Your Salesforce Adoption is Dismal. Well, who’s to blame?

So, you jumped in feet first and moved to Salesforce for the sales team? Congrats!

But, now you’re now spending a not-insignificant amount of money on license fees and the uptick in sales results you had hoped for isn’t there. Not even close.

Worse than that, the salespeople use Salesforce sporadically at best, some not at all. The data is a mess, and you suspect that the pipeline reports don’t tell even close to the truth.

You had all the best intentions, hired a reputable implementation firm, and your Salesforce Account Manager was always available and supportive. So, how did you get here? And how do you fix it?

To answer the second question, let's look at some of the most common culprits that lead to low Salesforce Adoption.

Choose Your Implementation Partner Wisely

We’ve been consulting on adoption for a long time now and in our opinion, this aspect of Salesforce only worsens.

Given the demand and revenue, we’re not entirely sure why, but we suspect it is due to so many firms jumping into the Salesforce space. In that rush to participate, it is driving huge demand for a limited talent pool. There are only so many seasoned Salesforce consultants, and even established firms are having trouble attracting and retaining the best.

What this leads to is poorly designed systems. “Lately,” says Mark Christie, Founder of P3 Performance, a Salesforce Adoption agency, “we’ve seen some implementations that are just so far off the mark. I honestly think that some consultants forget who they’re building Salesforce for. They need to remember that salespeople need to use this thing. And salespeople, by and large, want it to be simple!”

Salesforce is remarkably simple to configure. Most implementation consultants love to configure and build things. But just because it can be configured doesn’t mean it should be.

"We had one client," recalls Christie, "that used to have Microsoft Dynamics, which they liked. But someone decided to move to Salesforce. So, they hired a firm that assigned a junior consultant to the project."

"This 24-year-old had nine certifications but minimal real-world consulting experience, as it turned out. He did what he was told to do. Because the former users liked Dynamics, they instructed this kid to break the Lead conversion model of Salesforce and make it run more like Dynamics. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that a Lead was a person. To them, a Lead had to be a company."

"So, the kid took many things that Salesforce does out of the box well and broke it all to mimic Dynamics. When we got onto the project to develop the training," recalls Christie, "the platform needed to be clearer and behaved very differently from what we knew Salesforce to be. We explained to them our grave concerns that gaining adoption on this system would be incredibly challenging."

"We almost got fired from that job," says Christie. "In hindsight, we should have walked away. The training was, predictably, not well received. The implementation firm was furious with us, as were many of the organization’s employees. One senior VP was in our corner, and we thought we may have been on to something. He called us three months after their Go Live date to tell us that the users hated Salesforce and refused to use it."

Most Common Salesforce Implementation Mistakes

Making Salesforce into a replica of Dynamics or any other CRM program is simply the worst of the offenses, designed to make adoption a challenging hill to climb. But there are many others.

Here are some of the most common mistakes that we’ve seen.

1. Not starting with the Sales Team themselves.

When we accept a training assignment, we first get the client to submit a list of names of Sales Managers and Sales Reps that we can interview. We want to know all about what they sell, how they sell, who they sell to, how long it takes, what the steps look like, etc. We didn’t want to hear about Salesforce until we conducted several interviews.

Often during these interviews, we’ll ask, who on the implementation side did you speak with? To our surprise and amazement, the response is usually, “No one.”

How is it, we wonder, that a professional implementation firm can claim to build a system for sales users when they haven’t spoken to the users first?

2. Not creating Home Pages and Dashboards that Sales Users want.

The Salesforce Home Page should be the immediate Go To page for any Salesforce Sales User – managers and reps alike. It should contain dashboards that identify the main Key Performance Indicators that the sales team relies on to gauge the health of their current state of sales.

The Home Page should be customized for each user so that they can see their immediate results front and center. Sales reps should be able to track their MTD (month-to-date) results compared to their monthly target, their total YTD sales results vs. annual target, their trend time, and comparisons to any other relevant period, like last year.

Sales Leaders should have the same set of reports displayed as a Dashboard for their entire team and the ability to use a Dynamic Dashboard to view how their reps look at their results.

