Everything you should know about Salesforce adoption (and how Tango can help).

Tango knows Salesforce

And excels at flattening the learning curve for others. 🙏
5,600+ change enablers in IT, Operations, Training, and Enablement from 60+ industries rely on Tango to:
Auto-generate Salesforce how-to guides with screenshots
Pin step-by-step instructions inside of Salesforce in just a few clicks
Minimize change for end users by bringing Salesforce training into the flow of work 
Increase self-service, stay on budget, and alleviate the burden of re-training
Drive Salesforce
adoption and ROI 
5,600+ change enablers in IT, Operations, Training, and Enablement from 60+ industries rely on Tango to:
5,600+ change enablers in IT, Operations, Training, and Enablement from 60+ industries rely on Tango to:
Auto-generate Salesforce how-to guides with screenshots
Pin step-by-step instructions inside of Salesforce in just a few clicks
Minimize change for end users by bringing Salesforce training into the flow of work
Increase self-service, stay on budget, and alleviate the burden of re-training
Drive Salesforce
adoption and ROI

No other internal Digital Adoption Platform is backed by Slack/Salesforce Ventures and has:

86,000+
Interactive walkthroughs 
created on Salesforce
1,490,000+
Individual actions captured on
Salesforce with screenshots
301,000+
Uses of Salesforce standard operating procedures
Our IT team brought Tango in first. But when I saw it [two weeks before I’d planned to host my first Salesforce training], I begged for it. There was no reason to consider any other tool or solution to increase our Salesforce adoption rates.
Jessica Sickler
Marketing Analytics Manager

The Salesforce Adoption Lifecycle

You are (somewhere) here. 📍
Are you a Director of Business Applications, Sales Enablement, Sales Operations, or Sales Training with an upcoming Salesforce rollout? You’re in the right place. 
If you have a hunch success will depend on change management just as much as the technical setup and data migration, you’re (already) off to a great start. But where should you actually start?  

At the top of the Salesforce Adoption Lifecycle (or SAL).
The SAL is a framework to drive process adoption, ROI, and business outcomes through successful employee change management. 
Maybe you’ve only been tasked with one or two of the phases to the right. Maybe you’re responsible for all five. Either way, it’s best to consider the SAL in full. Before we help you do that—let’s look at the big picture.

The Salesforce Adoption Lifecycle

Why your business bought Salesforce

It probably wasn’t on impulse. 💸
After evaluating several CRMs, it’s likely your company invested in Salesforce because you have a business problem to solve and you wanted the market leader.
Maybe you have:

Subpar customer engagement—and no way to attract more prospects, close more deals, or retain more customers

Disconnected systems—and no way to unify customer data and communications

Siloed sales, marketing, and service teams—and no visibility into the full customer journey

Too many repetitive tasks and too much manual reporting—and no way to streamline and scale operations

Poor data integrity—and no way to forecast accurately and make informed decisions

Subpar customer engagement

And no way to attract more prospects, close more deals, or retain more customers

Disconnected systems

And no way to unify customer data and communications

Siloed sales, marketing, and service teams

And no visibility into the full customer journey

Too many repetitive tasks and too much manual reporting

And no way to streamline and scale operations

Poor data integrity

And no way to forecast accurately and make informed decisions

Salesforce is a powerful tool, but it isn’t a silver bullet. To hit your goals, get the most out of your software spend, and truly transform your business, you need your agents and reps to use the platform.
(Consistently, correctly, and ideally, without 1,000 questions for you.) 

Salesforce training and adoption challenges

What you’re up against. 👀
Traditional software training pulls customer-facing teams away from their jobs and asks them to:

