The 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 (Day Six: User Training & Adoption)
TL;DR: Here is my list of things you should be considering as you reboot your business for 2024, focusing on Salesforce generally and User Training & Adoption specifically.
Here’s the first post in this series, which includes background and how you can save $150k/year: https://medium.com/@kmcafeesf/the-12-days-of-salesforce-for-2024-day-one-dd8051e0adee
Day Six (of Twelve): User Training and Adoption Programs
What you should consider: Invest in comprehensive training programs to enhance user adoption and proficiency, reducing errors and increasing productivity.
What you should evaluate: Assess potential productivity gains and error reductions through better user proficiency. Consider the time saved on issue resolution.
Annualized cost savings (est. based on 30 users): $8,000.
How I would approach Day Six and User Training and Adoption:
Note that this is the lowest ROI section on my list, but one that you cannot ignore. Your best bets will start with 1) a feedback mechanism (whoa, foreshadowing for a future week!) and 2) process documentation.
Feedback.
We collect feedback to make the system better. That could mean a user survey to get started, or it could be metrics and analytics that tell you things like cycle times, throughput, handle times, close rates, etc., and show you the opportunities to improve them.
Ideally, whatever mechanism you select should be open and transparent (much like the IdeaExchange is for Salesforce — an open forum where ALL community members can post ideas and vote up/down others’ ideas). That idea is very powerful, and Salesforce — based on community feedback — created a package of those components that you can deploy in your own org or community.
Feedback can also take the form of a Center of Excellence (aka COE), where ideas for projects, improvements, metrics, etc., all are surfaced and explored to relate importance to the organization and levels of effort. This is certainly a more formal approach, but some organizations will thrive on that, as it can create a defined direction and prioritization when done right.
Documentation
Sure, I get it. No one except perhaps the very hearty wants to create or maintain documentation. But here’s the thing: when you want to make changes the right way, that’ll be your first step.
In order to effect useful change, you’ll need to determine your starting place. Metrics play a part there (we close deals in 37.5 days, on average, or each rep handles five deals at a time, etc.), and so does your process.
Knowing that your sales process, for instance, is six stages long and takes about 37.5 days on average is great, but how long is each stage, usually? How many customers are in the process in parallel? Where are the sticking points? Where are the departure points?
Answering these questions with some detail around how you operate today can help surface opportunities to improve things, add integrated data, improve analytics, or maybe even to blow up and restart a process entirely.
But I digress…
User Training
The user training you should think about is related to those processes and the feedback. Do users have a clear plan of action? Do they know what to focus on (and what not to)? Do they clearly know how they stand in the organization? Do they know how the data or activity they provide changes the company’s outcomes?
Training on-the-ground is key as well; if you can find trusted users (read: not necessarily leaders) who can identify training needs and help create some guides or materials for others to benefit from, those will have the greatest impact.
Reinforcing the training (and outcomes and metrics) from leadership is also key. Clarity of message will deliver results.
And the aforementioned feedback loop can help keep you on track and prevent a full-scale revolt or departure.
This is a part of the 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 series. Here are links to the other initiatives you should consider, and as always, please reach out to me if you’d like some counsel or my approach via my team at Rule Six Consulting LLC.
Day One: Automation of Repetitive Tasks
Day Two: Data Cleanup & Deduplication
Day Three: Analytics & Reporting
Day Six: User Training & Adoption
Day Seven: Mobile Optimization
Day Eight: Artifical Intelligence
Day Nine: Communities and Portals
Day Eleven: Security & Compliance
Day Twelve (Hooray!): Improvement Cycles & Feedback
I appreciate you spending some time thinking about these topics with me, and I welcome feedback and additions.
