October 2012
Successful Salesforce CRM Adoptions
A successful Salesforce CRM adoption program depends on many factors but the first hurdle is to identify those key but basic CRM features which must be achieved within the first 3-6 months.
These may be more basic than you think, like, “to get all of our Accounts and Contacts into Salesforce with the users actually using the tool and recording all of their Opportunity activity”. Pretty simple and this gives our friend the Salesforce cube lover something to stay focused on.
Salesforce is a tremendously powerful platform with more features and possibilities than can easily be grasped, and being human, we all get rather excited about all the possibilities and reach for the stars before we even have a launching pad in place. Then when the project goes “splat” lots of human fingers get pointed at the IT team who flubbed. Think of our furry friend again with too many cubes to select and gather together: he frantically scurries around with nothing really getting D-O-N-E.
The ideal Salesforce CRM adoption program would then consist of a phased approach with the correct grouping of features in each phase and rolled out only when the previous one was complete and the users were trained, rolling along and productive.
You see, too many Salesforce project managers will identify ALL of the desired features and then try to roll them all out at once:
- Accounts + Contacts
- Leads
- Web to Lead
- Opportunities
- Chatter
- Workflows
- Cases
- Content Library
- Outlook for Salesforce
- Salesforce Custom Mobile
- Custom Objects
- Full ERP Integration
- Service Cloud
- Custom Reports
- Dashboards
- Etc.
How in the world can your users absorb all of these new features at the get-go? Especially with management asking for too much detail for all of their reports? Users rebel, management gets frustrated and the CRM is looked upon with disdain.
The solution:
WORKOUT A PHASED SALESFORCE CRM ADOPTION PROGRAM ON A GRADIENT
This could mean you start with Professional Edition and then later upgrade to Enterprise when you are ready for those features. Just getting your users on board, trained, data migrated and core Sales Cloud features in use – really in U-S-E – is a challenge.
Your Salesforce account manager will obviously try to sell you the moon and why you need all of the features right away but keep it real for your team and users. Perhaps you work for a high-tech start-up and everyone will just jump right on board, then go for it! Or, your users are somewhat technically challenged and thus a phased, gradient approach will work wonders.
Here’s to your successful Salesforce CRM adoption program!
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