From Salesforce Admin to Consultant – Part 3 – How to increase adoption of Salesforce users with Change Management Skills 

By Jennifer Wood

|
September 5, 2022
|
8 min read

Are you looking for the next step after gaining your Salesforce Administrator certification? YES! Join us for our 6 part series where we teach you the key skills to become a No1 Salesforce Consultant.

In this week’s podcast and blog, we’re talking about implementing Change Management Skills throughout the life cycle of a project to engage, enthuse and empower your users to achieve high user adoption.. This is an essential skill for any Salesforce professional if you want to properly support stakeholders by understanding their needs and implementing a communication strategy to support it. It’s one of the key ‘soft’ skills to master once you have completed your Salesforce Admin Cert to help acquire the consultancy skills that every Salesforce professional should master. 

This article is one of a 6 Part Series where we teach you the key skills to become a No1 Salesforce Consultant. Salesforce professionals who master this suite of skills are cream of the crop as they do things professionally and this leads to fantastic project outcomes. With the right skills and training you can advance your Salesforce Career from learning the basics of being Salesforce Admin to becoming a Salesforce Consultant. During this series we cover: 

  • How to gather requirements professionally with Business Analysis Skills (Part 1)
  • How to prioritise requirements using Agile Project Management (Part 2)
  • How to increase adoption of Salesforce Users with Change Management Skills (Part 3)
  • How to empower Salesforce users with Coaching Skills (Part 4) 
  • How to manage Salesforce changes with Dev Ops (Part 5)
  • How to pitch yourself for a Salesforce Consultant Job Role (Part 6) 

Read on to find out more what is change management, why is change management important, what is the value of change management and what does change management entail. 

 

If you are looking to upskill your skills and confidence in this area, you can also check out our Change Management training courses below. 

What is Change Management?

Here are the four key principles:

  1. Understanding the organisational need, culture, readiness – Understanding the organisational need, business need and what approach is appropriate for the organisational culture and history?
  2. Understanding different stakeholder personalities – Understanding who the different stakeholders are and their different personalities – learning styles – enthusiasts v blockers.
  3. Empowering people to lead change – Equipping the Exec Leader to lead change and implementing a short to long term Team e.g. Change Management Team, Salesforce Champions, Centre of Excellence
  4. Project Comms Strategy – Planning communications throughout the project – the why, what and when in at least 3 different ways to enthuse, engage and embed

Increasing Salesforce Adoption – Why is Change Management important?

If change management principles are ignored there is a probable chance that stakeholders won’t be engaged, enthused or empowered to engage with the Salesforce system. This will happen because: 

  • The business case is not clear or communicated 
  • People are not clear on why it is important and buy-in is low
  • People do not feel consulted, are frustrated or not engaged

This will lead to:

  • Input into the design being low
  • A poor technical solution
  • The Project being delayed 
  • Leading to user adoption being nil/ low 

How to Increase Salesforce Adoption – Using our Approach to Change Management

At Supermums we teach 4 pillars of Change Management to maximise the success of your salesforce project. These pillars are not linear but layered throughout the project lifecycle:

1 – ANALYSE

Understand the Rational & Readiness

2 – PLAN

Plan an Approach & gather a change management Team

3 – STRATEGY

Mobilise Leadership to execute the plan and Facilitate stakeholders

4 – CHANGE

Prepare for the roll-out & Embed changes as the norm

ANALYSE – Understand the Rational & Readiness for the Salesforce Project

This pillar leads us back to the importance of Business Analysis Skills (see PART 1 of this series) and it’s a core component of change management. Stakeholders need to understand WHY the CRM project is important. They need to know the business case and rational for doing the project. It’s also important to understand WHEN is a good time to do the project. A risk analysis needs to be undertaken to understand what the risks are so you can implement an effective risk mitigation strategy.  

