10 Totally Doable User Adoption Tips (Video)

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TRANSCRIPT

All right, thank you so much everybody for being here today for user adoption tricks. So chances are if you’re here, it’s because you probably have some user adoption problems or you anticipate you’ll have some user adoption problems in your company coming up and you’re trying to be proactive, which is amazing and I applaud you for that. But let me just assuage any fears and just to let you know that this is a common issue for every company. Every company struggles with user adoption. It’s always at the forefront of a pupil of management’s minds. I would say, is particular when change is almost upon them or upon you. It is definitely the some that goes by the wayside as things calm down and things become more comfortable. We’ll talk about that in a second, but just want to let you know that the reason you’re sitting in these seats is a fantastic reason and a very valid one and one that everybody seems to share.

So me, why I’m standing here talking to you. My name is Jess Mooney. I’m the marketing director at Encore and I’ve been really interested in user adoption theory like in practice, like with our teams in our own company, and then also conceptually for probably about 20 years or so in different areas. In CRM, since version 2011, I’ve been a power use in that since that time. And I’m also the leader of the local CRMUG group. It’s the CRM User Group. We meet over in Microsoft at the Redmond campus once a quarter. And if you’re not familiar with our group, we are really awesome and I’m not just saying that because I’m the leader. You should definitely check us out even if you wanna just come to one meeting and just be a fly on the wall, see what’s going on. But we have about a rotating cast of about 50 or so users, really great conversations. We have a lot of fun. We feed you. It’s a great morning and afternoon. So let me know if you’re interested in that.

And then I’m just gonna call out some of my favorite things in the world. The top there, that’s Zephyr. He’s my co-op dog. Co-parent him with my ex-neighbor. And then that’s my favorite camping spots in Canyonlands. And my new baby, my jeep, Roxy, is right there. I think Alex is first in line for a test drive. So everybody sign up behind him.

And then what we’re gonna talk about today, so we’re gonna talk about user adoption, but why is it the focus? Why is it an ongoing focus? We’re gonna go through that. We’re gonna get into the tips. Obviously, that was the topic and that’s what got your attention. So I will not skip those. And at the end, we’re gonna share. I’m big on talking about what works and what doesn’t work in each other’s companies. I guess that’s probably why I’m the CRMUG leader, but I really love opening up the discussion for you to talk about what’s worked in your organizations, maybe some techniques that have succeeded no matter how small. And I’d love to hear about some to that haven’t worked so well. Me especially I do learn really well from what not to do as well as I do from what to do. So hearing about the negative is a positive, if that makes sense.

All right, so user adoption, what is it? Well, I have highlighted the main word there. The end game is efficiency with user adoption and it really is more from the company’s perspective when you talk about user adoption. It’s the framework, the different techniques that the company is going to put into play in order to get the workforce, whether it’s team or a person, whoever it is, get the workforce to move more efficiently. And of course they wanna do that because efficiency is the twin of profitability.

Now from the person aspect, from the people management part is change management. And I’m sure everyone in this room on this call has heard of change management. It is definitely a phrase that’s thrown around in many, many contexts. And it really is a much bigger concept than just throwing out a couple of tricks that you or telling you about some techniques that might work. Change management is the understanding of the process that we go through as people when we undergo change, and then how to best shepherd people along that path. And when I say shepherd them, I don’t mean just hurry along your way, get up the mountain and go. I mean, how can you get them down that process as calmly, and actually, as happily as they can go in order to make your users of more efficient from like the quickest possible moment. And of course all of that is in order to get them focused on those business outcomes that you even implemented user adoption in the first place for.

Of course, these guys, they just go around and around and around and around and around, and these are things…once you focused on user adoption, you’ll find yourself really getting into those techniques, really finding out the different ways that you think will work for your users to bring onboard those new processes and new systems. And then once those get moving and you get some momentum, you’ll realize maybe you need to focus a little more on change management, maybe there’s some people struggling in those adoption processes. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the personal aspect and then back and forth, back and forth. So these things are constantly moving back and forth between each other. They overlap quite a bit and you really can’t talk about one without the other, which is why I started off with this today.

