Amee Cooper, Director of Change Management & Training at VMware, was one of the speakers during the breakout session titled, Go for Growth: How to Transform Your Salesforce Training Culture. She described VMware's Salesforce implementation and how the initial training was pretty manageable and effective - but over time, it didn't work very well and adjustments needed to be made.

WebEx wasn't enough

In the beginning, Amee was a team of one, and could send all of her communications via email and provide all of her training via WebEx. She would also provide recordings of the training sessions (something that she admits isn't very useful because nobody refers to them).

But as time went on, and VMware added new features and more staff, she noticed things were happening that weren't so great.

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 - 

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?