Why Are Companies Investing in Salesforce Training Now More Than Ever?
Remote selling was an alien concept to sellers in most of the industry verticals before COVID-19 struck. But the pandemic has changed the dynamics of sales processes and routines forever across all industries. Meeting and selling to clients virtually through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or any other web conferencing tool, for that matter, is now the norm. What’s unbelievable is how sellers have adjusted to this new way of selling though there would have been some hiccups along the way.
But, for sellers in a lot of companies using Salesforce, the ride has been far from smooth. Salesforce’s complex interface coupled with the company-level customizations is making it harder for sellers to stay productive. As Salesforce itself suggests, the first step is to make it easier for employees to do their jobs. One of the primary ways to do that is to ensure that remote sales teams are not spending an awful lot of time figuring out how to navigate Salesforce. And that’s where companies are investing much of their SalesOps resources in this remote environment.
Salesforce Onboarding and Training
Salesforce offers a complex and highly customizable user interface. Release after release Salesforce becomes more feature extensive. Sales reps often find it inconvenient to discover, understand and use these features promptly. They revert to their previous ways of completing a task within Salesforce. This pattern creates a requirement for continuous training to instill confidence in sales reps while using Salesforce.
User onboarding and training have always been an obstacle in successful Salesforce adoption. Organizations often try to fill this gap with instructor-led training, videos, tutorials, and lengthy process guides.
These conventional training methods are highly inefficient during the remote work environment. Physical distancing limits the option of approaching support teams or Salesforce administrators for follow-ups related to training. Sales reps become overwhelmed because of information overload and resist changes in Salesforce. Ultimately organizations end up paying thousands of dollars for an underutilized Salesforce application.
Why Are Companies Investing in Salesforce Training?
Digitization and upskilling are two trends that have emerged together in this pandemic. Sales reps are also required to keep pace with the emerging trend of upskilling by being proficient in Salesforce.
With an increased Salesforce usage and lack of personal interaction, Salesforce training requirements have evolved post-pandemic. Following use cases illustrate how these training requirements have changed in the post-pandemic era:
The need for continuous learning & training
According to Gartner, a sales employee interacts with at least 14 different CRM related applications.
Salesforce isn’t a standalone application in the sales cycle. There’s a tightly integrated network with several other applications like CPQ, Contract Lifecycle Management solution, Document Management solutions (SharePoint), and Sales Enablement tools. Sifting through various applications to obtain relevant data has become more time-consuming in the remote work environment.
Sales reps often feel technology overload and are unable to keep pace with continuous releases. Therefore, there’s a need for continuous and effective Salesforce training programs to avoid implementation dips.
Increased use of CRM software
Salesforce observed a 24% increase in usage of CRM since 2019 in SMBs. This increased usage implies an increased number of customized instances in the same organization as well. In the case of a global enterprise, each BU will have a customized Salesforce instance. The customization can be anything from different languages, sales processes to different application integrations.
Adopting a traditional approach to cater to such diversified training requirements will not be sustainable. Additionally, there’s a plethora of content available online to deal with Salesforce complexities. The information overload and absence of a clearly defined training strategy often leave remote users confused and frustrated.
A Digital Adoption Solution like Whatfix maps users’ activities across different BUs to understand the user experience gaps. It leverages learning in the flow of work to provide a bite-sized, customized, real-time learning experience to your sales reps.
Self Serve Culture
While working remotely, locating the required content is time-consuming and consumes the productive time of sales reps. Higher content discovery time increases the dependency on peers and support teams.
It is essential to foster a self serve culture to prevent support teams from being overwhelmed in the remote work environment.
For instance- Whatfix’s self-help widget allows Salesforce Admins to create a customized self-help section, thereby creating a centralized location for users to obtain any content. It encourages users to explore the content at a comfortable pace and assures that their queries will get resolved within the tool without any manual intervention.
Here’s a snippet of how it works:
Automation of tasks
Salesforce suggests that sales professionals spend only 34% of their time selling as they try to juggle repetitive and mundane tasks like quote generation and data entry.
While working remotely, each task becomes more time-consuming, leading to extended deadlines and working hours. Leveraging the right Salesforce features and other performance enhancement tools can enhance the productivity of sales reps.
For instance: Quick Text functionality allows Salesforce users to add predefined messages, short notes, and questions in emails, chats, events, etc. This feature contributes heavily towards the standardization of data entry and reduces the time and effort required by sales reps.
Measure Effectiveness of Training
Before the pandemic pushed everyone into working remotely, Salesforce training was mostly ad-hoc and social. Peers offered training assistance, and it was easy to gauge whether or not a person has understood a concept.
However, in a remote environment, learning responsibilities have shifted entirely on sales professionals. It has become difficult to gauge their efforts and understanding in the case of virtual training.
To measure the effectiveness of virtual training, metrics like content creation time, the number of L1 support tickets raised, and the average user onboarding time are crucial.
Discover how Trotec reduced its Salesforce training time by 60% and content creation time by 50% using Whatfix DAP.
Summary
Amidst the Covid-19 crisis, CRM platforms like Salesforce have occupied center stage in the sales cycle. With limited support available to Salesforce users, it is essential to strategize and invest in Salesforce training now more than ever.
Discover how a leading global services company, Experian, leveraged an innovative onboarding and training process to introduce Salesforce Lightning and accelerated user adoption with a Digital Adoption Platform.
Schedule a conversation with one of our product experts to build a self-sufficient Salesforce user base.