So why the focus? This actually breaks up the perspective of user adoption into the two most important facets, really. There’s the individual, the employee side, the me side that is the unique person that you have as the employee who is basically just wants to do the job their best that they can. They wanna do it as efficiently as they can for their own reward. So that is, “I wanna do it so I can make my goals. I can make my commission. I can make it out of work by 3:00 p.m. on a Friday instead of 5:00. I can get in line quicker for the salary raise or the promotion.” And these sound like self-serving rewards because they are, and every single person in this room, every person on this call has felt these same incentives themselves. It is normal and it’s why we’re working in the first place. The basic reason is we make a paycheck so we can support ourselves and our families, go do what we really love to do, come back in and do it all over again. So that’s the me aspect.

Company is the us aspect. That is the sum total of all of those individual wants and needs, all brought together in a way, hopefully, that’s unified, that makes the company move forward and actually achieve those business outcomes that we mentioned on the first slide. Eventually, they just wanna be, they wanna get to proactive versus reactive. They wanna get to unified processes so that they’re comparing apples to apples when they get reports, and they can actually grow in a scalable way instead of trying to react to maybe one person or one team’s version of the truth.

So this is more from the me perspective, so just something to bear in mind is that user adoption is happening all over the place all of the time. It’s happening not only for your users, but it’s happening for you. It’s happening for me. It’s happening for your mom, my mom, your dog. I mean, it’s happening all over. You could not avoid user adoption unless you’re living in a cave on the side of a mountain with a big boulder in front of you, and maybe not even then. But so, this is just an example of some of the technologies, and just probably only like a tiny speck of them that we interface with almost on a daily basis. These technologies are constantly growing and changing and evolving. There’s more competitors coming out. There’s updates downloaded to your phone every other day. It seems like there’s constantly a new way to interface or a new thing to learn with these technologies.

And this is just us getting up in the morning, getting breakfast, getting in the car, gonna go to lunch, maybe get home, take the kids somewhere, go have dinner with friends, and go to bed. That’s what this is. This is not doing our jobs. It’s a lot. It’s an awful, awful lot. And us as companies are then asking our users to take these more, I guess, comfortable, maybe predictable processes that they have in place at work and change them, and sometimes change them dramatically. That can be highly upsetting. It can be very frustrating and it can be a difficulty to add on top of all these other things that we’re asked to do on a daily basis just to go about our lives.

Another thing to notice here is as you’re scanning through these graphics, I’ll bet you that you can pick out three or four of these things and you can easily just shoot out like within a word or a phrase, you can shoot out exactly what the reward is that you get for the user adoption effort that you have to put forth to start using one of these things. Like, it’s not hard. There’s a couple of these on here that I immediately I’m just like, “Oh yeah, I can make my coffee without actually going downstairs to make my coffee. That’s awesome.” It’s little simple things, but in our daily lives, the reward is easily identifiable and we have a very…we quickly judge if that reward is actually worth all the effort of downloading an app or learning the new process or figuring out which buttons to click when. It all becomes very, very clear and it’s usually very simple. And this is the same struggle that companies must go through to identify these rewards for their users when they’re working on user adoption for a new technology or our new process. They need to identify that easy to see, easy to consume reward, and make it clear that that reward is absolutely worth the effort that it takes to actually adopt what they’re asking to be adopted.

And some of you might not have seen this before. This is the normal response to change. This is the human response to change. And I think this chart has been done in many different ways, many different years and have many different call outs in these different little dots along it. But this was one that just really spoke to me. I think everything is a little bit different across them except for that line. See that blue line that swoops up, it dips down, and then it kinda pushes up over a hill. That one, it never changes, no matter what the graph is, you’re gonna see that line moving, changing the same way. Basically, it’s just how things move forward. So at the beginning there’s always, this is how we do something. There’s a kind of a general adoption. And then when I say the beginning, I mean, starting a company or starting a department or starting a campaign or starting a new AP process when you’ve never had one before. We start.

And then we get up that hill. It’s very quick. We need something going now. So wisdom is very short. We don’t have the time to really learn and understand all the options out there, but we gained confidence quickly because we are, we need it now and we need to do it right. We get up at the top and suddenly we start realizing, “Okay, well, you know what, we got something in place because we needed it, but it doesn’t do everything we needed, or actually, this is kind of frustrating, or this part’s broken. This other part works fine, but this part’s broken. We need to fix it.” So at that red dot, at the peak of mount stupid, that’s where we all get together and go, “You know what, that was kinda dumb. Let’s figure out a new way to do this. Let’s go back in, revise or reinstall or re-implement, whatever.” And it’s all agreed upon.

