How to Increase the User Adoption Rate of Salesforce Implementation?

While lots of people may adopt Salesforce implementation to improve their ROI, but sometimes they do not get the desired outcome through Salesforce. Salesforce may not be able to increase organizational sales, increase pipeline visibility, and enhance the efficiency of email marketing campaigns due to the lack of proper implementation strategy and stages. Inaccurate project implementation planning can reduce and neglect the chances of user adoption and common risks.

Here in this blog, we will discuss the ways to plan a successful Salesforce implementation and user adoption. A Strategic and planned implementation can result in guaranteed user adoption. So let us see how one can make the Salesforce implementation successful?

Planned Implementation + Key Aspects for Successful Salesforce Implementation = Successful Salesforce Implementation Maximum User Adoption

As per Salesforce, its customers can get an average of 53% of their ROI by properly implementing this CRM. For this, you should follow below-listed practices:

Consider various implementation strategies and choose the one that matches your exact requirement.
Follow the implementation stages in a better manner
Map each implementation stage properly
Create a project timeline and plan the budget
Know and major your risks
Ensure user adoption

Let us look and discuss each of the above-listed steps in detail to know more about this.

1). Choose the Best Implementation Strategy

The choice of implementation strategy will completely depend on the current state and type of your organizational business process. Let us assume that you are fully satisfied with your current practices of sales, marketing, and services, but your CRM does not support them in a full-fledged manner. In such case, Salesforce implementation can help you in digitizing your sales, marketing, and customer processes and addressing business challenges in your desired manner.

But if you are not happy with the performance of your sales and marketing teams or processes, then there can be two options for you:

a). First is to implement Salesforce and to migrate your processes in the best way to Salesforce

b). Secondly, you can redefine your processes and design them from scratch within Salesforce. While this can be the most difficult strategy as well.

2). Choose Suitable Implementation Stages

As soon as you get your future implementation ready with you, then you should evaluate the possible ways of current Salesforce implementation, and you can have the following two ways for that:

a). Several Simultaneous Salesforce Cloud Implementation

By this, you can implement and automate the sales, service, and marketing activities of your business process by using Salesforce at once. In this way, the organizations can get streamlined business processes and many other Salesforce process automation capabilities like field updates, email notification, customer and sales service contribution.

By improving any service in all three departments at the same time can provide you with better customer retention and engagement. You can leverage the three popular Salesforce clouds that are Sales, Marketing, and Service cloud. However, multiple simultaneous implementations can increase failure chances and create data integrity, data loss, and corruption like issues. You can take the help of implementation partner to mitigate the failure risks as well.

b). One Salesforce Cloud Integration

You can also implement Salesforce clouds one by one to lower the risk of integration disruption. Initially, you can implement your priority cloud product that can be sales or marketing and later execute the service cloud implementation. However, for this approach, you may also have to execute temporary implementation in parallel to maintain the internal departmental service synchronization. With the help of experienced developers, you can plan and perform these temporary integrations.

3). Planning of Salesforce Implementation Steps

The sequence of Salesforce implementation steps will totally depend on the scope of your project and its implementation approach. It basically includes the following steps:

a). Consulting

Salesforce consultants that may be hired can analyze the business process needs and help you to choose the required functionalities. Depending on the scope of Salesforce product for your business processes consultant may also suggest a better implementation approach for your business process requirement, they may also suggest the best licensing option for your organization as well.

b). Data Transfer from Former to New System

To ensure data quality, you should take care of the safety of the data import step while moving to this CRM. It may also include other key aspects as well that are a mapping of corresponding data objects, data cleansing, ensuring data duplication rules for various Salesforce objects and data migration automation, the can be performed easily through migration tools.

c). Application Customization

Implementation is incomplete without customization. Salesforce objects may need to be customized that can be done easily through point and click tools. All customization can be performed through point and click tools at once as batch processing or can also perform customization sequentially to deliver functionality enhancements step by step.Testing and Deployment

After customization, the Salesforce implementation must be tested by QA engineers to ensure its functionalities. For deployment, the process is executed and migrated to the UAT or user acceptance testing environment. If it works as per the user’s expectation, then the solution is accepted by the users. Just after training completion, a new solution can be easily used by the users or employees of the organization. Even there should be a full-fledged solution and service for after-launch support.

4). Time and Budget Planning

While implementing Salesforce, one other imperative and considerable aspect is the time taken to implement all requested or required features. If the implementation scope is defined clearly, then project timeframes and adequate and required budget can be easily planned by the organizations. However, the cost of implementation is not fixed as it depends on several below-listed factors:

While choosing or selecting the implementation process, avoid any imbalance between the choice of any out-of-the-box without an appropriate and suitable budget. This may lead to low user-adoption in the longer run. Moreover, never avoid the two most important costs that are user training and after-launch support. It may also lead to low ROI and adoption rate.

5). Considerable Implementation Risks

Risk forecasting must be seriously considered as it may also affect after implementation result. These risks may be like:

a). Inculcation of any irrelevant feature:

Here user can buy the maximum value Salesforce edition with rich functionalities. Whether in real, you may be paying more for any unwanted or not-required feature. As a result, you may get the fully compliant solution without overpaying and with superfluous functionalities

b). By Choosing any Non-User-Friendly Solution

Well, if you choose any rich Salesforce functionality, but the user is not comfortable with that, then the resulting adoption rate may be low, and the solution potential may become low. Any sort of user disappointment may result in lower productivity as well. For this, consider any of the issues that your user may have with your last CRM and see how you can manage and avoid that in your new CRM?

c). Balanced Project Implementation Length and It’s Benefits

If your Salesforce implementation takes too long as 12 months for implementation due to its complex required custom features and their solutions, then it may result into most undesired consequences like the inability of the users to exercise the new solutions successfully. Users must try to master any complex implemented solution that may be highly challenging for them.

In case if the implementation is large and complex and also includes lots of custom development, then in such case the most required solution must be delivered first. When your user gets trained on it only then adds other required functionalities. In this way, the user will not have to go through any complex structure, and he will get proper time to command any new functionality as well.

6). Make Sure User Adoption

Let us suppose that your Salesforce solution has been completely configured, and the UI is also convenient for your user along with automation of sales and customer service tasks. If your employees have been fully trained for the new CRM features and the automated process, then you may consider that half of the adoption has been done. Also, you can also conduct a user-training session by any training specialist that can provide them with the best in-house training and guide for full functionalities. Some of the additional user–adoption factors may be:

Availability of Day-to-Day Salesforce Help + Best Adopter Motivational Rewards = Maximum User Adoption

a). Availability of Day-to-Day Salesforce Help

Any trained or certified Salesforce administrator can easily fill the gap between the employees and CRM functionalities. Training conduction by an experienced person can increase the user-adoption time in a timely and efficient way. You will notice a rapid growth in the adoption rate. If you cannot hire a Salesforce admin then can also take the service of any third-party training service provider as well.

b). Best Adopter Motivational Rewards

You can also increase the adoption rate by rewarding the users who spend maximum time with your new CRM. Not only this you can reward them based on several reports that they created through CRM, contacts added by them and other useful criteria can also be considered to motivate the new users or the employees.

Final Thought

Well, Salesforce implementation may be incomplete without the complete user adoption. So right from the beginning of its first implementation step up to the last user-adoption step, organizations must consider all aspects associated with user-adoption. Choose a proper and suitable implementation strategy and approach, plan your budget and project timeline in advance, and last but the most imperative point is to encourage user adoption by any means. As a result, your business ROI will get increased, and every business user will adopt CRM.