OVERCOMING BARRIERS
Barriers to
Salesforce ®
User Adoption:
HOW TO OVERCOME THEM
BY: SHANNON FLAHERTY
THE FURY GROUP
Shannon Flaherty
Shannon Flaherty has spent the last
20 years developing sales processes
to drive strategic growth in the small
to medium business space with
some of the world's most influential
companies. In his current role as
Fury Group Director of Training,
Shannon is bringing this knowledge
and experience to the masses so as to
enable companies to empower users
with knowledge and efficiency.
BUSINESSES ACROSS all industries
share a number of common elements.
Companies are going to have employees
completing tasks, a need to track how
those tasks are being completed, and
(ideally) some way to make sure that
everything is happening on time and
efficiently.
This is where Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) programs come into
play. These programs are meant to assist
with workflow from start to finish across
all departments. They help organize your
internal organization so that you can
stay on top of everything that needs to
get done, from management of accounts,
contacts, opportunities, and scheduling to
invoicing and productivity.
The benefits of CRMs are numerous
and the downsides are comparatively
few. The first, and probably most glaring,
benefit of these systems is the time
that will be saved. By becoming efficient
and combining everything into a single,
convenient dashboard, users know what
they need to do each day and don’t have to
search around for the right program to do
it. They log in, review their day, and get to
work.
Ironically enough, the main barrier to
the adoption of CRMs in most businesses
is the very people they are designed to
assist: the end-user employees. After all,
it’s one thing for the CEO of a company to
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implement a CRM and tell everyone to use
it, but it’s a whole different thing for the
users to actual buy in and get going on it.
Encouraging User Adoption
User adoption is the key to
implementing a CRM and making it work
for your organization. So how do we
handle and overcome the issue of user
adoption? First, by understanding why
users aren’t adopting the CRM in the first
place and then finding individual solutions
to each problem.
One of the largest fears faced by
the majority of mankind is fear of the
unknown. That fear, of the unknown and
unfamiliar, presents the largest barrier
to user adoption in Salesforce® (and
almost any business system). People
have their systems in place. In the past,
those may have been an extensive series
of sticky notes where employees kept
every task they had to complete. Now,
perhaps they have a combination of online
programs and calendars combined with
company systems. The issue is, no matter
how complex, once people get used to
something, they loathe to change it.
It is no surprise that to get a group of users
to overcome their unfamiliarity with a new
system you must assist them in becoming
familiar with it. This can be done through a
combination of training and day-to-day use,
but it also pays to encourage your users
to try new things. There is no single right