4 Steps to Successfully Roll Out Salesforce (Part 4)

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 customers ask, ‘How do I use Salesforce?’

As a consultant, do you know how to train users to maximise adoption?

Training brings together all the BA and change management principles into one pot to create the final outcome. This is often the make-or-­break point for adoption issues. Making sure you continue to sell Salesforce is key, as we covered in the last chapter, but in this chapter we’ll look at how you reinforce this through tailoring how you deliver your content to appeal to people’s different learning styles.

Delivering Salesforce training to end users isn’t just about throwing together a training manual, delivering a three-­ hour training session and hoping for the best. That approach is likely to result in issues with low adoption.

Instead, to refine and work towards a perfect training strategy, you need to take into consideration:

• People’s different learning styles
• People’s different motivations
• Different training mediums and approaches

The success of a Salesforce implementation often lies in supporting people to engage with the process and system, rather than the technical skills involved in building the system.

What can go wrong?

If you are delivering mentoring or training in just one type of learning style, it’s likely that it won’t meet the needs of some people. They just won’t get it and will struggle to learn. Additionally, if they don’t know why they are learning Salesforce and what it means for them and their job, they won’t be engaged. Explaining the business case as well as the personal motivational factors will start to grab their attention. We talked more about this in part ?? blog.

How to get it right?

It’s important to accommodate training into your budget, and to also appraise the value of training within the ROI. Often, budget can be limited, so make sure that the training budget is not squeezed to nothing as this is one of the most important areas of spend to achieve project success. We need to approach training in a way that encompasses different learning styles to motivate people and deliver digestible content in the right way.

Learning Styles and Motivation

Learning styles can be understood using the VARK/VAK model, which I briefly mentioned earlier. Under this model, there are four learning styles: visual, auditory, read/write, kinaesthetic. Can you identify your learning style? Quite often, we can be a combination, with a primary and secondary preference. Below is an example scenario that could help you work out your preferred learning style:

If you are putting together some DIY furniture, what do you like to do?

• Watch a video (auditory)
• Read the manual/instructions (read/write)
• Follow the pictures (visual)
• Just have a go without consulting anything (kinaesthetic)

You can also take a learning style test, and you could use this with people you are training to uncover their styles too. This is particularly valuable for one-­ to-­ one mentoring. In a group setting, you would want to try and appeal to all learning styles. When you are motivating people to learn, you first need to ask yourself: why are they going to listen to this?

Typically, people with different learning styles need to be motivated in different ways and you should kick off any training agenda by addressing why they are there and learning ABC – this is to grab their attention. To reach everyone, you need to cover all the following aspects:

• Visual – they want to see what it’s all about with a demo or taster video.
• Auditory – they want to know what is going to happen and when.
• Read/write – they need to know why they are doing this and what’s in it for them, with facts/figures.
• Kinaesthetic – they want to get stuck in and hear and see examples of others using it.

To get this right and tick all of the above boxes, you’ll need to think about how you are going to deliver the training content in a range of mediums. Below are some ideas:

• For read/write types, you need to prepare a training manual and Trailheads, as they prefer reading text.
• Visual types will prefer pictures, videos, live training sessions, slides.
• For auditory learners, you’ll need live training, with verbal instruction and/or videos etc.
• For kinaesthetic learners, providing user scripts to run through will help them experience the content they’re learning.

Access to Training Resources

Once you have delivered the training, you need to think about where the training resources are going to be kept so that people can continue to refer to them. You have a few options here. The basic method, and a quick and easy solution, is to set up a shared external folder in a digital filing system. You could also use folders or Knowledge Articles in Salesforce, ideally with quick links embedded around the Salesforce system to navigate people back to the training resources.

Alternatively, you could introduce an LMS (learning management system). The benefit of an LMS is that you can upload content and set a training plan for your users in an ordered fashion.  This will also provide an audit trail, showing you whether people have completed and watched the training material, meaning non-­ adopters can be flagged easily and a motivational strategy utilised.

You could use native in-­ situ training resources, setting up training tools that are already embedded in the Salesforce system and easy to find – think Trailhead Paths, My Trailhead, Learning Paths and In-­ App Guidance. You could also consider third-­ party in-­ situ training and adoption tools. These enable you embed content, such as instructions and videos, around your Salesforce org to boost digital adoption within your user communities.

How to Evaluate Success

The success of a training strategy is indicated by the end-­ user adoption analytics. Are they as expected? Ask for feedback on the training and host a follow-­ up session for reflective learners in case they have any questions. The next chapter, on user adoption, will go into more detail on this. We teach our trainees to communicate and deliver a holistic training strategy that will give the best chance of high user adoption, and to make full use of all their coaching tools and techniques.

For further reading on Salesforce training, Improved Apps have published some useful white papers on this subject. You can find these linked on the book resources page.

Just scan the QR code with your phone, or click on the image:

• Delivering Zero classroom training
• Top ten tips for driving digital transformation, usage and adoption in the current climate
• Guide: How to get employee Salesforce onboarding right first time
• Guide: How to deliver Salesforce training that sticks
• Guide: 6 steps to successful just-­ in-­ time learning in Salesforce

What should YOU do next?

By the end of this blog article, you should have a comprehensive understanding of how to create a holistic training strategy that can engage people with different learning styles and meets the needs of end users. You know to prioritise training in your allocation of time and budget, and how to measure its success by looking at user analytics.

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

Improved Apps began back in 2011, when a group of like-minded Salesforce experienced specialists saw a need for a better way of engaging users. As the workplace evolved over recent years, we all have fewer hours in the day to get tasks done and training and self-development often take a back seat in our day-to-day lives. Their mission is to prevent the daily time-wasting spent searching for content or answers and to drive the next generation of user engagement, which improves adoption, the overall experience and business value.

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.