Background
Strong Salesforce adoption is the cornerstone of a successful implementation and ongoing ROI. The higher your adoption rate, the higher ROI you will likely get from the system.
Gaining executive buy-in is crucial in order to promote and increase end-user adoption. And it’s not just about creating a “big brother” culture. It’s about easing processes and ensuring the system truly fulfills the user’s needs.
Your end-users must see that the data they help log gets used in meaningful and productive ways. For the executive, that means running reports and making good decisions based on sound business intelligence data.
The client, a leading manufacturer of chemical additives for concrete products, began their efforts to spur Salesforce adoption from the top down while they developed their initial Salesforce roadmap. Craig C., VP Technical Sales and Marketing, enlisted the help of Concentrix Catalyst to conduct a thorough discovery of their needs with various members of their sales, marketing, and project teams.
Opportunity
The client and Catalyst worked together to identify the root causes of inefficiencies, identify reports that would provide meaningful information to the people who needed them, and develop a strategy for the system that would make it “mission-critical” to users to conduct their everyday tasks.
Spending more time on the discovery and completing their due diligence up front before their Salesforce implementation paid off for the client. The resulting system proved valuable for both the executive team and sales team users.
“I use Salesforce every day,” Craig said. “The first thing I do in the morning is log into Salesforce, even before logging into Outlook. Everything I need to do every day is sitting there in Salesforce. In my position, it’s indispensable. And when I use it, everyone else ends up using it because it is a tool that can help you become more successful in your position.”
Solution
Mobile enablement and optimization play a key role in prompting a high rate of Salesforce adoption. The client sales team members use the mobile-ready version of the Salesforce Calendar app extensively. The app was customized by Catalyst to enable the sales team to complete event recaps for their sales calls.
“We don’t even use Outlook anymore for the sales reps when they’re traveling,” Craig said. “If a rep has 20 calls in a week, he will put them on his Salesforce Calendar and relate it to Opportunities, Contacts, and Accounts. Then he can manage his whole day off his phone.”
In promoting adoption from the top-down, Craig also ensured that everyone understood the needs of the sales reps to ensure the tool is valuable for them. It was a priority for him to equip his team with the tools they needed to enable their success.
“Catalyst created an event recap feature for us so they can do their call reports basically real-time,” Craig said. “Now we don’t even do call reports anymore.”
Use a trusted partner to guide you down the right path
Building a Salesforce roadmap with a consulting partner who understood all the options available on the Salesforce platform that would help solve their pain points proved invaluable. It was also vital for them to identify inefficiencies in their processes and what their users really needed.
“Catalyst, in configuring the system for us, helped us realize all these efficiencies and that’s what is critical. If you don’t have Salesforce configured and customized to meet the needs of your workforce, it’s not going to work,” Craig said.
