Increase Adoption
Increasing adoption is about making it worth your users' time to learn a new system. You can encourage adoption by supporting users, offering incentives (and disincentives), and providing additional functionality that makes their lives easier.
Support Users
Supporting users is an ongoing process. It involves getting user feedback, providing ongoing training, and identifying user champions who'll help their co-workers day to day. Here are some suggestions for providing user support:
- Conduct a survey - The Force.com AppExchange includes several survey tools you can use to let users express their likes and dislikes. Use surveys periodically to sample user opinions-and then act on them.
- Encourage user champions - Identify users who are enthusiastic about Salesforce CRM and encourage them to help others. Leverage their success to help inspire others.
- Address problems quickly and publicly - Consider any problems an early warning. Fix problems and modify the application based on feedback immediately. Communicate to users how the problems were solved and how their feedback directly impacted the application.
- Offer refresher training - Additional or "refresher" training doesn't have to be formal, just make sure it's appropriate for each user group. For example, sales managers and sales reps will have different issues and will need different refresher sessions.
Encourage Adoption
Many customers find offering incentives can have a big payoff. Here are a few suggestions for encouraging user adoption:
- Identify and reward the strongest adopters. For example, this measurement can be based on the highest number of reports or activities created or the highest number of new Contacts added. One company gave away iPods to the strongest adopters.
- Communicate about new product features that will help users in their daily work.
- Take the approach, "If it isn't in Salesforce CRM, it doesn't exist."
- Tie adoption to compensation.
- Mandate both timeliness and data quality. Reps must enter Prospects and early-stage Opportunities immediately, not just before closing the deal. Otherwise, you lose the advantage of early visibility and the ability to measure close ratios.
Provide Additional Functionality
Giving users additional productivity tools can also a huge difference in whether they'll embrace the new system. For example, integrating with Microsoft Outlook will have a big payoff because users no longer have to switch between applications. The same is true for providing mobile access so reps can access Salesforce.com from anywhere. In addition, the Force.com AppExchange has hundreds of applications you can easily install into your environment. You can even test drive the applications first.
Measure Adoption
Before you can improve adoption you have to measure it. Once you know adoption trends, you can use incentives to actively encourage adoption.
Use the adoption dashboards available on the Force.com AppExchange to track login activity and new records added by users. The most common measurement of adoption is the log-in rate, but it shouldn’t be the only measure. For a more detailed analysis of usage and adoption, consider these measurements:
- Object ownership – Track how many Accounts, Contacts, Activities, and Opportunities each user creates. These measurements let you quickly identify those reps who are not using Salesforce CRM correctly.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) – KPIs provide more targeted monitoring. Good choices include Opportunities won, Opportunities lost, Loss by competitor, Average deal size, Sales stage duration, Forecast accuracy, and Productivity.
