How to Train Yourself and Others to Use CRM

To get started with a Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, platform for your business is an investment. It’s not just an investment for your business, but an investment for you, your stakeholders, and the ones who will be using the system. There may have been a number of reasons that you decided to get a CRM but no matter what those reasons are, it takes users to make it successful.

Those users also need to know how to make themselves successful once they are using CRM. Training your users to use CRM doesn’t have to be a complicated or time-consuming process, but is necessary to make them effective. A good CRM platform will provide the tools and support to get you up and running quickly — we’ll share the ones that are available for Salesforce Essentials.

Take Advantage of Walk-throughs

For visual learners, seeing how a process is done on-screen can make doing that process even easier to understand.

On-Demand Videos of Workshops and Setup Guides can take users through step-by-step processes, from how to import your data to setting up reports and dashboards. These videos can be a great starting point since they allow users to pause, restart, or re-watch at their leisure.

Attend Virtual Workshops

Hands-on Workshops can help users further grasp and master the features of CRM. During one of these workshops, an instructor will walk you through processes, much like in the on-demand videos. Since these are live events, you also gain the ability to ask questions during the training.

Gain Know-How with a Knowledge Base

While many companies, including Salesforce, would love to be able to provide video demos of every single process within the CRM, it’s not always feasible. Each company is unique, so we provide videos for more high-level processes that are commonly used regardless of the type of business you have. For other setup or customization that you wish to do, there’s the Knowledge Base.

A Knowledge Base is available 24/7/365. No matter when you are working in the system, you can always access the Help site to get access to helpful documentation if you are unsure how to do something.

View some examples of our most used Knowledge articles:

• Create Custom Fields
• Import Data with the Data Import Wizard
• Generate Leads from Your Website for Your Sales Team

Create Your Own Resources

Training your users does not need to be only an external process. You should empower your users to create internal Knowledge articles and documentation specific to your organization. This will help them not only feel more engaged with your CRM system and processes, but it can have added benefits for your organization.

Consider the following:

• Are your current employees going to be the only ones who will ever use the system? Most likely not. Creating internal resources specific to your business processes can help train new users as they come on board with your company, enabling them to get up to speed more quickly.
• If an ex-employee mastered and improved upon your CRM processes, but they never documented anything about it, how can another user know how to update or maintain it going forward?

These are some of the benefits of having your own internal Knowledge Base of information. With Service Cloud as part of your Essentials org, you can create that Knowledge Base within Salesforce itself. Keep in mind that it is important to ensure your documentation is updated regularly so the information is relevant and accurate.

Additional Tips

1. It may be beneficial to create a training plan for your CRM. Consider who will be taking on specific responsibilities within your CRM and have them get trained on those areas first. For example, it may not be beneficial to train a salesperson on how to send mass marketing emails. You would likely want to ensure they are trained to work with Leads and Opportunities first so they can start selling right away.
2. Check out our learning platform called Trailhead. With Trailhead your users can learn more about Salesforce and how they can be successful in the platform. Each module also has points attached to them that accrue based on how many are completed. This is a great way to encourage a competitive learning environment. Challenge your users to get points, and even offer your own prizes when they reach certain levels.
3. You and your users don’t have to go it alone. If you get stuck on setting something up, can’t find the information you are looking for, or just need general guidance, we have a team of Essentials Support Coaches available to help. You can create a case from within the program, or utilize our chat feature to connect directly.