Salesforce offers a wide range of powerful tools and solutions designed to enhance sales and marketing processes and make them more effortless than ever. However, without the knowledge of how to properly utilise them, you won’t be able to take advantage of their full potential.
The CRM service provided by Salesforce is divided into several areas: Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and IoT. Even though all of the solutions are developed with the user in mind, there is still a lot to learn about when you decide to use a remarkable technology like Salesforce.
One of the main reasons businesses are hesitant to adopt new technology is the lack of basic training on how to use it. You don't want to spend money on a product just to discover that your team doesn’t have the means to use the platform correctly. This is why training should be required whenever you implement a complex tool.
Why?
It’s important to remember that just like having a top set of kitchen knives doesn’t make you a world-class chef, acquiring a powerful product like Salesforce doesn’t automatically make you a specialist. By providing training on how to use these tools and making sure that all current and potential users are familiar with their features, you will ensure that your business is getting the most out of your Salesforce licence. And the advantages of that are plenty.
Return On Investment
Since you pay licencing and subscription costs, it's critical that all of your team members understand how to use its capabilities. In the end, that’s what will make the investment worth it. Using Salesforce correctly improves your chances of earning monetary and non-monetary returns. Using the platform's features will allow teams to execute work more efficiently, which as a result, can lead to an increase in the company's profits.
Increased Client Satisfaction
Ensuring your customers have the most excellent experience is a critical component of using Salesforce. The solutions aim to help you strengthen your customer interactions by streamlining operations and boosting communication. Educating your team on how to use Salesforce can also help customer service representatives deliver more professional advice when responding to enquiries. Therefore, providing these skill-building opportunities to team members can help your business flourish in the long run through customer loyalty.
Boosting Productivity
If your team is only using some of the features, it’s an indicator that you have room to learn more about the software and improve operations in other areas. In-depth training can enable departments to understand how to use the right tools specifically for their roles and to inquire about any components that are unknown to them. As a result, your company's processes can become more seamless and efficient, which will lead to an overall improvement in productivity.
Staying Up To Date
If your team has been using Salesforce for a long time, staying up to date with the platform’s new features and refreshing knowledge of its key components is crucial. Salesforce releases software updates on a regular basis, which often offers more and better ways of utilising each product. If your team stays behind, it will mean a regress to your business.
How?
Now that you have the reasons why Salesforce training is beneficial for you, let’s move on to the ‘how’ of it. There are various ways you can ensure your team is trained in best practices when it comes to the perfect way to utilise Salesforce products. Here are some of the most popular ones.
Trailblazer Bootcamps
Salesforce describes Trailblazer Bootcamps as ‘an immersive, in-person learning experience designed to help Trailblazers learn in-demand, role-based skills and earn Salesforce Certifications’. These learning offsites consist of a set of various paths (or trails, if you will) that have all the necessary information on each and every tool.
They were designed to make the Salesforce Certification process more straightforward, but that doesn’t mean your team can’t use them, even if you’re not planning on getting certified. These Trailblazers have Salesforce Certified Instructors that will help your team members get acquainted with all the features and gain insight into the whole Salesforce environment. They also come in handy when you need to know about any recent product changes and updates.
Certified Instructor
Being taught by a certified instructor is not only possible via Trailblazer Bootcamp. There are independent instructors that offer in-person or online seminars that are the perfect way to educate your team on how to utilise Salesforce properly. This may be especially useful if your business is entirely new to the Salesforce system and you wish to learn more about the various tools and functions this platform provides (including the implementation process).
A qualified instructor can support your business through every step, which will help ensure that your team is more confident in utilising all of Salesforce's capabilities and learning about new features and functions based on any recent updates.
Internal Training
Salesforce offers detailed information on their products on Trailblazers and on their blog site, but they also offer instructions within their own products, all of which can be a valuable training resource for your team. If you want to provide the seminars but don’t have the budget to pay the private instructor, it’s possible to design your own training program by using the resources provided by Salesforce.
The most optimal way to approach this is to ask the team members that will be using the tool first what they would like to learn about the most and which aspects they are most interested in learning. That way, you won’t waste any time focusing on unnecessary areas; instead, you can create your own training manuals based on their feedback. It’s recommended that the person providing these seminars is the same person assigned the Salesforce Administrator role in your company.
Who?
Since each team will use a specific area of the tool and sometimes even separate tools, it’s vital to ensure that your teams receive role-based training. This way, each department can devote time to learning more about its specific responsibilities and not spend unnecessary time learning things they won’t actually utilise in the future. And which teams exactly should receive such training?
Sales Team - training focused on sales funnel management
Customer Support Team - training focused on addressing consumer inquiries
Marketing Team - training focused on tracking and optimising marketing ROI
Now that you know the whys, the hows, and the whos, all that’s left is choosing the right way for your business to learn about the Salesforce products you are currently using or planning to implement. For support, reach out to our Waeg experts today.
than happy to have a chat with you!
Wiktoria Kaglik, Copywriter @Waeg, an IBM Company
