Wondering why your users are not adopting Salesforce?
Salesforce is a big investment, so you want to make sure your users are using it to its full potential for your business to get the most out of it.
A poor Salesforce implementation stifles user productivity, and hurts your sales.
Over the years we have seen hundreds of poorly customised Salesforce systems, yet most of these mistakes are easily fixed in a couple of hours.
So, what’s stopping you from fixing these problems?
Here, are some common excuses we often hear:
- Fear of change – this is how we have always done things
- We absolutely need this (field/feature)
- Users will not adopt anything new
- We need something up and running now, we’ll think of change later
Here’s the twist, change is inevitable and it’s not always bad, as your business evolves so will your processes. For your users to adopt Salesforce properly you need to make sure Salesforce helps them do their jobs better by making it easy to use.
Let’s take a look at some of these glaring mistakes that kill adoption and burn your salesforce investment.
Fix your Salesforce mistakes for good!
#1: Too many fields
Trust me, you don’t need 20+ fields to capture information for any single record. Make it easy for your sales team to collect the necessary data quickly.
Avoid creating fields that you think “you may need” and for those very rare situations.
#2: Long page layouts
Don’t make your users scroll up and down the page to find information. This is common in businesses who offer multiple services where each has its own sales process and field requirements.
Use record types to organise fields by service and sales process.
#3: Too many non-functional field types
What are non-functional fields you ask? Checkboxes, multi-select picklists, too many long-text fields.
Checkboxes take up a lot of space on the page, use a single picklist field to replace 10 checkboxes.
Managers insist on having long-text fields for sales reps to enter vast amounts of information (narrative). This almost never happens and is very difficult to report on.
Open-text fields are necessary, but limit them to one or two per record, even better can the information be captured through picklists?
Multi-select picklist are notoriously hard to report on, in particular running any meaningful analysis is impossible. Always try to break it down into single picklists and dependent picklists.
#4: Too many required fields
One of many contributors to bad data. Guess what, if the user doesn’t have the mandatory information at the time of creating the record, they will simply enter anything to enable them to save the record.
Importing data becomes difficult and slows down the progress of the sale.
Use validation rules to prompt mandatory information at appropriate stages of the sales cycle.
#5: Bad data
Your CRM is only as good as the data in it. Most issues around data quality are people and process problems.
Fix the problems at the source, educate and motivate your users to put the right data and update salesforce.
Clean-up Leads
Old, outdated and incomplete data not only drives marketing and sales people crazy it also diminishes the credibility of your Salesforce system and reports.
Backup very old unqualified leads and delete them from Salesforce. The last thing a user wants, is to stare at an endless list of dead leads every day.
Clean-up Opportunities
As a manager, are you frustrated with inaccurate sales forecast and pipeline reports? Well, it’s likely you have hundreds of old open opportunities skewing your results.
Run a bulk update on all opportunities and mark them as closed lost. Use workflows and reports to notify record owners of open opportunities.
#6: Email Templates
One of the most under-used Salesforce features. Composing repetitive emails each time is not good use of anyone’s time.
Turn your most effective sales emails into templates you can personalise, optimise and share with your team.
#7: Broken Sales Process
As your business evolves so do your business processes, make sure your processes are aligned to your business. There is always an opportunity to automate and improve existing processes.
#8: Lack of Meaningful Reports and Dashboards
Your Salesforce system offers a wealth of data, it is easy to create pretty dashboards very quickly. However, you could ask for lots of meaningless data in dashboards.
For example, a report on “Number of leads per week”, like website traffic only indicates visibility and vague interest and not a strong pipeline. Similarly number of calls or customer support call volume are easy to game and the numbers won’t mean a thing.
Here are a few good indicators of business health:
Marketing
- Number of fully qualified or converted leads
- Number of converted leads accepted by sales
- Percentage of leads convert
Sales
- Percentage of sales reps logging in on a weekly basis
- Number of sales cycles started
- Number of quotes issued
Account Management
- Cost of customer acquisition
- Percentage of revenue from repeat business
- Percentage of customers still active
- Customer lifetime revenue/profitability
Customer Services
- Number of new problems identified
- Number of problems solved
- Time to resolution from a customer’s point of view
#9: Skipping Sales Process Stages
The biggest challenge in sales management is to ensure your team actually follow it. Even with a sales refresher training program in place, you will only get 40-50% of sales people following the steps in your sales process.
Some common problems with not following the process include:
- Sending proposals without understanding the customers’ requirements
- Skipping to the advanced stages in the sales process without identifying the correct decision makers
- Arranging a demo without understanding if the prospect is a good fit (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline)
We love visual guides; they help you remember information easily. We have created a sales process poster template which has helped our customers sales teams close more sales consistently.
#10: Lack of Salesforce Training
Train your users not just how to use Salesforce but also to follow your sales process.
Provide training based on the user’s role. For example, a marketing user should know how to create and follow up leads and a sales user should know how to create a sales opportunity and follow the sales process.
#11: Not Using Workflows
Lots of businesses are missing out on the power that Salesforce workflows provide, there is so much value untapped here.
A few examples of problems you can solve with workflows:
- Send auto notification emails to customers
- Send renewal reminders
- Notify Sales/Marketing of stale leads and opportunities
- SLA agreement escalations
As you can see these mistakes are easy to make, but they are also easy to fix.
It’s your turn, log into your Salesforce and fix these mistakes today.
P.S. We’ve put together a stack of resources to help you get the most out of your Salesforce, these include:
- Sales process template to help you create your process
- 8 Salesforce ready email templates for every stage of your sales cycle – simply cut & paste
- Sales poster template to help your sales team follow your processes
Download the resource below.