10 Ways To Improve Sales Force Adoption

Sales Force Automation systems like Salesforce.com are ESSENTIAL tools. However, like any tool, it’s only as valuable as the proficiency with which it is used. As easy to use as Salesforce.com is – or any other SFA tool – many companies still struggle to get their people to use them.

The recommendations below come directly from the book Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler. It’s worth the read. In addition, to help re-enforce the advice in the book, I added specific actions our company implemented as examples. These recommendations work! Once in place, we grew our target market in the US by more than 50%+.

Three Core Adoption Values

1. Executives must lead by example

Adoption starts with the CEO and the executive team. As a rule of thumb, users will only adopt as far as their managers do, and managers will adopt only as far as the executives do.

2. Better design = better adoption

The easier you make it for people to adopt (cleaner interface, comprehensive training, and initial handholding), the more they will.

3. Peer pressure and collaboration work

Starting with the executive team, everyone needs to expect your SFA system will be used. Ask “Why isn’t this in our sales system?” until you’re sick of even hearing yourself. Bring meetings to a halt until the sales system is updated NOW.

10 Ways to Increase Adoption of Your SFA

1. Set up a useful CEO/executive team dashboard AND review it at every executive meeting

We created a 1-page report focused on current Q, current Year, next 6Q’s, showing weekly $/% change in the pipeline. It also included current Q closed won business and $/% change from week to week. During our weekly Exec meetings, I (CEO) would verbally walk through report highlighting wins and areas needing improvement to reinforce the company’s focus on sales.

2. Clean up your SFA clutter to improve visibility

We re-implemented our solution, focusing on the standard fields available and removing fields/sections no longer in use or required. This significantly reduced the time required to add a lead/opportunity.

3. Make compensation dependent on accurate reports in the system

Sales commissions were calculated directly from booking reports. We also introduced weekly compliance reports based on opportunity activity updates, poor compliance = reduced commissions.

4. Clearly communicate why SFA adoption matters

Accurate pipeline information = better sales forecasting. We communicated this during all pipeline review meetings (weekly) and at company town hall meetings (quarterly).

5. Customize user interface for your people by role

We had different views/profiles for sales, marketing, services, and administrative – we limited administrative access to change/modify the views to a few and continuously looked at ways to remove clutter and distractions from the sales executive profile.

6. Start training and creating expectations Day 1 with new hires

Frankly, we fell down again and again on this, we clearly communicated the expectation that use of the system was required and important, but training was too hit and miss.

7. Make adoption a part of the sales culture and peer pressure

We ran weekly pipeline review calls, working directly from reports in system. We would Skype, with the report open, and update/make changes real-time while in the meeting. If a sales executive wanted to discuss an opportunity, it had to be in the system, otherwise it didn’t exist, and I would not listen. We also sent out weekly compliance reports based on activity goals and these were shared with everyone in the company.

8. Take an online training class for your SFA system

We offered training to our sales executives; however, most of them were all ready familiar with our SFA (Salesforce.com) and did not need it. I do think we should have provided more training specific to how we used the application, definitely we had room for improvement.

9. Hire an experienced SFA user of your system to do one-on-one training sessions with your team (and provide administrative support!)

This recommendation is very important, not just for helping with training, but to keep the system running efficiently and supporting sales leadership. You need a dedicated Salesforce administrator who can quickly get things done, keeping sales management resources focused on selling. Ideally, your Salesforce administrator is also capable of running pricing exercises and reviewing pricing quotes before they go out the door.

10. Evaluate a mobile smartphone version of your SFA system

This definitely makes sense, sales people travel, and it would be great to have ability to provide updates when not connected to the SFA system. With that said, we tried several times, never had any success. We tried several plug-ins that were recommended but we were unable to find one that worked.

Ultimately, everyone in the organization has the responsibility to adopt the SFA successfully. However, the CEO bears the most responsibility here in also using it and staying committed to doing whatever it takes to help the company embrace it and use it effectively.

Truly, in this case, you must lead by example.