Then there’s that briefest moment of hurray. This will be great and that’s not listed here, but I know it exists because I think we’ve all felt it. And then so quickly after that, we just take that rollercoaster dive straight downhill and we go right into the valley of despair. And I always think of this is the pit of despair, like in the ”Princess Bride” when Wesley is down in the dungeon and he’s getting electrocuted. And I bet you some of you users would say they feel the same way, but basically what we’re trying to do is decrease this pittiness. This low sloped down. We want this to be shallower. We want that slope of enlightenment, that wisdom gained to be as elegant of a line, but maybe not quite as steep. And we want that plateau of sustainability to last much longer.

So the whole point of user adoption is to actually shallow that out. You’re never, I’m not gonna say you’re never, because that’s when somebody raises their hand and says, “I did it.” So I’m not gonna tease you, but pretty much never. You get this line to be completely flat from the peak of mount stupid all the way over to the plateau of sustainability. There’s gonna be a dip. And that’s because people do experience some form of grief. They experience grief for the comfort that they had before, the predictability they had before. There’s a lot of normalcy that’s gone now because things are so different. Even in little ways. It still it does affect the daily life at work. So what we try to do is just shallow this out and that’s what I’m hoping a lot of these tips and tricks are gonna do for you.

I wanted to add this in as well. This is the ADKAR model of change from a Prosci. We’re actually a Prosci-certified company. And it goes a little bit deeper I think than just that flow I just showed you of the up down. This shows you the phases or the kind of the steps forward as people move through change. And I’m gonna kind of basify this a little bit because I know like when I was reading the bullet points in our awareness and desire and all that, I was like, “Okay, well this is so big and broad. How do I bring this down to like brass tacks?”

So for awareness, the awareness would be like, I know that I need to exercise. I know that exercising is good for me. It will reduce stress. It will obviously reduce weight. It will increase mobility. Apparently, it’s going to like, I don’t know. It’s like the miracle elixir of life is exercise. I know this now. Okay.

Desire. Do I have the right desires instilled in me that make it a meaningful awareness, not something that just I know and passes in one ear and out the other. Desire meaning, am I tired of my joints aching when I wake up? Do I wish I had more mobility? Do I get short of breath when I go up a flight of stairs? Those types of things are those, do I wish for those things to go away enough?

Knowledge, do I know how to exercise properly so that I don’t burn myself out, and I don’t injure myself like I did on this stupid rowing machine a few weeks ago with my shoulder. I can, excuse me, I can engage a personal trainer. I can download some videos, I can do…there’s different aspects to it, but do I have access to them?

Action. Do I have my life set up so that I can work out? Excuse me, I’m still getting over something. Do I have the time set aside, the proper amount of time set aside every week to be able to go workout in the gym that I want to. Do I have a membership? Do I have the right workout clothes? If I have kids, do I have a babysitter? All of these things. Do I have the ability to take the action I want?

And then reinforcement is that plateau of standup sustainability I showed you before. It is making sure that mechanisms are in place that this is long-lasting. So do I have a workout buddy that holds me accountable or do I have to like a little reward system? So every time I hit a milestone, excuse me, I take a drink of water. Gosh, maybe I need to workout just to make sure I have enough breath for this presentation. So, reinforcement, yeah, like I said, just making sure you’ve got the mechanisms in place so that it is sustainable. You keep it moving forward. Rewards are a big one and we’re gonna get into that in a second.

So here we go with the big 10. Number one, and all the admins in the room are now rolling their eyes, end users, I swear end users will make your life easier. It is not the way of IT, usually, to think this way. Some of you do, but end users really, really should be involved in the earliest stages of requirements gathering and it doesn’t mean that they need to define what the requirements are. As matter of fact, I would advise against that. I would say you get your business outcomes in place. You figure out your requirements based on that, and then you involve your end users and say, ”You know, we wanna make sure that our sales pipeline is always 100% truthful. In order to do that, we want to do A, B, C, D.” And then that’s when your end users come back and go, “Ah, well, you know, B really isn’t that good because we only do that at 3:00 p.m. on Fridays because we really don’t have the data until then. And so, if you’re looking at it on Tuesdays, it’s kind of a stupid thing to add into your process.”

