How to Create an Effective Salesforce Training Plan

Salesforce is not the world’s most popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform for nothing. It’s highly flexible, versatile, and scalable – three qualities that make it the go-to tool for businesses across a range of different sectors. Salesforce acts to give a detailed and holistic view of everything: collating and storing data on suppliers, partners and customers, analysing and automating business processes, and more.

Given the tremendous potential of Salesforce, mapping out a well structured training plan goes a long way. Here are five steps to creating an effective Salesforce training and onboarding program:

Set Goals According to Your Business Needs

Your Salesforce success (and by extension, your training plan) will be led by identifying and aiming to answer your business goals and objectives. Assess your most important needs and then determine how Salesforce will help achieve these. Consider questions like:

Are we targeting sales or customer acquisition?
How can we manage and use our stored data more effectively?
What reports could be beneficial to the team?
Can we improve our customer service? What automation or self-service tools can we use to do this?

Identify What Salesforce Offers to You

Once the key business objectives have been listed, you can identify which Salesforce tools and features you’d like to prioritise in training. Salesforce has just about limitless potential, and making the most of the tools that benefit you can revolutionise your systems and processes.

For this reason, partnering with a Salesforce consultancy for training and support is often encouraged. At Purus, we pride ourselves on helping teams get the absolute most out of their Salesforce investment, whether they’re looking to move over from an existing system or start from scratch.

Prepare Your Team

Adoption of a new system is determined in part by good organisation. Before undertaking the training itself, ensure your team understands the purpose behind Salesforce and the capabilities the platform affords. Clearly explain what the training plan looks like, how long it is expected to take, and which metrics will be used to measure success.

It is worth noting that optimisation of the tools and features may take a little time. Because of its highly versatile nature, Salesforce can be adapted to cater specifically to virtually any businesses – but team members shouldn’t be expected to reach this level of understanding overnight.

Start the Training, Track the Progress

With a training plan in place that works towards achievable business goals, now is the time to onboard the team. This will look different from business to business, but the main aim will be to make sure that your team is proficient, comfortable and up-to-date with the latest Salesforce technology and tools.

Although the easiest way to track team training is to work with a Salesforce partner like Purus, you can also track Salesforce usage and progress by looking at:

Daily login rates and times
Number of activities and posts created
Uptake of the Salesforce internal messaging system

Ask the Team for Feedback

As with anything involving multiple people and teams, communication is crucial. Actively ask the team for their feedback on the training, the system itself, and ways to optimise any processes. Find out if there is something helping one team that may be hindering another. Understand which aspects of Salesforce team members may still be struggling with. By communicating clearly and stressing the importance of feedback, you will be able to pinpoint and resolve any problem areas.

Some Bonus Training Tips:

In order to get the best out of Salesforce from the beginning, it may be beneficial to:

Create a checklist to keep track of staff training (and the completion thereof).
Create a Salesforce manual to onboard new employees at later dates.
Because Salesforce prioritises automation, make sure the team works towards the strengths of the platform. Automating any manual tasks from early on can be a monumental time-saver.

Setting Up Salesforce for Your Business

If you are interested in implementing Salesforce in your business, we at Purus would love to help. Reach out to us with any questions or requirements and we will assist you further.

Our Salesforce consulting services include: