Driving Transformation Through Salesforce Adoption
How to design a Salesforce change management strategy that accelerates adoption and ensures transformation
Transitioning to a new technology platform is exciting and challenging for businesses, employees, and customers. When implementing a new platform like Salesforce, you have the opportunity to do more than just transition to a new system — you can instigate and drive transformation across functions, ways of working, people, and technologies.
Exciting possibilities arise, such as global business process re-engineering and standardization, the evolution of your current sales or service model, and the implementation of new data governance to drive business outcomes. You have the chance to align leadership behind one cohesive vision and revolutionize your organization into your desired strategic destination.
Of course, these significant opportunities are met with a fair share of challenges, including:
- A lack of leadership buy-in with the new direction
- Continued misalignment between business and IT when implementing the new platform
- Misunderstanding of new capabilities by the end user
- Training misalignment with the way that users learn
- Lack of incentives to use the new platform
Through a strategic change management approach with a strong emphasis on adoption, you and your team can combat the challenges listed above to actualize desired results and transformation.
How do you design a transformational change management strategy?
Utilize a customized strategy designed to align leadership, engage stakeholders, communicate to various levels within your organization, understand readiness, train end-users, and ultimately drive adoption.
Below are five key characteristics of a healthy change management solution, along with a few Salesforce considerations:
Leadership alignment
Change starts with creating leadership alignment on the vision, benefits, risks, and success metrics of your program and your broader transformational endeavors. Prepare your leaders with the right information and skills to champion change and lead effectively.
Salesforce considerations:
- Why do you want to implement Salesforce?
- What business objectives do you aim to accomplish with Salesforce that you couldn’t do with your previous CRM?
- What does success look like at go-live, one year from now, and five years from now?
- How will you map towards those metrics as a leadership team within Salesforce and outside of Salesforce?
Stakeholder engagement
Collaborate with your impacted stakeholders to understand the positive (and sometimes negative) changes across people, process, and technology. Capture the sentiment within various levels and cultures of your organization as you recognize gaps between your current and future state.
Salesforce considerations:
- Who needs to understand project milestones, metrics, and general information? Consider directly and indirectly impacted stakeholders by the Salesforce implementation.
- Which of your stakeholder groups need more of a “high touch” approach verses a “keep informed” approach?
- How can you bring these stakeholders along the journey with you to encourage Salesforce adoption? Can you involve “high touch” stakeholders in Salesforce demos, sprint playbacks, show and tells, or feedback focus groups?
Communication
Develop a communication strategy and design communications (internal and customer-facing) to promote awareness, readiness, and ownership of the new functionality and ways of working. Distribute information and gather feedback through a variety of channels to ensure your audience receives your key messaging in their preferred channel.
Salesforce considerations:
- Once your users are using Salesforce, which channels can you use to communicate messaging from within Salesforce?
- Can you use native features such as Chatter groups, In-App Guidance, notifications, and Salesforce surveys to share new enhancements with your end users?
- Do you need to consider additional languages or varying channels for a global implementation?
- How can you utilize your change champions to share the messaging locally and inspire confidence in how Salesforce meets your business needs?
Education
Design an education strategy rooted in providing practical knowledge to your target audiences as they perform their daily tasks on day one. Think through content creation across multiple vehicles such as quick reference guides, micro-videos, eLearning, just-in-time learning, and in-person or virtual training.
Salesforce considerations:
- How can you use Salesforce partners and just-in-time learning providers to enhance or develop your education strategy and content?
- How can you use Salesforce native features to promote enhancements?
- How can you intuitively design your Salesforce environment to enable ease of use and functionality?
Adoption
Determine what success looks like for your leaders, end-users, and customers. Drive towards targeted metrics of Salesforce adoption, ways of working, desired behaviors, and business outcomes.
Salesforce considerations:
- How can you inspire leaders, managers, and end-users to complete daily tasks within Salesforce?
- Can you use techniques such as gamification, competition, performance measures, and incentives to drive adoption?
- How can you use Salesforce native functionality and an intuitive design to drive adoption?
