A New Year Is Just Around the Corner

It’s no secret that Salesforce is a powerful tool–whether it’s tracking business opportunities or employee information, it’s a Swiss Army knife that anyone can find useful in any industry. Salesforce is an integral piece of software that ensures workflows across departments are streamlined and cohesive. Our very own team of awesome admins works daily to ensure that the user’s Salesforce experience is the best it can possibly be. For this week’s blog, we want to feature three ways you can empower your Salesforce users and strengthen your org’s instance as we move into 2023. How do you get your users to not just utilize Salesforce, but to love it? Let us tell you. 

At the heart of these tips and tricks is one thing: keeping the end user in mind. Inquiring about their needs and creating a product that meets those needs is just the beginning, especially when it comes to a long-term technology investment. Understanding not only what the user needs and being aware of the why will ensure a product that’s made for the users relying on the CRM daily. 

Simplify Apps with Your Users in Mind

At first glance, Salesforce can feel a little daunting–it is a hefty piece of software that has tools to do just about everything. Because of the powerful nature of the CRM, it’s easy for new users to become overwhelmed and immediately shut down the software, especially when they have spreadsheets and other softwares that have helped them do their job for longer. However, Salesforce is most powerful in its ability to consolidate those tools, all in one place.

The solution to user adoption is so much simpler than we think it is: understanding what’s necessary of an app for a specific group of users and tailoring it to their needs can be the gateway that leads to widespread adoption and a cohesive workflow that employees can use for times to come. Simplifying the user experience can come in many ways. Whether it’s organizing tabs based on workflow, to hiding unnecessary tabs that can bog users down, these are small ways to ensure efficiency and overall adoption for users. The bottom line? Don’t over-engineer! With so many configuration options, it can be tempting to create instances with complex workflows, but keeping it simple with the end user in mind can build a product that’s not only easy to use, but easy to train new employees in as well. 

Optimize Pages Based on User Needs

Making simple changes to an org to streamline use is just the beginning. To make an even stronger org with higher utilization, we must consider optimizing pages with those same user needs in mind. At its core, this means defining clear standards that reduce changes to objects in the org and prevents re-learning or confusion amongst users. Keeping it consistent seems like too simple an idea, but it rings true: implementing a set of standards, templates, and layouts will create smooth and cohesive navigation for everyday users, and generate Salesforce experts who are able to pass their knowledge on to those who are newer in the org.

But what are some ways that we can maintain consistency and standards amongst different apps? This can look like maximizing visible screen space by using tabs to organize information into thoughtful panes, or de-cluttering buttons and arranging them so the most commonly used ones are readily available, with the rest accessible through the drop-down menu. Another feature that helps users visually is a path on any Salesforce object. These paths allow users to move successfully through a defined business process, like stages of an opportunity or phases of a project. The bottom line? Creating paths that are aesthetic and consistent can help user adoption for new and old users, no matter their Salesforce expertise.

Maximize Your Users’ Page Layout Experience

As it is best practice to maintain consistency amongst objects, it’s also deeply important to define standards for how you create page layouts. Those standards help admins more quickly and effectively manage your pages while empowering your end users with consistent layouts that they can master in no time. Human brains tend to group similar tasks together, so by keeping fields together while organizing page layouts, and then putting those fields in a logical order allows for an adoptable workflow your end users will love.

Keeping end users in mind also means favoring the one or two-column layouts. This highlights a product that is not only visually appealing, but cohesive to an end user’s overall workflow, enhancing their Salesforce experience and encouraging them to continue developing the CRM. One-column layouts are great for text area fields with large amounts of text, whereas two-column layouts work great for most field types, barring you’re not planning to put them in a sidebar. The bottom line? Try it out. Nothing in Salesforce is set in stone, so experiment with what your users find most efficient and go from there!

Let’s grow into Salesforce experts, together.

With a CRM that works as hard as Salesforce, becoming experts isn’t work that can be done overnight. Our Bitwise admins keep things users like in mind and design a Salesforce org that addresses all of our users’ needs. We continue to empower even the newest Salesforce users to become experts and utilize the CRM for all of the goodness it’s capable of. And we want you to be an expert, too. 

If you’re interested in more information on how to create a Salesforce org your users will use (and love!), visit our guide to help simplify and optimize your Lightning Experience. Together, we can build cohesive, streamlined orgs that make daily tasks easier and make us all more efficient–whether it’s managing customer relationships, employee information, or keeping track of tech support requests.

This post was written by Amber Carpenter, Junior Copywriter, at Bitwise Industries. When she isn’t writing, according to her Spotify Wrapped, she is simultaneously someone very sad who also loves to dance.

If you’re interested in uncovering the tech possibilities available to your organization or want to find more ways to increase your ROI with technology, click this link to schedule some time with one of our experts.