And then also you wanna customize, so based on that feedback, you wanna make sure that as you’re going through development, you’re putting those customizations in place. Even the little bitty things, little things like changing the name of an entity, you’d be surprised how much user adoption you’d get just by changing your nomenclature from the out-of-the-box fields and forms to what you use in your company. Making it customized. Gosh, this is annoying. Making it customized for your users is what’s going to make them feel welcome and comfortable in the environment.

And this one is a tough one. It’s a tough one because I don’t want you to see that. It’s a tough one because basically, I guess, it’s summed up pretty easy in when we’ve had CRM sales meetings before, and I don’t mean internal ones. I mean external. We’ve definitely sat down with prospective clients and said one of the best and worst things about CRM is that the answer is always yes. So basically, CRM is really wonderful in that it is a Pandora’s Box. You can do almost anything with it. You can track your cows, you can plan your airline route, you can count chocolate bars. You can do whatever you want. And so because of that, it has the capability of becoming a Frankenstein. And that can happen even in little bitty ways, just things becoming unwieldy very fast. And the faster that happens, the faster your users decide it is not a worthy system. So make sure you streamline your business processes.

If you’ve got those business processes defined, make sure there’s simplified to the point of just the big rocks. Just the really big important items are what’s called out and what are put in place. The little bitty nuances and some of the things that might loop back on itself, like when you’re white boarding the whole process and you realize, “Oh, well, this doesn’t really move over here, it moves over here and it dead ends.” Or, “This isn’t an infinity loop.” Obviously, you wanna fix those things. But if they’re just little nice to haves in the sales process, do not bog down the system with them. Just put in the most important things. They need to be actionable and they need to be important to management.

Minimize the number of required fields. That’s extremely important. It is so tempting when you get in there and you’re working in thinking about data quality, you want to require everything because everything should be important, right? You should know where your leads are coming from. And you probably do, but is it really important to the end game of that user’s work day to have that data into CRM? Probably not. It hurts to say that, but probably not. You wanna make sure there’s only the minimum in there. You can add recommended fields all day long, so if you’re in there and you see the little red asterisk that’s required, if you see a little blue cross that’s recommended. You can add those and just train your users to know that if they see the blue cross, it is very important to their colleagues, to their team, to their manager, that those are filled in. And just, you know, encourage them to do so.

And keep the forms clean by using out-of-the-box permission, excuse me, security-level permissions. Super, super easy to do…well, okay, let me back up, not that easy to do. Once implemented, it’s fantastic to have installed. If you’re unsure about security permissions at all, if you think the setup is complicated, if you feel like you’re just too worried you’re gonna hit the wrong button, let us know. We can easily help you with this part, but it can be very, very powerful. You can let your users only see the fields, even the sections of the forms that they only need to see. It keeps them focused and it keeps them from feeling like everything has to be input inputted or put in the system and they just walk away. Keeps that from happening. So definitely remember to keep it as simple as you can.

And data quality, I did just mention this phrase. This is the other outside of user adoption. This is probably the other phrase we hear the most often when we talk about CRM. Data quality is number one and I put that up there like that because I bet you in your system somewhere there is data that looks very, very similar. So using field validation rules, very simple thing to implement any time you are turning on a form or creating new fields, just don’t skip this step. It’s not a difficult one to set up. Make sure a date field is a date field and email is an email. Tool tips are great that you can have, you know, your users can literally just hover or click on an area in CRM and that little tool tip pops up, explains to them exactly what type of data needs to be input. And then this one is sometimes a little harder to sell. When I say sell, I don’t mean I sell you, I mean you sell up the chain, can be harder to sell than some of these others starting with clean data.

So, you know, this really happens a lot when you’re fusing two huge data sets, or you’re maybe starting like implementing a new module or a new application. Basically, you wanna make sure that your foundational data is as clean as possible so you’re starting from the truth and you can maintain the trust and the data. If you start with dirty data and you add clean data on top of it, it’s like having, it’s like having mold in your carpet and then you go vacuum the carpet and sets, you know, like just, you know, just everyday wear and tear, no matter how much you vacuum that carpet, that mold underneath is still there. It’s still gonna create spores in your home and create mold elsewhere, and eventually just dirty up everything. You’ve got to start with the clean.

