Successfully rolling out Salesforce Quote-to-Cash in your organization is only the beginning of your implementation journey. Although you have been sold on the potential of Quote-to-Cash to transform your organization digitally, you still need to convince others they should buy into this vision and make significant changes to their workflows and processes to accommodate change. Unfortunately, achieving successful adoption of new technology by end users is often challenging for organizations. A 2016 study by the firm Forrester Research found that 38% of businesses report encountering problems implementing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology as a result of slow user adoption and challenges with organizational change.

In a prior post in our digital transformation blog series, we discussed the power and potential of Salesforce Quote-to-Cash to drive digital transformation by improving and refining an organization’s sales strategies, enhancing the customer experience, and eliminating inefficiencies. In this blog post, we will chronicle how to achieve strong end-user adoption, which is essential to long-term success with Quote-to-Cash. Let’s explore six best-practices approaches for maximizing end user adoption for your Salesforce Quote-to-Cash platform:

1.Create a seamless, intuitive user experience: Managing the sales lifecycle and customer relationships is a tough balancing act for any employee. When push comes to shove, employees inevitably choose to serve customers first and master new technology second. Thus, you want to do everything you can to make Quote-to-Cash seamless and intuitive to use. In customizing your user interface, you want to eliminate pain points such as repetitive data entry, unnecessary and redundant fields and tabs, toggling from one screen to another, and manual data analysis steps. You also want to invest in proper data quality-control checks to demonstrate to users that Quote-to-Cash will not allow sloppy, incomplete data to slip through, which will, over time, compromise the quality of the business intelligence provided by Quote-to-Cash.

2. Weed out workaround opportunities: Employees who are perfectly happy with their existing workflows will have relatively little drive and incentive to learn Quote-to-Cash. Consequently, they will tend to maintain their status-quo workflows for as long as possible. To overcome these challenges, it’s important that you weed out opportunities for employees to continue to use workarounds. You want to disable, deactivate, and reroute as many legacy systems as possible to Quote-to-Cash, which will force reluctant employees onto the new system.

3. Offer relevant, hands-on training: Employees don’t tend to respond well to generic Quote-to-Cash training because they don’t see how the system is applicable and relevant to their daily work. That’s why you want to combat this with situational, hands-on training focused on employees’ day-to-day workflows. The more effectively you can solve employees’ specific pain points, the more value they’ll see in adopting Quote-to-Cash workflows.

4. Show employees how to track their own KPIs: Quote-to-Cash comes preloaded with user-friendly dashboards that serve up KPIs and other business insights. Employees won’t necessarily care about how the organization itself is performing, but they will care about how they are personally doing. Thus, you want to focus on training employees in how to monitor their Quote-to-Cash KPIs. They will love being able to track how they’re doing in real time, and comparing their performance to their peers in areas like closing deals and cross-selling. Ultimately, these KPI tracking abilities will convince even skeptics that there’s value in migrating to Quote-to-Cash.

5. Create expectations around Quote-to-Cash usage: Quote-to-Cash shouldn’t be optional, and there are many ways you can enforce this culture shift. First, senior management should be modeling the use of Quote-to-Cash as part of their own routine work. Second, all managers should be living by the motto: “If it’s not in Quote-to-Cash, it doesn’t exist.” Third, Quote-to-Cash should be part of employees’ performance reviews; supervisors should evaluate employees in terms of their ability to master the Quote-to-Cash system, as well as their ability to improve their productivity and performance using Quote-to-Cash.

6. Appoint Quote-to-Cash champions and evangelists: Quote-to-Cash champions and evangelists are early adopters of technology who will master the Quote-to-Cash platform and then promote and facilitate its adoption among peers. You want champions and evangelists on every department and team across all levels of your organization. They will help anticipate road bumps, identify pain points, and offer creative, out-of-the-box solutions for resolving challenges.

Achieving and sustaining strong end-user adoption rates is challenging for any major new technology initiative. That’s why you also should consider the services of a highly experienced Quote-to-Cash implementation partner like Simplus—an issue we discussed at length in the previous blog post of our digital transformation series. Simplus’ implementation experts are highly trained in more than just how to expertly guide you in rolling out your Quote-to-Cash system; we’ll also help you turbocharge your user adoption efforts.

Maximizing end-user adoption requires focus and dedication. The process starts with creating user-friendly, engaging experiences on your Quote-to-Cash platform, and weeding out opportunities for employees to develop workarounds to Quote-to-Cash. To maximize user adoption, you also want to offer relevant hands-on training, show employees how to track personal KPIs in the system, create a culture of expectations for Quote-to-Cash usage, and appoint champions and evangelists of the platform.

In the final blog post in our digital transformation blog series, we’re going to explore how you can effectively measure the return on your Salesforce Quote-to-Cash investment, and quickly prove out the value of the platform to your C-suite and other stakeholders.