Not all change is hard. If I decide to change my shirt, the change can happen immediately - just find a shirt I like, pay some money, and put it on. 

But sometimes change is hard. If I decide to get in shape, that decision alone won't change me. I need to consistently do the right things over an extended period of time before the change sticks - which means that I need to make a lot of right decisions everyday for a long time.

So when change requires that we consistently do the right thing for a long period of time, then it becomes hard - especially if it entails overcoming old habits. 

If you want your organization to regularly use Salesforce, you have to clear the path for them so that using Salesforce is easy.

That may require you to make the user experience more enjoyable by changing the physical layout or workflow, but it can also be done by simply providing users with better directions.

Give your users better directions

I recently read about a study that was conducted to answer a very basic question - 

If you suffer from Salesforce adoption issues, you aren't alone. We talk to a lot of organizations that struggle with getting folks to actually use Salesforce.

In a previous article, I outlined 3 reasons why people might not adopt Salesforce in your organization. In this article, I am going to do a deep dive into one of them - motivation.

Why your team members aren't motivated to use Salesforce

If your team members aren't motivated to use Salesforce, then it is probably because they receive no direct benefit from using Salesforce.

Let me give you a common scenario. Many organizations implement Salesforce so they can get better information about how their marketing and sales teams are functioning. Most of the time, this is done through dashboards - a data visualization tool that provides all sorts of great information at a glance, and typically used by managers.

There's only one problem

Photo: Ian Sane

Let me quickly paint the picture of two Salesforce training events:

Scenario 1

The attendees who arrive have never used Salesforce before. The instructor asks them to login but several haven't received their "welcome" emails. The instructor spends the first 30 minutes trying to get people set up and logged into the system.

Nobody is the least bit familiar with how Salesforce works so the instructor has to keep repeating instructions to make sure that everyone is in the right spot.

Everyone feels overwhelmed by the amount of new information and the information retention level is low.

Scenario 2

All attendees arrive at the session already having logged into Salesforce so getting everyone up and going takes just a few minutes.

The most common concern I hear when I talk to existing Salesforce customers is "lack of use"---available Salesforce licenses are just sitting around unused, even though the organization has already purchased them.

Does that sound familiar?

Did you (or someone you know) purchase Salesforce, follow the rollout guide, and do all of the recommended training sessions only to have your team avoid using it? Have you resorted to pleading, and maybe even "mandating" its use?

Letting licenses sit around unused is not only a waste of money, but it also means you're probably not getting any of the productivity gains you had hoped for when you adopted Salesfoce. It is a double hit to the gut---a big expense and no productivity gain.

So, the question is - why isn't your team using Salesforce?

In my recent eBook, "The Pragmatic Guide to Training and Onboarding Salesforce Users in Your Nonprofit," I talked about creating road map documentation to train and onboard Salesforce users. I wanted to provide some follow-up material that would go into a little bit more detail about how Admin, Super Users, or Trainers could create a documentation site that organizes road map documentation.

What can you do with a documentation site?

There are several reasons to create your own documentation site: you can easily organize content, your users can easily search for content, you can manage version control... the list goes on. But one of the most important reasons is that you can make your documentation incredibly easy to find by putting it right in Salesforce (see image below).

So I'm going to show you 7 simple steps for putting together a Salesforce documentation site, and then how to make that site available right within Salesforce.

This is a follow up article to our previous post, which basically said that if your team isn't reading the Salesforce documentation you are writing, stop wasting your time writing it. 

And that's because Salesforce documentation isn't about getting something down on paper---it is about getting information into the hands (and heads) of the people who need it. Which means that your job doesn't stop after you type your last sentence. It stops when your team is successfully using your documentation to get things done in Salesforce.

So here are some tips to make them WANT to use your documentation, and have them asking for more.

I saw this comment on a guest blog post that Jonathan wrote over at Button Click Admin:

I worked soooo hard on good roadmap directions, and people still just call me first to walk them through it. Maybe one day they’ll get sick of me saying, “Did you read the directions?” and stop calling. Maybe?

As a Salesforce Admin or Super User, you really don't have a lot of free time on your hands. If people in your organization aren't reading the documentation you are writing, then I would suggest that you stop writing it.

Yep, you heard me correctly---stop.

It's no secret that Salesforce is taking the world by storm - well over 100,000 businesses and around 18,000 nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions are using Salesforce.

But what isn't as well advertised is that the majority of organizations

I used to put on training events for SSOs (System Security Officers) that showed them how to use a complex web application. After standing by a projector for an hour, demonstrating various onscreen workflows, I remember looking out and thinking, "Nobody is going to remember a thing I'm saying in about 30 minutes."

Sure enough, over the next couple of weeks