User Adoption and a Metrics Driven Culture Come From the Top

November 25, 2009

Events like the visit to Salesforce.com on November 4th 2009 are just one of the ways we provide sales and marketing support to our portfolio companies. This week’s featured learning from the visit is:

Drive user adoption and a metrics driven culture from the top down: 

Salesforce.com repeatedly stressed the importance of this point, and the benefits they reap from practicing it. The fact is that if everybody managed themselves, we wouldn’t need to hire managers, and because managers are hired to track their employees’ performance, people care about what their managers care about. These two facts have significant implications for how businesses use dashboards, not necessarily in Salesforce.com, but any dashboards. If people don’t know what their managers are measuring them on they are less likely to meet their managers’ expectations.

What most companies do when they purchase a CRM or a sales automation system is setup dashboards to track certain sales performance metrics. One of the biggest mistakes I see expansion stage companies make is that they don’t show their reps the dashboard, and they rarely look at the dashboards themselves except at quarterly or monthly reviews (if ever). This is a huge mistake. At Salesforce.com the dashboards that have been setup to track sales performance metrics are communicated to the sales team, and the sales management team, and they are all expected to view these dashboards regularly. And they do.

At Salesforce.com it is not uncommon for a member of the sales management team, or even the CEO to email a sales rep about poor performance on an exception dashboard. Once a sales rep receives an email from the CEO they never appear on the exception dashboard again. Similarly, they have big deal alerts set up which are sent out to the entire sales management team when a deal closes above a certain dollar amount. Then a VP of sales or some other member of the sales management team can send out a congratulatory email to the rep that closed the deal. That is a huge motivator.

Setting up dashboards and big deal alerts are not break through ideas. The important thing here is that the dashboards and big deal alerts are used and sent out to the leaders of the sales team, and the leaders of the organizations in addition to sales reps and their direct managers. Putting this into practice is easy, and inevitably results in increased user adoption and a metrics driven culture (as long as your dashboards and alerts are setup to track the right things).

Check back next week for another best practice from the Salesforce.com visit.

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.