How to Establish Salesforce Champions 

Find out how to identify and upskill Salesforce Champions in your Salesforce Team in this weeks blog. Managing Salesforce is a team effort which involves participation from senior management, to the Salesforce technical team to the Salesforce champions within the departments. Over the next four weeks we are going to walk you through how to set up a Salesforce team for success so you Salesforce org is governed and managed effectively. 

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Part 1 – How to establish a Salesforce Center of Excellence
Part 2 – How to hire a Salesforce Team
Part 3 – How to identify and upskill Salesforce Champions
Part 4 – How to set up a Salesforce Team with Roles and Responsibilities 

How to Identify and Upskill Salesforce Champions

A Salesforce Champion is going to be a representative of Salesforce within their team or department whilst also doing their existing job role.

It creates a wider Salesforce support team under a central Salesforce Admin function, as they become to the go to person for issues, ideas, and solutions with different levels of responsibility.

Within this blog we look at how you can formalise your Salesforce Champion structure to make sure you select the people with the right skills, personalities, experience, and motivation to achieve success. At the end of the day, they are going to become the internal Salesforce power team! In this circumstance you are hiring existing staff to be your champions as opposed to hiring new staff, and you want to follow a process, not just select people on the cuff, as otherwise it can all go wrong. 

Why Have Salesforce Champions?

It’s impossible for a central in-house Salesforce admin team to be the eyes and ears in all departments using Salesforce, so it’s important to spread the love a bit.

Champions provide cover when the central Salesforce admins are off on holiday or sick.

Champions can support end users to use the system properly everyday as they have someone in their department who understands how they work and how they should use it specific to their job.

Roles and Responsibilities of a Champion

A Champion can have different levels of responsibilities from facilitating meetings to becoming a delegated admin. The role can offer progression where they start doing a few things and then they get more responsibilities as they train up in Salesforce Administration and Business Analyst Skills. 
Responsibilities can include:

• Facilitating team discussions to identify current challenges or improvements desired. by Salesforce users with a view to trying to resolve them.
• Providing onboarding training new team members on how to use Salesforce. 
• Analysing user adoption and troubleshooting issues.
• Managing duplicates and data integrity. 
• Undertaking business analysis workshops and mapping out processes with the team.
• Working with the managers to produce a business case for new requirements.
• Making changes to the Salesforce system to meet user’s needs.
• Updating training resources if the system is updated.

How to Select Salesforce Champions

I would highly recommend you conduct an interview process for Champions. It can be easy to just pick the most enthusiastic person in the room, but they might not have the right skills. It can also be difficult to just nominate someone, as they might not be interested in doing it. The champion doesn’t have to be senior in experience, but they have to want to do the role.

How are going to motivate someone to apply for the role who has the relevant enthusiasm and skills? Can you offer additional benefits e.g. an increase in salary, promotional opportunity, training etc.

You would ideally want to advertise the opportunity amongst the team and then go through a shortlisting and interview process. Ultimately you would be looking for.

• Skills – If they have some Salesforce admin experience already then that’s great, but alternatively you would be looking for someone that is good and quick at learning technology and enjoys improving businesses processes to produce better outcomes for the team and customer. 
• Personality – Typically you are looking for a good listener, questioner, problem solver and fixer. 
• Experience – Ideally, they would have had experience with Salesforce and CRMs before, but this isn’t essential, just a nice to have. They also would have had experience of training individuals. 
• Motivation – Individuals are often motivated by reward, so the opportunity to upskill, earn more, get a promotion will appeal.

How to Upskill Champions

It depends on the roles and responsibilities you want a champion to have.

If you want them to understand Salesforce but not be an actual administrator, you could get them to complete the Salesforce Associate Certification with relevant trailheads to do.  

If you want them to be delegated Salesforce Administrator, then you would encourage them to complete the Salesforce Admin Certification. The training they undertake to do this should suit their learning style, so if they prefer live training, they might want to do the Supermums Authorised Salesforce Admin Course. If they are happy reading things, they may just want to do trails. 

If you want them to produce business cases and conduct business analysis, then you might want to complete the Business Analysis Certification. You can get them skilled up in the Supermums Consultancy Skills Course or learning Business Analysis in another way.

How to Manage Champions

Champions are part of the Governance Structure – As a representative for their team and department they need to collate issues and business priorities and present this back to the Salesforce team and COE. They shouldn’t be part of COE meetings directly, but they should have regular meetings with the in-house Salesforce team to report back and discuss progress.

It’s important to give them the opportunity to learn and discuss Salesforce learning, products, problems, and issues with their peers and to feel like a team rather than work in isolation. It can be useful to arrange informal Salesforce Lunches to get your champions together to discuss certifications, new features, and tools. You could invite them to user group meet ups.

There will need to an element of Performance Management within this role as there are job responsibilities and so there needs to be a feedback loop with their direct line manager. There should be performance objectives, KPIs and learning opportunities all built into the role.

An internal Salesforce Support Desk can co-ordinate all the different cases amongst Champions especially if they have a delegated admin role. They can respond and update cases that are relevant for their team and department.

A Communication and File Sharing Platform Is valuable to keep conversations and the lines of communication open to discuss any of the above factors in between meetings. When you all work in different departments it can be easy to get siloed. Having a mutual platform for communication and sharing files related to Salesforce work is imperative to teamwork.
At the end of this chapter, I hope you have the right information to help identify suitable champions and put in place a framework to support their new roles that bridge the Salesforce team and users within their departments.  

This series of content is taken from extracts of the new and upcoming book, “How to be a Super Salesforce Consultant – The A to Z Guide of How to lead a Salesforce Project”

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