I don’t know about you but I would love to go back to high school and change a few things!
On a recent client discovery interview, a successful Financial Advisor made the following statement about her frustration with the Salesforce Classic Interface: “There are just way too many clicks!”
I chuckled and said, “In many ways Salesforce is a lot like High School. Sadly, most Salesforce users only use Salesforce at an Elementary School level at no fault of their own.”
Most users of Salesforce must adopt what someone else has created because they were never part of the development and rollout strategy of the solution. Today, more often than not, an IT department within a company designs, configures and deploys a Salesforce solution to a Sales Group, Marketing Team, or Support Center and expects those users to adopt the platform. In many cases, users revolt and adoption comes to a very fast stand still.
If that happens, don’t give up, launch a more inclusive effort by bringing in those subject matter experts and focus on building a more friendly User Experience or User Interface known as UX/UI. And then, with all these new lessons learned, do a “re-launch” of the platform. Hopefully to a much more successful adoption outcome.
Get User Adoption Right the First Time!
Technology solutions are primarily built to support users in performing their day-to-day activities. Yes, there are many more benefits to what users log and track in the Salesforce Org but that’s all a bonus to serious adoption of the solution. Keep things simple and easy to understand for the users and never, ever, think that the technology is more important than the person. The technology-tail, should never wag the user-dog.
Talk Less, Listen More!
As an IT professional, if you’re involved in the design and rollout of the platform, interview end users and document the key things they do to be successful at their jobs. You may have grand vision for what Salesforce can do for the entire company, but don’t fall in to the trap of thinking your vision is their true need.
- Your first goal should focus on driving an adoption.
- Use the crawl, walk, run mindset.
- Don’t give them or show them more than they need!
After you’ve got them head over heals in love with how well they can do their day-to-day activities, then you can start rolling out deeper capabilities, dashboards, and comprehensive reporting.
Fewer Cliques/Clicks is Better!
Remember where they’ve come from. Most users have learned to live in email, Powerpoint and Excel spreadsheets where most tasks take only a few clicks to update a field or a change in a report. Most new Salesforce users complain about the number of clicks it takes to find, edit and save information in Salesforce, be that an Account, Opportunity, or Contact record.
- Create Views showing the most relevant fields that relate to their daily tasks.
- Teach them to use inline editing. It’s so simple and easy even a 1st grader can do it!
- Just because you may have created two hundred custom fields in an account record doesn’t mean you have to show them all to the end-user in one long, crazy page! It is overwhelming to the user.
Lightning is an amazing interface framework but don’t fall in to the trap of showing more than is really needed in the various components and related lists.
Think, Build, and Deploy with a Mobile Mindset First!
High School is when most teenagers start driving. Whether that be the family minivan, a beater pickup truck or Dad’s second BMW. Not all High School students want to drive the same kind of vehicle. As an IT professional, you may have a sweet desktop set up at work with multiple monitors; don’t think just because you work in a certain way that everyone else does as well.
Most end users, the real movers and shakers and quota achievers are now so mobilized they live and breathe in their iPad or iPhone.
