Company-wide Salesforce adoption isn’t something you aim for on a whim. That’s because Salesforce is a complex, powerful tool that needs to be carefully set up for your organisation first. Only employees who’ve worked at companies who use Salesforce effectively know how it feels to use Salesforce as part of their day-to-day work.
This blog summarises a webinar we ran with Mount Anvil, who described their Salesforce journey. You can access the replay here – one webinar of a series on Salesforce adoption.
The starting point to achieving company-wide Salesforce adoption
When your employees are not using Salesforce properly, it’s time to reassess the entire structure. Keir Bowden, BrightGen’s CTO and Salesforce MVP, wrote in a previous blog post about inheriting a bad Salesforce org. Before Mount Anvil called in BrightGen’s support, they had a Salesforce org that had become outdated for their needs as a growing company.
If you’re setting up Salesforce for the first time, you need the buy-in of your workforce. Salesforce will only be adopted when it has been set up correctly. You need to understand your internal customers, their pain points and their needs. When your employees see value, Salesforce becomes part of their everyday work.
It’s crucial to get the right help from the start, not just from Salesforce. You need the right people internally to make this work and you need to truly understand your business. Often that will mean getting someone to come in from the outside and look in. Technology is always evolving, as is Salesforce and your business needs. Continuous improvement is a necessary part of your Salesforce journey.
Six hallmarks of success
James Burgess, BrightGen’s VP of Customer Success, summarised the steps your organisation needs to take to see Salesforce adoption throughout the business.
- Obtain buy-in from the top, and demonstrate this
- Pull together a centre of excellence or steering committee
- Put Salesforce at the heart of the process
- Make it really easy!
- Salesforce should support the job, not become the job
- Herald results
With these steps in place, you’re well on your way to company-wide Salesforce adoption. Employees become more effective and data becomes more reliable. Additionally, you can make business decisions faster and your organisation becomes more proactive.
A Salesforce case study from real estate
BrightGen started working with Mount Anvil’s CRM Manager, Anit Sharma, in 2017. Mount Anvil’s Salesforce system was highly customised and had been set up for previous ways of working. The company could not pull reports easily and work was not visible for management.
Mount Anvil recognised the problem: data was broken and Salesforce needed to be reinvented for the company. The first step was data cleansing. Anit Sharma worked with BrightGen to strip out as much of the old customisation as possible. In Anit’s words, “Salesforce is built the way it is because of… the reason it is! It’s best at doing what it does.”
After BrightGen had reimplemented and cleansed Sales Cloud, they needed to ensure that Mount Anvil could pull home management details into the system. Case management, pricing, status, sizes, addresses… Every detail about Mount Anvil’s homes needed to be accurately kept in one place. Mount Anvil’s employees needed to be confident that this was the one place to go for all information. Otherwise no one would value the data they got from Salesforce.
Digitalising the sales process
The next step was to truly digitalise the sales process. This meant the sales team needed to use Salesforce to submit their offers. The sales director started to enforce this by saying that if offers weren’t in Salesforce, they simply wouldn’t be accepted.
“If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.”
Now approvals could be sent directly to managers’ phones. Clients would get emails as soon as their offers were going through – because the system had been set up to automate the process. Salesforce had become a single source of truth and data could finally be relied upon.
The biggest step for Mount Anvil was getting a single customer view. This was a six month project with BrightGen that would mean they could finally see everything one customer had done with them over time.
With Field Service Lightning, Mount Anvil’s field service team could instantly see what jobs needed to be done on a map. The turnaround time from logging a case to closing it reduced from 12 down to three days. Importantly, Mount Anvil’s clients saw an even better level of service.
Where multiple people were buyers on multiple opportunities, multi-purchases became available. This resulted in a smoother level of service for the customer, with Mount Anvil’s salespeople truly understanding what they needed and cutting out paperwork.
No one works in spreadsheets any more at Mount Anvil. Their management can track sales progress and spending in one place. Data is accurate and all in one place. That’s why Mount Anvil now has 50 active users in Salesforce, as opposed to four when they first started the implementation.
Company-wide tech adoption is a never-ending task
Mount Anvil is continuing to work with BrightGen’s team to progress to the next level of Salesforce utilisation. You can listen to those examples in the webinar replay.
A smooth user experience should be every company’s baseline. Your customer’s needs will evolve – and in today’s environment, that will likely be dramatically from day to day. Your own organisation’s needs and resources will also evolve. Having a single source of truth enables you to serve customers seamlessly.
Every organisation relies on its employees to keep customer data up-to-date. If employees are able to update information in Salesforce as easily as writing on a scrap of paper (or even more easily), you will drive company-wide Salesforce adoption. This enables further automation and reduces effort in the sales process longer-term – ultimately providing the best customer experience.
Get time to speak with a BrightGen expert about your Salesforce implementation: Contact Us.