And we actually know a couple of really great third party solutions. I know I’m not sales pitching to you. I’m actually saying these guys are fantastic. Pretty cheap for like a one and done solution, and then they have some that are rotating solutions. But they’re really easy to work with and they helped just sweep across your data, like I said, either once or recurring and help you get to that foundational level of truth. There is some really cool machine learning aspects to a few of them, too, like, you can explain to them like it’ll basically say, ”Well, I see Jim Smith and James Smith are the same person and I see that jim.smith@company and jimsmith@company are the same person. I’m gonna merge all these guys.” And you’re able to actually go in and say, ”No, I don’t want you to merge these because I want those and I do want you to merge these.” Eventually it will start learning you and learning how your company gathers that data and wants to keep it. So it’ll get smarter as it moves forward in identifying what needs to be duplicated. And of course, if you trust it, you can just tell it to go merge everything in the world, but I wouldn’t recommend that. So really cool tools there if you’re interested.

And then setting up duplicates, detection rules, that’s something that’s out of the box, not difficult to set up. It can be kind of like what the required fields though. It can be very, very tempting to get kind of strict on the duplicate detection, which means that your popup is happening for your users all the time. And when that happens, you’re just getting users clicking buttons like crazy and they don’t care what they’re looking at, they just wanna get through it so they can do their work. So be a little selective about it. Be kind of conservative about what you want your duplicate detections to be set on, like your email field or something. And we can help you with that too if you’re interested.

BYOA, so you guys have definitely thought about, or excuse me, heard about super users. It’s something that’s talked about a lot when we talk about user adoption and companies. But there is a lot to creating a small team. Usually, it’s like one person from each department or team to be the evangelists for your system or for your new processes. And these guys are the early adopters. They come on really, really early on. They understand all the benefit propositions from the start. They understand the pain points that are trying to be met. They can see some of maybe even the backend build of it. So they get some of the foundational aspects. They are really, really just there to understand all of it and push it out towards the team. The ideas that you’re not just handing this down from some IT department that these other teams have never seen or heard from. They are learning these processes and these new ways of doing things from a person that they trust and they know and they work with. And that’s gonna be a lot quicker in adoption because the trust level is already set.

And then you also wanna make sure you acknowledge these people, like remember with the plateau of sustainability and with reinforcement, you wanna reinforce these guys, too. Make sure you have some ways of acknowledging them. If you can empower them to be trainers, let them teach their teams, let them be the ones that people come to with questions and let them kind of be the guru for their areas. Sometimes a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction out of that or just call them out on staff calls, thanking them, have the CEO specifically call them out and say, “Thank you.” There are different ways that they can be acknowledged and it’ll help them feel that they wanna continue on.

Automate the aspirin. So this is more about really finding those pain points that your users are experiencing. And this is more about those requirements in development, but it’s focusing in on the pain points and not necessarily on the business outcome. You wanna do both. Obviously, the end goal is the business outcome, but the pain points, if you can solve those while you’re gaining a bit of business outcome, you will dramatically increase the adoption. So find out where the pain is. It might be outside the CRM, might be in a disparate marketing automation solution like Act-On or a survey monkey or something like that. Maybe they’re just sick of not being able to get their data into CRM and they hate cross-referencing spreadsheets, take a look at what you can do to help those items as you’re working on this implementation.

And if you’re not sure what those are, I mean sometimes obviously we’re all busy pulling your users sometimes really sucks and it can be so hard to get data out of them in a timely manner. You know, ask your organization for some time to do some ride-alongs, even if it’s just ghosting someone on a shared screen through Skype or GoToMeeting, but take a little time, like an hour or two. If your company is really investing in user adoption, they shouldn’t have a problem with this. Then, find out what their time leaks are, where are they spending so much time spinning their wheels, what seems to be difficult, where are they having trouble jumping from system to system that’ll help you find the pain.

And then you wanna automate it because you have a great opportunity to make CRM the hero for them. And as soon as they understand that CRM is doing the work for them, they will get in there and they will do whatever they need to do to make sure CRM does the other half of the work. It’s almost universal. And there’s a couple of times we’ve joked in the CRMUGs that people will do any amount of work to get out of a little bit of work and that’s how you can get CRM to work for them.

