5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Salesforce.com User Adoption

February 4, 2010

One of the struggles at expansion stage companies when it comes to their salesforce implementations is user adoption. And as I have mentioned many times before, user adoption is the key to a successful implementation. Here are 5 easy steps you can take to improve user adoption. 

1. Clean up the page layouts – Go through the page layouts for the most commonly used objects in salesforce.com. Typically leads, accounts, opportunities, and contacts. Remove any irrelevant fields from the page layout, and group the remaining fields into collapsible sections where it makes sense. Reducing the clutter on the page layouts can go a long way in making your end users lives easier.

2. Clean up the views – If your end users use views to manage their leads, activities, accounts and opportunities keep the views pick list free of clutter. Figure out what the few key views are for each object that all end users need to have and set them. Then restrict end users from being able to create and edit public views. This can be done in the profile configuration. 

3. Implement key activity views – While salesforce.com provides a number of useful canned views, there are 2 activity views that I use at all of our portfolio companies that make all of my end users lives easier. a. My Activities today and overdueb. My Activities this week and overdueThese seem obvious, but they don’t come canned, and most salesforce administrators don’t think to set them up. The view parameters should be pretty easy to figure, but please post a comment below if you need any help with that. 4. Get end user feedback – In almost any salesforce implementation there are probably a few small tweaks that would take an Admin seconds to make, but would make the end users lives much, much easier. Getting end user feedback and quickly reacting when you hear small changes that can have a big impact not only makes the end users lives easier, but it can also make them feel like active contributors to the implementation.

5. Implement console – Salesforce administration can often involve complicated tasks, but the console is probably one of the easiest to implement, and also one of the most valuable features salesforce.com offers. While mainly recommended for customer support case management, it is also a great tool that sales people can use to manage their activities, leads, and opportunities. If you don’t know what the console is download the user guide and try it out.
You can also go to successforce.com for many other great tips and ideas to increase your user adoption.

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.