesforce’s current in-app guidance is limited to the Salesforce instance itself. Still, you can always look at digital adoption solutions to create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, and tooltips for custom Salesforce setups – allowing for better contextualization and integration with your Salesforce applications.
2. Centralize Data for Faster Content Discovery
A tightly integrated Salesforce application empowers sales reps by providing a unified view of all existing customer data, helping sales teams handle relationships better, ultimately empowering them to close more deals.
With a centralized data system, content discovery time is reduced. It further improves Salesforce adoption by improving accessibility to training material.
3. Smart Nudging & User Diagnostics
It is essential to track user actions for effective goal management and benchmarking for improvement. Leveraging behavioral analytics allows sales leaders to analyze the features used by sales reps and tackle the underutilized features and trouble areas at every funnel stage. Based on this analysis, you can create in-app content to guide users through the flow to show them – in practice – how to accomplish different actions in Salesforce.
4. Improve User Engagement
A disengaged sales employee will be more different to turn into a Salesforce power user. Look at improving the engagement of your employees to translate that involvement into a more invested sales team member. You can improve user engagement by the following methods:
- The Salesforce Chatter App: The Chatter App is an effective way to increase user engagement and can be used by new users for support when looking for solutions to Salesforce problems and questions they have. Users can keep communication open with their team, allowing for improved transparency, as well as a collaboration by taking action directly from the feed. In addition to Chatter, you can also leverage other Salesforce Apps such as Drift and Einstein Bots for engaging users.
- Trailhead: Salesforce Trailhead is a straightforward Learning Experience (LEX) tool that can empower your users to self-learning goals and start working towards achieving them by completing training modules and related tests.
- User Feedback: Capturing quantitative and qualitative feedback on your Salesforce onboarding, training efforts, and change management efforts via surveys, Chatter groups, or polls can go a long way in increasing Salesforce adoption. This allows teams to adjust their Salesforce L&D (learning and development) based upon their team member’s individual needs.
5. Leverage a Digital Adoption Platform to Improve User-Proficiency
Achieving high Salesforce adoption is a lengthy process but does not need to be a labor-intensive project. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix help you improve user proficiency by providing contextual, in-app guidance across the sales cycle – built directly into Salesforce. It improves the efficiency of your sales reps by automating manual tasks and providing multi-format support content in a self-help widget. You can also manage change effectively through smart nudging in the form of pop-ups and beacons.
See Whatfix in-action below with a user onboarding flow:
Discover how Cardinal Health reduced support tickets and increased Salesforce adoption with Whatfix.
The Key Takeaway
By investing in training programs to turn your sales professionals from novice to expert, advanced Salesforce user allows organizations to achieve optimal productivity and performance. Leveraging technologies such as digital adoption platforms support your adoption strategy by assisting your sales team throughout their lifecycle to use the platform better, increase productivity & drive better sales outcomes.
Schedule a demo to discover how Whatfix can help you make the most of your Salesforce investment.