Salesforce Adoption Fails When You Skip This Step

Salesforce Adoption Fails: Don't Blame Your Users. Fix the System.

Hey, everybody. Mark over here at The Salesforce Trainers.

You know, something that's been bugging me today.

I had a good meeting with a client the other day, and they were implementing Salesforce Maps.

By the way, Salesforce Maps is a great program. If you have a sales team that needs to go out into the field and visit accounts on a routine basis, or a field service team that has to see customers regularly, check out Salesforce Maps. I can put you in touch with my friend Nicholas over at the Salesforce office in Ottawa.

Anyway, back to the client.

They had implemented Salesforce a while ago, and someone had decided that they should add a custom field on the Account record called *Group*. It was a picklist with the values A, B, C, and D.

The idea was that you'd visit your A accounts once a month, your B accounts once a quarter, and your C accounts once every six months or so.

Good idea, right?

So, we're meeting with a bunch of salespeople who are going to be part of the pilot group for Maps, and we're talking to them.

One of the things you can do in Maps is build layers. So, for instance, you can put all your A accounts on the map to see where they are and build a route around them. Or you can map your B accounts, or your A and B accounts together. However you want to design these layers, you can.

So, we're speaking to the reps and saying, "Hey, would it be a good idea to create layers around your grouped accounts?"

And a couple of reps were like, "Grouped accounts? What's that?"

And I said, "You know, A, B, C, D."

And they were still puzzled.

One of the reps said, "Yeah, guys, remember? We had grouping at one point."

And they said, "Well, what's the A account for?"

Even the guy who knew about grouping said, "Ah, well, you visit them more, I think."

But he wasn't even sure.

And so, here's the thing, guys.

When you're implementing Salesforce and you're thinking about adding custom fields, **involve your sales team.**

You've got to make sure that what you're asking the implementation partner to build in Salesforce is something that your sales team is familiar with, actually uses, and has incorporated into its sales process.

Just because you add a field in Salesforce doesn't mean the sales team is going to start using it.

This firm missed a fundamental aspect of how to implement Salesforce. And that's always **Process first, Platform second, and People throughout.**

And so, great idea: add a custom field to group accounts. But it's not such a great idea if your users aren't actually using it every single day and it isn't part of what they do.

So remember, when it comes to Salesforce adoption failures, **don't blame your users. Fix the system.**