Want your sales team to adopt Salesforce with ease? Want to leverage the platform to help achieve critical sales initiatives? It’s going to be difficult to get either if your team doesn’t know how to use the CRM properly. We’re hoping you have questions about making that happen.
After all, we tapped into the wisdom of these Salesforce experts:
- John Durocher, salesforce.com’s EVP of Customers for Life
- Tom Engelhardt, Lawley Insurance‘s Salesforce Solution Architect
- Micaiah Filkins, Force by Design‘s President and Co-founder
And we’re pumped to share what they had to say about getting your team started with the technology.
You can check out the full Q&A in our free eBook, “Getting Started with Salesforce: What NOT to Do.” Or, take a look at the sample below.
1. When should we start training?
Tom says: “It’s about setting expectations beforehand and not playing catch-up. We knew that Salesforce was coming for a while, so we did three months of training coming on to it. We did training in our sandbox before we even went into production, and our team knew the three things we wanted them to focus on.”
2. Who should be involved on the training end?
John says: “Make sure your team has the right skills, or you have the right team to execute. So, do you have the folks who understand the business married to the folks who will be implementing Salesforce?”
3. What should training focus on?
John says: “Training should not just be about the technology. Training should also include a day in the life.”
In fact, he recently led a Salesforce implementation at one company, where he says: “The training was: ‘Here are the things we want you to try and do from a business perspective.’ We didn’t train them on the application; we designed it intuitively enough that we didn’t have to train them from a technological standpoint.”
4. What should I assume in terms of teaching content?
Tom says: “Don’t assume too much. Don’t assume obviously that your users have the same intimacy with all of the moving parts as you do. They might not know why certain things are required or what a field even means. Before you introduce some field or functionality, obviously communicate it well in advance and make sure you set some expectations.”
5. We just invested tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in Salesforce – do we really need to invest more time and money in training?
Micaiah says: “All investment in training will be returned to you tenfold. If you do need to look at lowering your investment in the implementation, do it carefully – it should not come from the training budget.”
And here’s how he proposes you do that:
“Take yourselves internally through a rationalization exercise. Think of requirements in terms of priority…
• High: things that have a high business impact, achievable time frame and cost.
- You might say: ‘This is going to have real-world impact in my business.’
• Medium: things that we think are going to have good impact on the business.
- You might say: ‘It’s not going to make us more money, but it might save us some money.’
• Low: things that would be great, but you can’t legitimately justify.
- You might say: ‘That would be cool if the grass were greener.’ “
6. How should training be formatted?
John says: “Half-day classroom sessions are probably not a great learning path for adults. You can do some classroom training, but be sure to mix it up with hands-on activities and videos. And always make sure to follow up once the training is complete.”
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Find out what else these experts have to say in the free eBook, “Getting Started with Salesforce: What NOT to Do!”