All Sales Leaders should also have a Dashboard folder with at least the following key Dashboards:

• • State of the Union
  • AMP (Activities, Meetings and Pipeline)
  • Daily Pipe Gen
  • Clean Your Room

For a deeper look at what these dashboards are for or how to use them at your organization, call us here.

3. Not Recognizing and Planning for the Impact of Change.

We often tell our clients that it doesn’t matter how smart your salespeople are (and probably are very smart) or how technically savvy they may appear. Humans aren’t great at change. We’re hardwired that way.

So, to migrate to Salesforce successfully, we need a change plan. Fortunately, we have one of the best with the Prosci ADKAR model. "There are several change models, many with merit, but at P3 Performance, we prefer ADKAR." states Christie.

When firms think about rolling out Salesforce, they usually plan for implementation, and then sooner or later, they realize that the team needs to be trained, so they plan for that. But often, the training - the Knowledge component of ADKAR - is executed without any thought or attention to creating true Awareness or Desire among the participants. This process takes months to instill, and there is a defined process in which we do it.

Clients often tell us, “At the start of class, please tell the trainer to tell the Sales Team how useful Salesforce is and how it will help them.” Seems like a smart approach, right? Well, it isn’t.

The problem is that it’s the wrong messenger, not nearly frequent enough, and far too late in the game. The change message must occur months before training, not at the start of class! It needs to come from executive sponsors, sales leaders, and people managers.

After we establish Awareness, we then need to create Desire. Again, in our experience, we’ve had numerous clients tell us that their people are excited about Salesforce coming in. Then, when we’re conducting training in class, it becomes apparent that not everybody is thrilled. Organizations often make the mistake of taking some anecdotal evidence from a few more eager and vocal salespeople that genuinely are excited for Salesforce and conflate that to assume that everyone must be. This is a fatal error when it comes to driving adoption.

4. Not Having Standardized Sales Processes across the Organization

Salesforce is designed to automate a business or sales process, take your existing sales process, and configure Salesforce to map to that process. Organizations will have multiple sales processes, for instance, one for new business, another for renewals, and another for Key Accounts. Regardless of the number of processes, those steps should be consistent among all department members.

Suppose a company employs business development reps whose goal is to bring on new logos. In that case, the organization should have a standardized process to do that most efficiently.

There shouldn’t be one sales manager who promotes one set of sales activities to their team while another does it differently. Not only is this ineffective, but it is also a surefire recipe for low Salesforce Adoption.

If Salesforce is meant to automate a process, which sales leaders' approach shall we select? If we choose one of the methods, the other team will certainly look at Salesforce as a waste of time, as it won’t effectively lead salespeople through the steps they routinely follow.

Yet, time after time, when we conduct interviews with sales teams, we see exactly this. One sales team tells us they do it a certain way, while another tells another story. Quite often, we encounter that each salesperson follows their own rules and sales managers are seemingly fine with this. As long as the sales come in, why worry about the process?

However, this strategy needs to be revised from the start. For an organization that runs this way, we can tell you that implementing Salesforce will not solve a thing. It will only create more chaos and confusion, as now we’re adding sophisticated, process-automating software on top of no process. Not good.

Guilty, Your Honor. So what should we do now?

If you’re reading through this, you’re thinking to yourself, check for some (or all) of the mistakes listed; well, take some solace. You’re hardly alone.

A surprisingly large number of firms make these same mistakes when implementing Salesforce. It often takes a year or more to realize that you’re not doing something right and you’re certainly not getting the ROI on Salesforce you had planned for.

What do you need to do?

At P3 Performance, we’ll look deeper into your organization’s 3 Ps -your people’s readiness for change, your sales processes, and how your Salesforce platform has been designed to support those processes.

Chances are you've missed the mark if you’re struggling with adoption.

Give us three to four weeks, and we’ll provide feedback on what you’ve missed and, most importantly, a prescribed approach for getting things back on track.

Salesforce Adoption is a lot of work, trust us. But the first step is to draft a solid plan from which to work. Then, that work can pay off.