4 Steps to Successfully Roll Out Salesforce (Part 3)

You put all of the hard work into designing and building a Salesforce platform, but quite often rolling out Salesforce is the area where budgets get cut. This has significant consequences as not planning a good roll out strategy can have a significant impact on the adoption of the Salesforce System by your end-users. It’s not just about training, it’s about quality testing, running a great Salesforce Demo, selling Salesforce to stakeholders, and comprehensively training end-users.

Join us over the next four weeks as we share tips from Heather’s book, ‘How to be a Super Salesforce Consultant’ that will help you to to set up your Salesforce users for success with these key steps:

• Part 1 – Quality Testing
• Part 2 – Running a Great Demo
• Part 3 – Selling Salesforce 
• Part 4 – Training End-Users

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The consultant says, ‘Why should I use Salesforce?’

As a consultant, do you know how to sell Salesforce to your users?

Learn about some simple sales techniques to enthuse your users. I will talk through different motivational strategies and how to get people motivated to use Salesforce. There are two main approaches to getting people on board. The first is the typical ‘sales’ methodology of looking at users’ pain points and how you can solve them, and the second is a motivational strategy that aligns with the organisational culture. I would also recommend that you check out Chapter T on learning styles to give you a third element to your ‘sales’ strategy.

Motivating people to use Salesforce is a key ingredient of your change management and BA principles and it hinges on sales skills. When you introduce Salesforce into a company, the staff need to buy into the CRM to result in good user adoption. Salesforce may have been sold to the executive sponsor, but how do you now sell it to the rest of the employees in the organisation? As a Salesforce consultant, your job is to sell Salesforce to stakeholders throughout the project life cycle, from BA to training, to get them engaged and excited about using it. If the word ‘selling’ makes you feel uncomfortable, you can reframe it as ‘How do I make people happy by solving their pain points?’ as ultimately that’s what you’re doing.

What can go wrong?

The reality is, not everyone will understand what Salesforce can do for them, especially if they have never seen or heard about it before. The introduction of new technology can trigger different immediate reactions in your stakeholders. For some people it will be grief, anger, fear, denial, while for others it can be excitement and eagerness to learn.

If you have several stakeholders that are clearly unsure or reserved about Salesforce, which inevitably there will be, you need to move them to a place of excitement. Without a strategy to motivate people and get their buy-­ in, there will be low user adoption of the system. Signs to watch out for are people not showing up for workshops, managers not being engaged, people not preparing necessary information or speaking negatively in workshops.

How to get it right?

Where you have unenthusiastic users, you need to work your magic and turn this around by building a connection with people. You might need to do this through a one-­ to-­ one conversation with them as opposed to a group workshop in order to have a frank discussion. To move people towards a place of excitement you need to elicit emotional motivations in them. In your BA process you will have uncovered how Salesforce CRM will help them to solve their problems, pain points or frustrations. These emotional motivators can be push factors, where people are trying to move away from pain, or they could be pull factors, where they want to experience a better version of the world.

Pain and Solution Narrative

You want to capture and present a ‘pain and solution’ narrative, and then re-­ emphasise this throughout all your communication in workshops and conversations during the whole of the project life cycle, to keep people enthused and engaged. For example, when facilitating a workshop and presenting technical scenarios, you can re-­ emphasise the pain points but also propose the solution:

• ‘If we introduce this automated email then it will reduce administration for you.’
• ‘If we introduce a self-­ service portal it will help reduce customer frustration.’

Below I have listed some common examples of pain points that you might discover. Some of these should be evident to you from the business case document that has been compiled, but there can be multiple layers of pain points and what I would call a negative impact on teams and individuals. Don’t be afraid to ask the deeper question: ‘How does this issue impact you personally?’ It’s valuable to elicit the ‘personal’ issues beyond the business issues to really connect with your audience and get their buy-­ in.

For example, you might have a manager who isn’t sleeping at night or can’t switch off on holiday with their family as they don’t have visibility about how their team is performing. Or someone who is working overtime at nights to compile data for reports for quarterly management meetings. Or a parent who isn’t getting home on time due to the amount of admin they have to do. It’s recognising and solving these personal problems that helps to motivate people, more so than the business making more profit or reducing costs. As I have mentioned a few times, working as a Salesforce consultant is about making people happy.

