Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

Salesforce CRM Getting Started Guide3. What’s in it for me – It’s important to focus on how Salesforce CRM will benefit your users’ work lives: lessadministrative work, easier reporting, a clear view of their funnel, and easy forecasting.4. Hands-on training with real-life scenarios and data – Providing hands-on training and taking the time toclean your data before training will get you these benefits:• For your users – It makes the training session more “real.” Seeing their actual data and walking throughreal-life scenarios will give them a great idea of daily life with Salesforce CRM.• For you – It gives you an opportunity to get real-time feedback and further clean the data, if necessary.5. If it’s not in Salesforce CRM it doesn’t exist – Take this position when training your users (as harsh as it maysound). This is where it’s helpful to have an executive sponsor deliver this section to stress its importance.6. How users will be measured – Having a clear set of metrics in place gives users an idea of how they will bemeasured: for example, they need to review and make all changes to their data by x date, the sales manager(s)need to be able to view their funnel in the application by x date or all pipeline reports will be pulled from theapplication by x date. This is another section best delivered by the executive sponsor.7. Contests and incentives – Your users will be more motivated if you kick things off with a contest andincentives. Consider creating a contest such as 1st user to create 15 new Accounts in Salesforce CRM wins a$500 prize or 1st user to generate a pipeline report out of Salesforce CRM wins an iPod. Money is usually thebest motivator for sales users, but other prizes like iPods or iPhones work well too. You can even create a leaderboard in the application to generate some healthy competition.8. Q&A – Definitely leave time in your session for question and answers. Although this step seems basic, it’s veryimportant to make your users feel that you have time to answer their questions and get feedback.9. Takeaways – Create a tip sheet with the top things you want your users to take away from the training:terminology, new process flow, and step-by-step instructions for creating an Opportunity. Bonus points if youlaminate the tip sheet so users can easily post the list next to their computers. See “10 Tips for a Successful Training Plan” and take advantage of the following sample trainingtemplate: Salesforce Training Session.Go liveNow that your users are trained, you’re ready to flip the switch and go live. Send an email to the companycongratulating everyone on the project team, as well as the users who attended the training. Include theone-page training guide, if you created one. Remind everyone that Salesforce CRM is the system of recordfrom this point forward, make yourself available for questions, and provide follow-up training if necessary.Once Salesforce CRM is live, you’ll want to make sure you set up the application to attract usage. The loginrate is important, but it doesn’t really show whether users are using the application to its fullest potential.Here are some questions to ask:• Are users consistently using the tools provided to them?• Are users sporadic?• Do you notice a spike in use after training that then falls dramatically 3–4 weeks later?• Are your users showing “quantity” activities (i.e., number of Opportunities) as well as “quality” activities(i.e., pipeline velocity)?A great resource for tracking all these metrics is the Adoption Dashboard. It’s available for free and canhelp determine what you want to measure when it comes to adoption. For more information, see step 5:Make Salesforce CRM a Success.Summary and checklist: ready, set, goCongratulations. Salesforce CRM is now ready for prime time! At this point, you know how to:Progress Checklist Add usersGUIDE 16