Salesforce adoption problems and how to solve them

Salesforce has over 150,000 customers globally and is used by 83% of Fortune 500 companies. With numbers like that, it’s clear that Salesforce is the must-have business management platform. Implementation of Salesforce requires thoughtful and robust consideration of people, process, and technology. The decisions made when implementing Salesforce can make or break your company’s ability to grow and move forward. Gathering consistent, fully integrated, and accurate data in different areas of your process requires strong user adoption to fulfill your business goals.

Understanding a few of the common adoption problems can help start an implementation off on the right track.

5 Common Salesforce Adoption Problems

Understanding the roadmap behind a successful implementation

Salesforce isn’t a system that should be implemented for just one department to use. When a company decides to use a CRM like Salesforce, it’s important to think long-term and to fully understand the vision behind a successful Salesforce implementation.

Commonly, in sales-driven organizations, the decision to use Salesforce starts with your sales and/or marketing department and trickles down throughout the company. That’s because marketing and sales often start the customer journey and the starting place for data on them that will aggregate over time in your system.

Working with data of such magnitude can be intimidating. It’s essential to know which departments should also use the system and be included in the full platform roadmap. Knowing this in advance will help fill any gaps and will create better consistencies.

The power of old habits

With the implementation of any new tool or system, getting your employees to adopt and use it regularly is one of the most challenging problems facing managers. The problem escalates when your employees haven’t used Salesforce in the past. So how do you solve this issue? It’s something that can’t be solved overnight, but getting to the root of the issue is key. Most managers note either a lack of understanding or training as the reasons why users don’t adopt at the rate necessary.

When you’re adopting a system as big as Salesforce, you need to provide ample training and support to the users within the system. This will help mitigate any reasons why employees aren’t adopting the tool. Remember, behaviors can’t be changed overnight.

Automation and field validation can also go a long way in enforcing data standards. Creating a clear, defined, and guided process using Salesforce Lightning features will help ensure the system is easy to use for your reps.

Salesforce administrative support and regular release cycles

The ability to edit fields, change user permissions, install add-ons, or upgrade to the latest features are four of the hundreds of tasks a Salesforce admin takes on. User feedback and action on that feedback is key towards adopting a mentality of continuous improvement. Whether your company is less than 50 employees or supports thousands of users, not having direct access to your Salesforce administrators and voicing ideas presents a barrier.

Some organizations adopt regular release cycles on a monthly cadence or a cadence that mirrors Salesforce product releases. This helps keep your users engaged in the process of improvement and excited about changes that will improve how they operate.

Data consistency

If you need clean and consistent data across all your systems, implementing a Data Standards policy within your organization is key. The ability to drill down into data errors within the system, and solve for them, should be included within this policy.

A lot of Salesforce users connect their CRM with other apps, which may initially cause inconsistencies with your data. It’s suggested to use Salesforce as the central hub for all your data and sync other systems from there.

Lack of support from main stakeholders

Without support from leaders across the organization, you’ll be dead in the water before starting. If sales, marketing, customer support, and finance are on board, but you lack the support of your contract or legal team, you’ll start to experience gaps in your data and the overall effectiveness of the product.

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About the author

Stephanie Gaughen is a Senior Pardot Consultant at Concentrix Catalyst. She holds a master’s degree in media and communications. She has a passion for entrepreneurship, technology innovation, and next-generation marketing.