Deciding on the motivational strategies you will apply to engage people in Salesforce requires a considered approach based on:

• The business goals and motivations
• The organisational culture
• Individual factors:
• Personality types
• Emotional states
• Learning styles

Below is a mix of strategies for motivating people based on different emotional states. The approach you take will depend on what emotional state(s) the stakeholder is in and the organisational culture, so you will need to present these motivational strategies to the executive sponsor and/or CoE and ask them which they would prefer to adopt for their company and team members. Don’t make this decision yourself.

By the end of this blog, you should be able to embed softer sales techniques within your presentation style that will enable you to sell Salesforce to end users without you feeling like a hard-­ nosed salesperson. It’s about discovering and then communicating how the product will benefit users, which ultimately makes you and your customers happier. If you utilise this narrative in your conversations, then selling the product will feel authentic for you.

How to Communicate with different types of Stakeholders

When delivering the script, you need to have an understanding of how to communicate with and engage stakeholders with different learning styles, as people will see and hear things differently. There are four main learning styles, and individuals typically have a primary and secondary learning style. We will explore learning styles in more depth in Chapter T, but for now, the different learning styles are:

• Kinaesthetic: these learners like to feel how something works and experience how it will meet their needs. They often like to ‘have a go’.
• Visual: these learners like to see what the thing they’re learning about looks like and how it aligns with their needs, brand and content.
• Read/Write: these learners will want to know the details of the solution and service provider. You should include information about the scale of Salesforce, evidence of ROI and so on within your demo to support your narrative.
• Auditory: these learners like to hear stories similar to their own. You should reference successful case studies in similar projects or industries to back up your script.

When you are running a demo, you are effectively selling a solution to people, so check out some additional tips of how to engage your audience in Chapter S of ‘How to be a Super Salesforce Consultant’ book.

Technical Setup

In regards to the technical components of a demo, you want to keep it simple, to the point and focused on the primary features. You don’t want to overwhelm or distract listeners. When preparing the technical elements of your demo, you should:

• Add data that gives personalised touches to the client –­ eg accounts or products that relate to their story
• Create records and data throughout to tell the customer story
• Remove any fields/related lists that are not relevant to the demo
• Create a personalised app with the company logo
• Show relevant records with accurate data
• Show dashboards populated with data that show positive progress towards ROI objectives using Salesforce – eg sales performance increasing over a three-­ year period

Delivering a great Demo

You want the delivery of your demo to be smooth, structured and efficient. Practise your demo before you take it to your audience, preferably with someone who can give you feedback. You will often need to record a demo and share it with stakeholders as well, so rehearse and practise recording it. Take a presentation skills course if you are not confident with public speaking. Some top tips for your delivery include:

• Have tabs open in a browser to speed up the demo where relevant – but don’t jump through the journey
• Explain Salesforce terminology or change terminology –­ eg Kanban view/objects
• Demo how to change records and show how that will update dashboard graphs
• Show how you can create/adjust/add to records easily, eg by adding tasks
• Click through from records/list views into records to progress your story
• Show dashboards that speak to exec level
• Wrap up with the ROI

What should YOU do next?

By the end of this blog, you should have a game plan for preparing and delivering a great product demo. Creating a good demo does take time and effort but it’s worth it in terms of optimising end-­ user buy-in and adoption. If you have ready-­ prepared sales demos for each type of product you typically use, it should just mean making a few tweaks each time you deliver it. If you are preparing a demo for a newly built CRM system, then this is something you need to build into your time scales and budget.

Thank you to SharinPix for sponsoring this chapter taken from the ‘How to be a Super Salesforce Consultant’ book which is available to buy now from Amazon.

SharinPix enables pro photo usage for your users by giving you access to a business-­ oriented image toolbox and unlimited photo storage at a fixed cost. This toolbox enables you to access all the image features you’ve ever dreamed of plus various components to build the perfect user experience. This means you no longer need to leave Salesforce to edit, resize, annotate or watermark images. You can also work offline from your mobile device to snap pictures, dictate comments, scan docs and fill in offline forms based on a PDF.

If you love this content, you can also learn more and develop your skills by joining her Consultancy Skills Course. To find out more about this course, visit our course training page and get your info pack.