Change their ways

 And abandon systems they’ve been using successfully, sometimes for years

Build a new vocabulary

To navigate a notoriously complex tool 

Embrace data entry

 And get acquainted with a never-ending number of required fields

Memorize countless SOPs

That evolve every time Salesforce’s user interface and business processes change

Sit through boring training sessions

To “learn” information that can’t be used in the moment

Search multiple repositories

That were designed to increase general knowledge, not software knowledge

Read wordy PDFs

With walls of text guaranteed 
to make eyes glaze over

Watch long videos

That don’t make it easy to skip through the fluff and get unstuck

Prioritize learning your CRM

Instead of how to sell 
better and delight more customers

Change their ways

 And abandon systems they’ve been using successfully, sometimes for years

Build a new vocabulary

To navigate a notoriously complex tool 

Embrace data entry

 And get acquainted with a never-ending number of required fields

Memorize countless SOPs

That evolve every time Salesforce’s user interface and business processes change

Sit through boring training sessions

To “learn” information that can’t 
be used in the moment

Search multiple repositories

That were designed to increase general knowledge, not software knowledge

Read wordy PDFs

With walls of text guaranteed 
to make eyes glaze over

Watch long videos

That don’t make it easy to skip
through the fluff and get unstuck

Prioritize learning your CRM

Instead of how to sell 
better and delight more customers
So what usually happens? Agents and reps don’t adopt Salesforce. Data quality sinks. And it gets a lot harder to share actionable insights about your customers, preserve faith in the platform, and maximize your ROI.
Even if you’re lucky enough to have help on your highest stakes implementation (and the budget to hire full-time Salesforce administrators, bring on a consulting partner, and/or customize Trailhead)...it’s likely that:

Your Salesforce training will be siloed and look different in every system

Your tips and tricks will be too far away from where users need them, when they need them

Your Salesforce instance will be frustrating to use

It’ll be easier for people to revert back to old, off-platform ways to do their jobs

So where does that leave you? Without a good way to convince everyone to embrace the [very expensive] software that’s supposed to unite your company around your customers. 🫠
Salesforce estimates 94% of sales leaders believe they should be getting more value from their data. What’s holding them back? The 91% of CRM data that’s incomplete, with 70% of it decaying each year.

The Tango for Salesforce Playbook

70% of CRM rollouts fail. Here’s how to beat the odds. 💪
ICYMI: Most sales, marketing, and service teams *really* don’t like change.
That’s where the Salesforce Adoption Lifecycle comes (back) in. With proprietary Tango data and pointers crowdsourced from project owners who have made process adoption their north star.

PHASE 1: MEASURE ROI

What you want → Proof for stakeholders that Salesforce is money well spent
What you need → A way to confirm Salesforce is solving your biggest business problems

PHASE 2: STANDARDIZE PROCESSES

What you want → Documentation for every mission–critical process in Salesforce
What you need → An easier, faster way to create instructions that actually get used

PHASE 3: MANAGE EMPLOYEE CHANGE

What you want → Sky-high Salesforce adoption
What you need → A way to win over your most change-resistant agents and reps

PHASE 4: PROVIDE ONGOING SUPPORT

What you want → To keep support tickets and resolution times down
What you need → A way to make agents and reps happy and stay within budget

PHASE 5: OPTIMIZE ADOPTION

What you want → Confirmation Salesforce is making people’s jobs easier, not harder
What you need → A way to prevent adoption challenges and perfect your processes
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phase 5
Collapse
Expand
PHASE

Measure ROI

First, a reality check. If you want to measure ROI and connect your work back to business outcomes, creating a Salesforce usage dashboard and circulating a user satisfaction survey isn’t going to cut it.
The good news? There’s a better way to define the success of your Salesforce training project and justify your total cost of ownership. All you need to do is start measuring your process adoption over product usage and personal anecdotes. 👇
Instead of saying…
Try showing…

I ran [insert number of] training sessions

I answered [insert number of] questions from our GTM team

I’m not hearing any complaints

[Insert number of] users have activated their account

[Insert number of] users have logged into the system

[Insert number of] users are using Salesforce daily/weekly

[Insert percentage of] agents and reps are following the prescribed steps for [insert a Salesforce workflow critical to a specific business goal] perfectly every time

This analytics dashboard [insert Tango link] includes individual end user success rates for our most important processes in Salesforce

We’re [insert percentage] of the way towards achieving our [insert key result] in [insert timeframe]

Instead of saying…

I ran  [insert number of]  training sessions

I answered  [insert number of]  questions from our GTM team

I’m not hearing any complaints

[Insert number of]  users have activated their account

[Insert number of]  users have logged into the system

[Insert number of]  users are using Salesforce daily/weekly

Try showing…

[Insert percentage of]  of agents and reps are following the prescribed steps for  [insert a Salesforce workflow critical to a specific business goal]  perfectly every time

This analytics dashboard  [insert Tango link] includes individual end user success rates for our most important processes in Salesforce

We’re  [insert percentage]  of the way towards achieving our  [insert key result] in [insert timeframe]

The first set of stats above won’t tell your stakeholders much. But the others tell a story about process adoption as a proxy for a desired business outcome—and return on your Salesforce investment.

