The Moneyball theory to Salesforce Adoption

This weekend I had the chance to watch Moneyball again. For those of you have not seen the movie I’ll make it easy and give you a link to synopsis. Now, if you have seen the movie you might be wondering- “what does this have to do with Salesforce?” Well, everything. Thinking back to my admin days I would leave user group meetings, Dreamforce, or conversations with friends thinking “I’m going to build [insert your favorite dominate team that you love to hate] team. I’m going to inspire my users to swing for the fences and hit grand slams everyday! I’m going to push my users to not only adopt Salesforce, but become Super Users!” But then like that sad day where I struck out in t-ball, reality hit me. That creating a powerhouse of super users wasn’t going to happen over night.

So I’m hear to tell you, that a powerhouse of super users won’t happen over night.

But it can happen.

And to make it happen you have to teach your users to regularly get on base every day. Or as I call it- “The Moneyball theory to Salesforce Adoption”.

On base everyday.

Look, here is the deal. You wouldn’t hand a kid a glove and a baseball bat and expect him to walk up to the plate and hit a homerun every time. Sure it would be great, but it’s not realistic. What we need to do is teach the kid the fundamentals of hitting the ball and getting on base. So why do we give our users a log in to Salesforce and expect them to be Chatter experts and updating a pile of records everyday? That’s the equivalent of hitting a homerun on your first at bat. No, what we have to do is expect them to get on base everyday.

So what does “on base” mean. Well, first it’s setting an achievable goal that can be repeated every time they use Salesforce. Getting on base may sound simple, and to use Admins it is. But not to our users. To some of our users just turning on a computer and logging in is tough. Sure we will have super users who can get on base every day in their sleep. That’s great! Then let’s encourage them to get the whole team on base every day. Alright- so we know that ‘on base’ is the goal. Let’s define.

Change the way you think about adoption.

If all of our users are expected to get on base every day then we need to make sure we are measuring that. Similar to how they measure statistics in baseball. Now, don’t worry we aren’t going to do stats in this post- mostly because I took stats in college and um… failed. But hey, if someone wants to do stats- awesome! Me? I want to rethink adoption to be more than just log ins and a wall of shame. Let’s rethink adoption to be a combination of ‘on base’ activities. Like number of logins (similar to at bats) AND the number of chatter posts OR the number of records created OR the number of records edited. In this scenario- getting on base is logging in, posting to Chatter and creating or editing a record. That seems simple enough for a user right?

Stick to the plan.

Driving adoption isn’t easy. You have to work at it every day. If take the plan of just getting EVERY user to get on base every day there will be days when you wonder if it will work. There will be doubters, and management may wonder if the plan is really working. You have to stick to the plan. There will be people who mumble after meetings or training sessions that the plan won’t work. But you have to stick to the plan. There will be individuals who are incredibly talented at Excel- get them on your team, have them help you with reports and formulas. Oh yeah, and stick to the plan. Stick to the plan of getting all of your users on base, every day by the end of this year.

Then you can start building your dynasty.