Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re starting off our new format with an Interview episode with D’An Ervin, Senior Salesforce Admin at Seven Results and Dreamforce 2017 speaker, to talk about adoption.
Join us as D’An Ervin shares her experience as a solo Admin rolling out features to a global team and why it all starts with understanding things from your users’ perspective.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with D’An Ervin.
Why adoption is a trust exercise.
D’An has spoken quite a bit about adoption at recent Dreamforce events. For her, “It’s a trust exercise: several people depend on you in order to their job,” and because of that, “being consistent really does facilitate that trust.”
How do you build that trust? For D’An it’s about setting clear expectations. Tell them exactly what’s going to happen, and then make sure that you follow through on what you say. This process doesn’t just happen once at the beginning of a rollout but is instead a continual process as you add new things and train your team. As you might imagine, this means that one of the most important elements of any rollout is good communication.
Keeping communications organized.
In a rollout, it can be a real challenge simply making sure that everyone is on Chatter. D’An likes to set up communication guidelines at the beginning of the process. This helps to give people the lay of the land so they know exactly where to go for what, whether that’s to communicate key details or find important information. As D’An puts it, “It’s just like when we moved from phone calls to email or text.
The important thing is to get all of your information centralized. “As a solo Admin,” D’An says, “if you’re getting hit from different points of contact it’s really hard to prioritize when you’re taking care of so many other tasks.” You need to know where to start working through things each day, and your team needs to know where to go to get your attention.
An accidental adoption strategist.
Just like the accidental Admins we talk to every week on the show, D’An calls herself an accidental adoption strategist. “It came from me being a user first and understanding the pain points I was having when a new process was put in place,” she says. “Change is difficult for everyone, and when you don’t feel supported, it’s really hard to move forward with that change and adapt to it.”
After D’An’s first rollout, she realized the biggest thing she needed to improve was how she collected feedback. In her Dreamforce talk, she focused on structured feedback, specifically. Beyond that, it’s a good idea to make a focus group and try out your rollout before you push it to everyone.
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