Choose your own adventure. So this is business process flow. You can actually translate or how many of you are, actually, were using Business Process Flow right now. I’m on a call so I can’t see your hands. I’m gonna say three out of five of you. So Business Process Flow can hold your business processes, that’s why it’s called Business Process Flow and there are different ways to do it. There are different phases or stages. There’s different fields, you can require them. You can actually use branches now with Power Apps. There’s some really cool ways to actually make it kind of choose your own adventure, which is more dynamic and more fun, but it’s also a lot more relevant to that particular user’s process. So you’re not bogging them down with all these like 12 different fields that has nothing to do with a current client sales process that they’re engaged in.

And if you don’t have a process, I know you do have a process. You just maybe haven’t put words around your process. I highly, highly suggest you put words around your process. Go work with your managers, maybe even some of your power, like, your really enthusiastic end users or systems, things like that to define it. And it doesn’t have to be a big complicated thing. It can be three steps, five steps, but putting that into CRM is going to help with just the foundational aspects of getting the data into the system. Having a three-step process in there, getting people to put their data in and then having things like alerts or a task created or different automations that fire when those processes or little pieces of the process are filled out is gonna get them excited and it will get them to start getting data into CRM. And you’ll be surprised where it will start popping up in other places.

And restricted everywhere, so you wanna make sure they have access. That’s really the bottom line. You don’t want to walk up to your users and say, ”Hey, if it’s not in CRM, it didn’t exist.” But you can only access CRM in the office from 9:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday because IT is gone on Friday. You don’t want to do anything like that. You want to let them work where from where they want to work, where they need to work and when they wanna work. So your salespeople are out on lunches and sales calls in the middle of the day. You don’t want them to have to write everything down, run back to the office and waste an hour of transcribing that data into CRM, when they could be on sales calls and actually making you money. That will be huge waste, huge leak of time. So make sure it is accessible in Outlook. If you’re on D365, you already had the internet facing. Mobile access is huge, huge, and it has made a huge leaps and bounds. So if you’re not using mobile right now, definitely let us know. We can show you how cool and easy it is for your users to interface with.

And so gamification, that’s another big one that just came out pretty recently in D365. So gamification is… How many of you are familiar or no? Gamification is in your system right now today, if you’re on D365. I can’t see you. Maybe it’s the three, same three out of five. So gamification is in there. It’s really not hard to set up at all and it’s actually pretty slick. I mean, it’s not like Xbox 360 slick, but it’s cool. And if you’ve got like a big monitor in your office or even a little monitor, it doesn’t matter, but you know, having that up and having the visuals that it can share with that competitive game moving on is just really cool to watch. There’s things in there like a hockey for our Canadian friends. There’s every kind of sports team you can think of. There’s NASCAR, there’s, I think rowing, boating. I mean it’s just crazy. There’s a ton of them and they all have really pretty colors and graphics and all of that. So they didn’t skimp on it. It’s not like, you know, playing pong or something. But it definitely just brings it to life.

And what you do is you just set that up using your KPIs, those are your key performance indicators. And it doesn’t have to be the huge organizational KPIs. It can be your little granular team KPIs, like say you wanna improve your case resolution time, you want wanna maybe set up a game around average case time closed. That could be an excellent game for your service team and you can set that up maybe NASCAR style and you see the little cars going around the track and as they hit different parts of the track, they get a reward or they only get a big reward at the end, whatever you want. But you can set it up in so many flexible ways and you can also set up a, it’s called like a fan base where you actually invite in different people in the organization to be fans of the game and they can interact in the gamification portal and there’s like a trash talk area where you can interact with each other and it can be really, really fun.

This, of course, this depends your organization. Not every company would really jibe with this, but for the right organization it can be really cool. And then just make sure you assign some really fun prizes. We’ve had there was one company that we worked with that had a CRM Ninja or yeah, it was a Ninja. And they had an artist, a local artist make up a paper machete helmet and a gigantic plastic samurai sword and the CRM Ninja would, whoever that would be. It was a big international company with like a 100,000 people. They would ship that ninja outfit all over depending on who had won each game and it was a big deal to have it in your office. They would take pictures when it arrived and I think they threw like a little pizza party or something. But it was just, it became part of the culture that being, having the ninja was a big deal and they talked about it every time they got together. So it’s just a cool idea.

