Drive Salesforce Adoption with Salesforce Success Cloud Programs and Tools

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the difference between user adoption and feature adoption, and why they’re so important.
Describe some key Salesforce Customer Success resources and programs that can help drive adoption for your organization.

Adoption Defined

We talk about adoption a lot at Salesforce, but what does it mean exactly? In this unit, we discuss some key resources and programs within Salesforce Customer Success that can help you tackle the subject of adoption.

At Salesforce, adoption is two things: user adoption and feature adoption. Ensuring your Salesforce users are actually using the apps you’ve implemented is an example of user adoption. Ensuring that your organization is taking advantage of all the great features built into Salesforce products is an example of feature adoption.

User Adoption

Whether it’s a tweak to the secret formula of a not-to-be-named fizzy brown beverage or your favorite team’s new neon-green uniforms, people are often skeptical of new things. If you’re getting ready to introduce a new tool or process to a group of users, it’s critical that you take steps to minimize that anxiety. Be sure to explain why you’re using Salesforce and how it will help them at work.

Once your implementation is live, it’s also important to keep tabs on users’ sentiments. Think about the key groups that use Salesforce in your organization today. Is Salesforce making their jobs easier? Are they even logging in? If the answer is no to either of those questions, then it’s time to improve things.

Feature Adoption

Salesforce releases hundreds of new features every year, and these aren’t just shiny bells and whistles—they can have a real impact on your organization. For example, just about everyone wants to make operations more efficient by automating processes. Are you taking full advantage of Salesforce Flows and approval processes? Salesforce Customer Success can help you discover features like these and apply them so everyone has a better work day.

The Customer Success Ecosystem Is Always On

With almost 20 years of experience and hundreds of thousands of organizations using Salesforce technology, we’ve developed some great self-service, always-on resources that can help you with both user adoption and feature adoption.

Salesforce Help is your central hub for all these DIY resources.

Product documentation and knowledge base: Access the definitive reference material on just about all of our technology.
Trailhead: Learn Salesforce products, features, soft skills, and more—the fun way—with interactive content for developers, admins, business users, and beginners.
Trailblazer Community: Join our thriving network of millions of Salesforce customers, partners, and employees to collaborate and share your successes and challenges.
Success Center: Use this as your launchpad to learn the best ways to implement many of our most popular products.
Customer Success Event Calendar: Register to attend live, interactive webinars on products, processes, and tips for success.

Accessing Salesforce Help is super easy. Just click the big ? in the upper right corner of Salesforce if you are in the Lightning user interface, or Help in the Classic user interface. If you’re not logged into Salesforce, just point your browser to help.salesforce.com.

Salesforce Help provides what techies call “federated” search. This basically means that it pulls search results from not only the typical documentation and knowledge base articles, but also answers from the Trailblazer Community, add-ins from the AppExchange, posts on our Developer forums, and more!

Success Plans For Every Business

These always-on resources form the components of the Standard Success Plan. But what if you want more? Our Premier and Signature Success Plans give you more help and guidance on adoption, productivity, fixing and preventing problems, and optimizing your use of Salesforce.

Take a look at this Success Plan comparison chart.

	STANDARD *Self-guided resources*	PREMIER *Specialized engagements*	SIGNATURE *Proactive, high-touch partnership*
Trailhead, Help Portal, Trailblazer Community, Success Center	⚫	⚫	⚫
Technical Support	⚫	⚫	⚫
24x7 Phone Support & Developer Support		⚫	⚫
Expert Coaching: Targeted guidance and best practices aligned to your goals		⚫	⚫
Trailhead Academy Discounts		⚫	⚫
Proactive Services: Real-time monitoring, trends, recommendations			⚫
Account Management: Personalized, platform guidance from a designated Technical Account Manager			⚫

Get To Know Professional Services

The road to success can be a long one, and sometimes you need help reaching your destination. Salesforce Professional Services can show you how to set your business up for long-term, sustainable success on our platform.

We are a team of trusted Salesforce advisors and consultants. When we work with you and your partners, you benefit from more than 20 years of best practices to help you transform your business, your culture, and your operating models.

Salesforce Professional Services has two ways we work with our customers to accelerate speed to value: Assurance Services and Implementation Delivery.

Assurance Services: Our experts will guide you and your team through the most critical moments of your implementation, working alongside partners. Leveraging our codified best practices, from crafting your initial vision to providing technology oversight across your implementation, and every step in between. With Assurance Services, customers see consistent value and innovation from their Salesforce investment.

Implementation Delivery: For our most strategic customers implementing cross-cloud solutions and new and emerging products, we embed experts in your teams to deliver the right services and frameworks. Are you planning a large, complex implementation or a highly customized use case? Do you need to accelerate your deployment, or just want to ensure you get it right the first time? Our experts have the blueprints to get it right.

Here’s a video that provides a real-world example of Salesforce Professional Services in action. Watch this to see what it did for our client, Dell.

Calling All Trailblazers!

So now that you’ve learned about Salesforce Customer Success, what are the next steps? Since you’re already on Trailhead, you’re off to a great start. There are lots of opportunities for learning. You can start by taking a deeper look at our Success Plans to learn how you can turn your Salesforce vision into business value faster:

Discover Salesforce Success Plans

Make sure to promote Trailhead to all of your Salesforce users. It’s not just for admins and developers. There are lessons for fresh-faced beginners and seasoned experts alike, including a growing library of soft-skills trails such as:

If you’re deploying Salesforce to new users, think about incorporating Trailhead into your training plan. And consider taking it to the next level by installing Trail Tracker from the AppExchange. This nifty little add-in brings your users’ Trailhead achievements into your Salesforce instance so you can create scorecards and leaderboards and assign Trailhead badges to your community.

Don’t underestimate the power of a little friendly competition or swag giveaways for Trailhead achievements. We have lots of data that prove the value of Trailhead for companies. Users who complete badges are happier users with better feature adoption.

Finally, as just about any experienced Salesforce admin or developer will tell you, having a network of peers you can connect with is a huge key to success. The Trailblazer Community is where it truly comes to life. You’ll find many smart, passionate, and fun people on the Trailblazer Community helping each other every day.

So what are you waiting for? Head over, log in, and tell us a little about yourself on your profile page.