Deploy Your Salesforce Technology
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List what should be included in launch communications.
- Explain when you should use different training methods.
- Describe how your execs can sponsor your Salesforce implementation.
- List ways you can drive adoption through recognition.
This Is the Big Show
In the building phase you were the secret superhero; launch is when everyone finally sees your amazing work. There’s of course a lot of technical work that goes into launching Salesforce (if you need some help with that, check out this blog). In this unit, we talk about the key adoption steps you should take to make your launch smooth and successful. This is arguably the most important phase for impacting adoption, so listen up Trailblazers!
Communicate the Launch to Your Company
It’s no surprise that you’ll need to send out a communication about the launch of Salesforce. It is a huge deal, after all! But let’s talk about how you can get the word out and what key points to include.
How will you tell people? Try one (or more) of these.
- Email: It’s fast, cheap, and gets you to everyone regardless of location, and you can add links to resources or a video.
- Video: This is a compelling way to generate excitement. Bonus points if you include an exec to confirm that support is coming all the way from the top.
- Live event: This may be a party in your office or an announcement at a meeting (webinar or in-person). If you can time it with a big company event like a sales kickoff, you can build off that excitement.
What should you include in these types of communications?
- What’s coming: Tell reps that your company will be using Salesforce and what it does, without lingo or acronyms. Surveys indicate many sales reps don’t know the term “CRM,” even if they’ve used one. You can say something like, “It's a system that keeps your customer information in one place, so your team can manage your contact with your customers with this full history in mind.”
- What’s in it for your reps: What will it help your reps do better? Go ahead and highlight a list of benefits.
- Training: If live, when and where will it be? If it’s recorded or documented, include the links now (don’t just say they’re coming).
- (Bonus) Support from execs: Whether you use a video message from the VP of Sales or a note from the CEO about the importance of using Salesforce, include it—it will boost excitement and momentum.
- (Bonus) Success stories: If someone in the pilot discovered something really cool, share their story. Peer champions are excellent influencers—and everyone loves a good story.
Train All Your Users
Everyone—salespeople, managers, and execs—needs to understand how to use Salesforce. If people find a new system hard to use, they won’t use it, so give them the tools they need to feel competent from day one. Let’s talk about how and what to include.
How will you train everyone? Decide what works best for your audience, budget, and timeframe.
- In person: This allows you to be the most hands-on and answer questions, but it’s the most time consuming for you.
- Train-the-trainer: For very large organizations, training a small group to teach their local teams is a great way to scale in-person training. This has the added bonus of turning local leads into advocates of Salesforce themselves.
- Webinar or video: This can be shared as a recording, which is great for when new people are hired. Don’t feel compelled to have high-production value. The info is the most important thing.
- Documentation: Either something you create (customized to the audience) or information that comes from the Salesforce help website (that’s easiest for you).
- Trailhead: Choose a few modules to put into a Trailmix for reps to start with so they don’t get overwhelmed. We especially love User Training and Motivation, Discover Sales Cloud, Salesforce User Basics, and Salesforce User Tour.
- Help Menu: Supplement the Salesforce resources already included in the Help Menu by adding a custom section with links to your training documents, custom Trailmixes, Salesforce Help documents you want to really highlight, and more. Let your users know that if they have a question, just go to the ? at the top of the page.
- In-App Guidance Prompts: Create small pop-up windows to highlight configuration changes, introduce features, and provide tips. Write the content, select the target audience, and specify where it appears and for how long. Add links to internal wikis, training, or PDFs for a specific call to action. Then, use built-in metrics tracking to measure the success of the prompt.
For each feature you talk about, include:
- What it does
- How it helps them
- How they use it, step-by-step
Don’t forget to train your leaders on how they’ll use Salesforce. They may not need to understand the same breadth of features, but they should at least understand how to generate the reports they need to run their business and how to collaborate with their teams.
Remember Your Executive Sponsors
Remember back in the prebuilding phase when you got alignment from your executives, and they agreed to support Salesforce? This is where that really pays off and when they begin to do those things.
Especially key is that execs use Salesforce and expect everyone else to. One customer told us their VP of Sales showed up to her first pipeline meeting after the launch of Salesforce and asked all her directors for their pipeline reports. If they showed her a spreadsheet, she told them it was too outdated and asked for real-time information in Salesforce. Word spread quickly, and soon everyone knew that pipeline reporting had to be in Salesforce.
Executives set the tone for how everyone in the organization will act. If yours support Salesforce, word will get to your reps, and fast.
Recognize Great Behavior
Sales reps thrive on recognition, so tap into that with your adoption efforts. Salesforce itself can help you recognize your reps who are using Salesforce a lot.
Consider creating a dashboard that shows how frequently each person uses Salesforce. You can include one report on how many days of the month each rep has logged in, and another to show how many opportunities they’ve created in Salesforce. Post it publicly so everyone can see who your rockstars are. You can even customize that dashboard for each sales leader, so they can see what their team is up to and help motivate them.
Chatter is another way to bring public attention to reps doing a great job. You can @mention them (type the @ symbol and their name) with a positive comment, which will show on their profile and notify them. Go a step further by @mentioning their boss so leadership can recognize their efforts.
Launch is a big step and you've learned a ton in this unit. Now you know how to announce your Salesforce launch, teach everyone how to use it, get executives pumped, and recognize those who do a great job of using Salesforce. Amazing work, you!
Now that you’re past the big hurdle, let’s talk about how you can maintain high levels of adoption.