PLAN – Plan an Approach & gather a change management Team for the Salesforce project 


This pillar aligns with Agile Project Management Skills (see PART 2 of this series) as you are co-ordinating a change management project plan to be delivered by a change management team. The CRM project management plan needs to dovetail with the Change Management project plan to make sure everything is aligned. The two are fundamentally different but need to be interwoven together. The focus of a change management plan is on communication. It is a stakeholder engagement strategy and details how are you going to communicate what is happening, when, by whom and why to people. This will be executed by a range of people from senior managers, HR, internal marketing, operations and governance who will make up the Change Management Team. 

STRATEGY – Mobilise Leadership to execute the plan & Facilitate stakeholders on your Salesforce project

Once the Change Management strategy has been agreed, the Executive Sponsor and Leadership team need to be mobilised with clear roles and responsibilities. The leaders will need to deliver on a communication plan to inform the business and team what is happening and why. The management team need to be aware and bought into the strategy in advance to support the execution of the plan and communication campaigns. To enthuse, engage and empower stakeholders, it will require a mix of communication methods to respond to different motivational and learning styles. 

CHANGE – Prepare for the Salesforce roll-out & Embed changes as the norm 


In anticipation of the roll-out it’s important to prepare an adoption strategy with a set of processes in place to create a carrot and stick approach for adoption. Ideally you want users to feel enthused, empowered and engaged in the process but you will also need to look at ways to embed these changes as the norm with institutional and compliance changes. Once a system is rolled out how do you embed a change management culture going forward and establish quality control to check adoption is at the expected levels to evaluate success. 

How equipped and confident are you with change management skills? 

  • Do you have presentation templates to facilitate business workshops and document the business case?
  • Do you know how to assess risk, stakeholders, organisational culture? 
  • Do you know how to deliver and manage communications with different types of stakeholders?
  • Do you have systems and tools available to facilitate change?

Understand some of the principles of change management with our FREE Coaching Skills Toolkit. 

Learn Change Management Skills Confidently at Supermums

At Supermums we offer 2 x Advanced Training Courses on Change Management Skills which offer live training, a suite of templates, recommended resources, a weekly accountability training plan, a peer network of salesforce consultants, and group / one to one mentoring to support you on your business analysis learning journey to build your confidence, expertise and knowledge. 

Coaching tools and techniques are a key complementary skill set to support communication during your change management plan. Look out for Part 4 that talks about coaching to support Salesforce projects.

Find out more below about the courses that we offer to help you achieve this:

Salesforce Consultancy Skills Course

  • 3 month course
  • Start in October or December
  • Learn how to deliver successful Salesforce Projects.
  • Includes business analysis, project management and change management skills.
  • Includes pack of BA Scripts, Documentation Templates and Consultancy Skills Toolkit
  • Prepare for your Salesforce Business Analysis, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, NPSP consultant certifications.
  • Learn flexibly with on demand material.
  • Weekly support coaching with experienced Salesforce professional, Heather Black.

Salesforce Business Analysis – Level 4 Qualification

  • 18 month programme which is free for learners and funded by the UK Apprenticeship levy
  • Delivered in partnership with Learning Curve Group and Salesforce
  • Power your performance by understanding more about the company you work for.
  • Weekly Live training and 1-2-1 mentoring to gain a university level qualification.
  • Includes training for Business Analysis, Agile Project Management and Change Management.
  • Complete 2 further Salesforce Consultancy Certifications.
  • To be eligible you have to be employed by company based in England and working in a Salesforce Role

If you are looking for your next Salesforce Job opportunity then enlist the help of the Supermums Recruitment Team.

Supermums is proudly supported by:

Share

Written By:

Jennifer Wood
Jennifer's role is to look after global Marketing, Communications, Events and all things Social Media to help spread the word of Supermums far and wide!

Subscribe To Our Weekly Top Tip Bulletin

Get Updates And Learn From The Best






By submitting this form you agree to the terms of Supermums Privacy Policy: https://supermums.org/privacy-policy/


Shopping Basket