Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking with Laura Maker, Director at Cloud for Good and Dreamforce 2017 speaker, to talk about adoption.
Join us as Laura Maker shares the communication tactics she uses to help her rollouts and implementations be successful.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Maker.
Have a plan for Adoption.
For Laura, “The most important piece of advice I have is to have a plan.” Make a timeline, make sure everyone knows that schedule, and revisit it frequently. It’s easy to lose momentum once you get caught up in the details, so anything you can do to get everyone marching forward is valuable.
As others have said, adoption starts with leadership. “Your leader needs to make sure that they’re the first in line to set the example,” Laura says, which means making sure that they’re the ones who are making a move to Chatter. Even at Salesforce we sometimes struggle with getting everyone on Chatter, so keep your communications centralized, and you’ll have a strong start. In her organization, they have a Chatter group that exclusively functions as a changelog, which makes it easy for people to stay informed and asked questions.
Training is key.
Again and again, our conversation with Laura kept coming back around to the importance of training. For rollouts in general, it’s important to invest the time with your employees, so they know exactly where to go to get their daily work done and where to go for help. This is also important for something as simple as Chatter adoption. “Remind folks of what the assets are on the platform,” Laura says, and they’ll be more likely to take advantage of the new bells and whistles.
Not everyone learns the same way, so as you roll out more changes you’ll want to give people a variety of ways to take in the information. The first go-to is Chatter, but Laura will still send an email to catch late adopters. As you hit the 6-month slump, optional training sessions can give people a chance to refresh their memory.
The importance of communication.
The other key thing about adoption that we’ve heard from D’An, Marc, and now Laura, is the importance of communication. It’s a little harder if you can’t get everyone on Chatter, but it’s important to make sure that you’re always giving everyone a chance to speak. Invite people to give their feedback, and make sure that you respond to it in tangible ways.
During the show, we also got to hear where Laura falls on the great emoji debate: “Written language is so different than spoken communication and sometimes it’s so difficult to communicate tone through text.” That’s another vote in the pro column.
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