Adoption of new ways of working, desired behaviors, and Salesforce functionality is a direct result of a successful change management approach. These considerations above build your return on investment and propel your organization towards capturing the greater business transformation desired.
How can you use Salesforce and Salesforce partners to accelerate adoption?
Salesforce and Salesforce partners provide resources, experts, and customizable functionality to facilitate adoption. When thinking through your change management strategy, here are three key considerations to increase and drive Salesforce adoption:
1. Showcase success metrics through Salesforce
Use Salesforce to demonstrate success with the platform. Determine what’s essential for your leaders, managers, and end users to target and visualize. Promote these data insights to positively reinforce behaviors with dashboards, reports, and native functionality.
- Dashboards and reports — Create a customized set of dashboards and reports that displays essential information by role. Think through various levels of adoption metrics such as Salesforce usage, data accuracy and health, business drivers, and utilization of new features necessary to make real-time informed business decisions.
- Lead with Salesforce — Ensure your leaders lead by example to promote buy-in of Salesforce. Have your leaders share their Salesforce environment during town halls or team meetings as they run through metrics and team goals. Get your leaders excited about Salesforce through demoing fun features such as Salesforce for Outlook and the Salesforce app early and often.
- Badge your high achievers — Design badges within Salesforce to thank and spotlight early adopters. Make sure to tag their managers and teammates to increase awareness of their recognition and desired behaviors.
2. Utilize native features in Salesforce
As Salesforce evolves, more and more native features are available to increase adoption through engagement, communication, and learning. Current features include:
- In-App Guidance — Provide information on updates or enhancements through docked prompts, floating prompts, or walkthroughs when a user logs in or accesses different pages within Salesforce. Your prompts can include texts, links to videos, quick reference guides, and eLearning courses.
- Chatter groups — Enable support channels to field questions, post surveys, and gather information through chatter groups. These are great channels for your change management team, change champions, communication lead, or training team to monitor and share information to specified stakeholder groups.
- Help text — Promote data quality and accuracy through providing explanatory text over potentially confusing fields to support adoption. Utilize focus groups to determine tricky fields and test the effectiveness of supporting help text.
- Customizable help links — Update links in the drop-down help menu or add them to the utility bar to easily access training materials outside of Salesforce. Consider adding links to your Learning Management System, FAQs, or onboarding materials for your end users.
3. Consider digital adoption partners or resources
Outside of your typical learning vehicles such as micro-videos, quick reference guides, job aids, and eLearning courses, Salesforce implementations benefit from strategic digital adoption partners and resources.
- Just-in-time learning providers — Specialized companies provide just-in-time in-app learning that collaborates with your Salesforce environment, such as WalkMe or Spekit. These tools can showcase step-by-step processes in Salesforce, highlight new features, accelerate onboarding, and promote adoption.
- Trailhead and Trailmixes — Salesforce provides free resources to learn how to build, customize, and enhance your Salesforce experience. You can pick and combine trails to create Trailmixes for your employees to complete as desired.
- MyTrailhead — With additional licensing, your team can create learning in the shape of Salesforce trails with company branding and customized pictures, texts, and videos for your end users. Push customized trails to the Salesforce homepage of targeted end users and capture analytics through the Trail Tracker.
- Salesforce partners — Salesforce partners like Slalom bridge the gap between IT and business as they customize your Salesforce environment and execute an effective change management strategy designed to fit your targeted business needs.
In summary
Employees and customers must adopt the new platform, processes, and ways of working to drive transformation through Salesforce. In a previous client survey, we saw that 85% of employees believed that communication, education, and engagement efforts within a change management strategy better prepared them for go-live. While thinking through your change management strategy, remember to use Salesforce to promote adoption as often as you can.
Your targeted ROI and desired transformation are within reach. Utilize Salesforce capabilities and continue to bring your employees and customers along the journey with you.
Special thanks to my colleagues: Elizabeth Abad, Andrea Goodman, Nora Crean, and Sabah Habib for support in editing and contributing to this article.
Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Learn more about Slalom’s partnership with Salesforce and reach out today.
