Stop Blaming Your Users

Hey everybody. It's Mark at You know something that's been nagging at me a bit today. Got a call yesterday from a director of RevOps at a good client of ours. We did some Salesforce training for them this summer. They actually implemented Salesforce. They worked with a good partner of ours that does amazing work actually, and they brought us in when their build was at about 80% of the way there and wanted us to do the training. So we started by interviewing some sales managers and salespeople, which we always do, just to get a flavor for how they do things and make the training as realistic as possible with real examples. And during those interviews, we we got a feeling that, you know, there wasn't a lot of consistency. So we had managers running pipeline reviews much differently than each other. Some didn't even run them. We had salespeople who weren't really familiar with any of the opportunity stages and really kind of sold kind of their own way, and we brought this concern up with the leadership there. And we said, you know, that lack of process could kind of hamper your your Salesforce utilization and your adoption. And they said, yeah, we've we've never really been big on process very much, and we don't like to sort of manage that way. And I said, well, just so you're aware, this could hurt us a bit, but they wanted to proceed with the training nonetheless. So we ran the change management communication strategy, trying to increase the awareness of why we're moving to Salesforce, to up the desire among the sales team. And and for all accounts, it was very successful. People came to the training super engaged, ready to go. We ran great hands on training. We got super reviews. We did one on one management training after on reporting. Managers really liked it and by all accounts it was a success. However, like I said, I got a call from the director of RevOps yesterday and he said, you know, Mark, adoption metrics that we outlined with you at the beginning are not where we wanted. Um, and I said, yeah, it was one of those I hate to say I told you so moments. Uh, anyway, uh, they really did miss the fundamental principle of implementing Salesforce, which is always process first, platform second, and people throughout. It's a lot like building a house without a foundation. It's just not going to last very long. So they are committed to improving the situation, and we're going to continue to look at helping them out. But always remember, when it comes to Salesforce adoption, do not blame the user. Fix the system.