Customised Salesforce Training and Mentorship
Training is an essential part of going live with a new system, onboarding new team members, or if user adoption of your new system is lagging. Without training, your users are left to figure out how to use a new system without any help.
Is Training Necessary?
Sometimes a system can be so intuitive that people don’t need training to use it. Think about systems you use every day that you figured out yourself without training: online banking, phone apps, home entertainment systems. For most organisations, internal systems are too complex to be intuitive enough to use without training. Training is also an essential way for staff to know how to do their job, whether a particular task is done within a system or not.
Benefits of Mentorship?
For these reasons it’s important to understand what problem you’re trying to fix, and whether training is the right solution. Training may seem like the obvious solution if you have a user adoption problem, but the real issue may be that the system can’t do an important function that your users need. If this is the case, then the system needs to be fixed and aligned to organisational processes, and no amount of training will boost user adoption without this.
Sometimes a new system is implemented and not enough time is taken to clarify how organisational processes have changed, meaning that staff receive training on how to use Salesforce, but they don’t understand how to do their jobs anymore. In this case, training is required, but the training needs to focus on business processes rather than technical training in Salesforce.
If user adoption has fallen significantly and users have created several spreadsheets and third party tools to use instead of Salesforce, then simply providing training on using Salesforce isn’t sufficient. An important part of change management is explaining why the new system is better for users, supporters, managers and the organisation. If users are convinced that the system isn’t fit for purpose, then they first need to understand why it’s important to use and understand the new system before training will be useful.
Training vs Mentoring
Training is excellent for quickly providing basic understanding to a large group of people. It can be costly as people need to find time to participate in classroom based learning, and often it’s difficult to line everyone up to join a group training session.
Mentoring is a gradual improvement process; overtime users will develop confidence as they have many opportunities to improve their understanding as well as practise what they have learnt in their day-to-day job.
Mentoring is also a conversation; mentees have an opportunity to explain what their barriers are and address them with a mentor. If there is a barrier to receiving training that is unaddressed, the training will be a waste of time. A mentoring process over time will be able to see if there are barriers to learning or adopting a new system, and these barriers can be addressed so the mentee is able to succeed using Salesforce.