When you are preparing a live Salesforce training event are you focused on what information you need to deliver or how your audience will use and apply that information?

"Does Salesforce.com actually work?" That is what some of your resistant users are asking themselves. They also ask questions like, "Why do I need to enter all of this information?" or "Things were working just fine - why change?"

As a Trainer and an Admin, you've been put in charge of answering these kinds of objections. The tricky part is that many of your users don't actually ask these questions out loud - most just don't sign in or update data. 

So, how can we get everybody to "dance?"

As a Salesforce Admin and Trainer you may feel that you are being asked to do the impossible: 

• Make your training engaging
• Keep it short
• Make sure you cover everything

How can you cover everything that you need your team to know, keep it engaging AND do it all in a 1-hour session?

Documentation goes by many names:

• Training materials
• Job aids
• User guides
• How-to manuals
• Checklists
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs)

And a few more. But to make things easier for me, I just call it documentation.

And it's clear to me that organizations and teams no longer need to be convinced that having better documentation is important - that debate (if it ever existed) is over.

Right now, the problem many organizations and teams face is creating documentation, and then maintaining it once it's written.

Let me ask you a question - have you ever vented to somebody (or to yourself) any of the following thoughts?

• "Getting people to cooperate with me is like pulling teeth!"
• "Nobody reads any of the training material I make."
• "I need help, but nobody is offering (or willing)."
• "I'm trying to improve things around here, but I can't get any support - nobody listens!"

At one point or another, I have said all of those to either my wife, my co-workers, or my friends during lunch.

And at different times, I would have different reasons for why I just couldn't get through to folks:

The first job I had out of college was working at my dad's medical practice. It was a temporary gig because I had a full-time offer from a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. But since I graduated in December, and the consulting job didn't start until August, I had some time to kill.

So I worked for my dad in Pasadena, CA. I remember the first day at work - I sat down at a computer, received some login credentials for NueMD, and was basically told to

In training scenarios, we do everything exactly how it's supposed to be done. But maybe it would be better if we let our learners do it wrong.

I recently moved from the Washington, D.C. area (Tysons Corner) to a city just outside of Charlott, NC.

I don't actually have cable (see here to read why), so I couldn't watch the game between Brazil and Germany. But I figured it would be like most other soccer games - 90 minutes of running around with only 1 goal to show for it.

Late last night I checked Facebook and saw this post from a friend of mine - "The grown men crying in this World Cup are breaking my heart." Grown men crying? 

I figured it was a joke, but when I checked ESPN for the score, I realized that it was not a joke (although it took me about 5 minutes to believe the final score of 7-1 was accurate). And then I began seeing all of these images of grown men (and women) crying, just like the Facebook post said.