Salesforce Adoption Challenges – Guest Eric Hagelin

It was around 2018 we were growing rapidly and needed a better system than “clipboards”. We would print out orders from the website and put them onto a clipboard. This clipboard would go onto a rack next to a customer rep until the graphics were approved. From there, a copy of the approved design would be printed and attached under the order form.

We had this whole system that had worked for 15 years prior of making sure that the orders made it from start to finish. It was a bit cumbersome though.

Someone, at various points during the day, would walk a metal cart that was kind of like a shopping cart, but a bit smaller to the production floor with the most recent orders. These clipboards would then be distributed to the different print departments.

The metal cart was quite the upgrade at the time, but people were taking so many trips with a handful of clipboards.

I started researching different CRM systems that could help, not only with customer management, but also order management. I had stumbled upon Salesforce during that time and entered into their ecosystem of learning what it was capable of. I did demos and visited the NYC tower.

We took the jump into a better metal cart.

At the time, it was just my dad and I customizing Salesforce to work for us. We simply used it as a digital “clipboard” with the same information attached to each order. Workers still needed to print out the digital component for production on a clipboard, but now we could see.

The reporting and productivity metrics were amazing. We could finally see what each person was doing on our frontend. This allowed us to make changes that directly impacted employee workflow.

The biggest problem that we faced, however, was change.

Nobody likes change.

In hindsight, we couldn’t live without the Salesforce CRM we created. But back then, putting in each order to create a digital record was a daunting task. Pushing 100 orders a day with 6 controllers, meant each person was manually inputting 20+ orders per day. Lots of copy and paste.

To ease this change, we found an integration that worked directly with our e-commerce store. This pushed all order data at the time of purchase to automatically create an object in Salesforce. This completely eliminated the “extra” steps, but still there was pushback.

We had spent a lot of money on Salesforce as well as a lot of time, so we needed it to succeed. No going back now.

I listened closely to feedback and improved where I could. Things like putting important data fields in the right places, which didn’t seem like a big deal to management, was a huge deal for users. The layouts made more sense.

It wasn’t until we let go of a key member of the team that had been with us for a long time.

You see, Salesforce allows for better data recording and therefore can better monitor productivity with “digital” employees. Reports were giving us good data on actual performance and there was some lacking.

When we let this key member go, other users at the office took over their accounts. Salesforce made this a seamless process of reassigning an account.

What finally clicked was this. “There’s not enough data in here for me to take over their account”

Yes! If you put the important details at the account, customer, and order level, then picking up a reorder or transferring an account becomes seamless. If we are only given the basic “this person placed an order”, then we’re doing things for the first time EVERY TIME.

Adoption rates sky rocketed. We were finally putting in the notes that were usually in our brains. We would constantly remember who the customer was and how to interact with them. By putting this information into Salesforce, we could free up some brain space and refer to our CRM.

As I said before, we couldn’t operate without Salesforce now.