And then the other one is the lucky seven. So this is something that I think we all kind of innately understand, but it just needs some maybe some formal conversation around to make sure it’s implemented. As the seven modes of learning, everybody’s a little different and what complicates it more is that people are different based on what the different things they’re learning. So for instance, when it comes to learning something new in CRM, I am absolutely social and verbal like that’s why I love the CRMUGs, that’s why I talked to young Han Alex like crazy in the office when I’m trying to figure out a new process. That’s just how…I go so much faster if I can do social and verbal. But if I’m trying to learn a new way of doing something in Photoshop, I am 100% solitary and visual. I need people out of my way. I cannot talk to you. I can’t even have music playing. I want quiet. So it depends on what you are teaching them and what their style is of learning based on that thing.

The good news is that if you just focus on in your training library, if you focus on touching on these seven at least once, you will satisfy everybody most of the time. And that is…so no matter what their particular mix-match is of whatever it is you’re training on, you should be able to satisfy them. So just make sure you keep these in mind as you’re developing. And this is an example of the list that you wanna develop.

And this is actually probably my favorite tip, number 10. As people in the office could tell you, I absolutely am not an enabler. I don’t believe in enabling. I believe that we are all a uniquely intelligent people who are capable. That’s why we are employed in the companies that we’re in and we have the ability to be self sufficient. So with the right training, with the right tools, with the right company support, we can all be self-sufficient. And that’s what these of trainings should be for your users. So don’t spoon feed, you wanna do things like live training, give people PDFs, PowerPoint, video libraries including live demos that have been recorded. You wanna do open mic webinars, which are really great because people can Q&A, so you can get like some of those super users on the call. And then maybe like one or two of your actual implementation people and have them there for Q&A. You can do reference guides that you can have available through the Learning Path Automation in CRM. I’m not sure if you guys are used or an understand the learning path automation yet or if you’ve played with it, but it is a very, very powerful set of tools that is not only good for just new users coming into the company, but they’re fantastic for things like this user adoption and change management.

You can completely customize the path that your user goes through when they sit down and you’re live environment. You turn on Learning Path Automation, they are completely guided through it from start to finish or however you wish. They can interact with videos, interact with PDF documents. They can get links to online resources and they can be told where to click, how to click, when the click, all the reasons. You can give them as much or as little context as you want. It’s a really, really great thing to use. And you can start in little bitty ways right now, so just check that out if that’s activated in your system and if it isn’t, just talk to your administrator.

And the bonus tip, so contextual training. This is something not a lot of companies do because it does take a little extra time when it comes to training, but it’s basically be developing multiple training paths based on your departments and the different processes that they go through. So you wanna really focus it on who needs it, but in saying that, I would not disclude the rest of the company. There are people out there like me who really thrive on context and that’s why I popped up those first few slides on the stack so you could get some context around the tips, is that giving an a foundation of why you’re doing things and what they’re for can really help people do better in like in the precision of what they’re doing. Not just randomly throwing in whatever data, but understanding this data set has to be to these standards and these are the reasons why. So open it up to your company. If you’re doing sales focus training only, let your service team know if it’s optional, but they can join if they’re curious.

And then another cool one is assigning an end user from a different team to come in and explain and train on it. And the cool thing about this if you have the interest and the time to get the team involved, is that it brings a different perspective to that training. When you have a salesperson training a salesperson, they are going to be very specific. It is going to be extremely contextual. But when you get someone else, then they’re gonna bring a little bit of fresh perspective. They might hear one or two little nuggets that they wouldn’t hear from the salesperson just because they’re thinking outside of the usual sales box. So that can be really interesting in getting people’s attention during training.

And then always ask for feedback. So asking for improvements were discovered during that training. Was there something that they would have done a little differently? Like, even if it’s something like the color of that click link wasn’t what I expected, so I didn’t click there. If you’ve got one person giving you that feedback and it wasn’t something that you discovered in UAT, then it might be worth going back and changing that color just because if one person does, maybe a lot of people do. So those are my 10 tips and tricks, plus one, and I’m gonna open it up to the audience to see if anybody has some of their own words of wisdom or words of warning for us.