‍

Tango makes it easy to surface Salesforce process adoption metrics and structure ROI conversations this way, but you can still make the correlation between process adoption and ROI in other ways. Just don’t forget to make your work visible. 🫡

To optimize adoption [down the line], first you need to show adoption.
Joe Lehr
Revenue Operations Lead
PHASE

Standardize processes

Standardizing your business processes isn’t a novel idea. But there’s a reason why 71% of organizations have less than half of their processes documented…and it’s because traditional documentation is tedious, time-consuming, and thankless to make. 

‍

Thankfully, Tango offers a (much) better way to create step-by-step processes and share best practices at scale. 

‍

Could we be biased? Absolutely. But even Salesforce loves using Tango to teach Salesforce. ⬇️

I’m not getting the typical follow up questions. I don’t need to spin up ad hoc working sessions. I don’t have to answer a ton of ‘how do I do this’ emails. With Tango, I can click to create a guide that proactively eliminates confusion and walks people through Salesforce processes in context. It only takes me three minutes to make an SOP and prevent an enablement gap.
Lauren Murphy
Salesforce Customer Success Manager

Check out which SOPs Salesforce project owners have prioritized capturing with Tango this year.👇

Theme
Most popular processes captured in Salesforce
(2024 Tango data*)
Reports and dashboards
1.

How To Create and Run Your Weekly Opportunities Report

2.

How To Create Your Personal Role Dashboard

3.

How To Create a Custom Opportunity View

4.

How To Create an Open Case Report

5.

How To Create an Activities with Leads Report

Theme
Most popular processes captured in Salesforce
(2024 Tango data*)
Leads and opportunity management
1.

How To Add and Convert a Lead

2.

How To Add Products To an Opportunity

3.

How To Re-Assign Leads Based on Territory

4.

How To Set Up Lead Assignment Rules

5.

How To Create and Customize Opportunity Stages

Theme
Most popular processes captured in Salesforce
(2024 Tango data*)
Case and task management
1.

How To Open a New Case

2.

How To Transfer a Case

3.

How To Close a Query Case

4.

How To Create a Case from Email

5.

How To Configure Case Escalation Rules

Theme
Most popular processes captured in Salesforce
(2024 Tango data*)
Document and data management
1.

How To Update SOW Documents in Task

2.

How To Initiate SOW Docs E-Signature from Task

3.

How To Clone a Price Book

4.

How To Implement Version Control for Documents

5.

How To Create Custom Objects for Specialized Data Storage

*Data summarized from 86,000+ real process titles generated in Tango
*Data summarized from 86,000+ real process titles generated in Tango
As you standardize your processes (with or without Tango!), here are a few tips:

Interview end users to understand their daily work—before reinventing and operationalizing their workflows

Avoid taking a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to training—which forces end users to decipher what's applicable to them

Cater to your least technical end user

Make Salesforce data entry easy enough to do on autopilot by omitting extra info and leaning into “minimum viable context”

PHASE

Manage employee change

If there’s one phase of the Salesforce Adoption Lifecycle to double down on, it’s this one.

‍

Most Directors of Business Applications, Sales Enablement, Sales Operations, and Sales Training don’t have formal change management training. But crossing your fingers and hoping for the best won’t:

Convince change-averse end users in Sales, Marketing, and Service to embrace your new CRM and associated SOPs

Increase your odds of running a successful Salesforce rollout

Reduce the number of training and retraining requests in your future

Help you make an impact or get promoted

Change management needs to be a central part of your Salesforce adoption strategy—not something you address at the 11th hour. So where should you start?

Here are the top two suggestions crowdsourced from the Tango community. 👇

1. Understand (and empathize with) the end users who aren’t helping your cause

While most people don’t like change, some are more resistant to new technology and processes than others. These “ambivalent adopters” get a bad rap, but they aren’t lazy or bad. 

What most agents and reps aren’t that interested in

What they ARE deeply invested in

Memorizing procedures

Supporting anyone’s “culture of documentation”

Leaning into self-service

Making customers happy and bringing in revenue

Sidestepping change, staying in their comfort zone, and avoiding feeling stupid

Saving their time and energy for more impactful projects

Having their hand held if/when they do seek help

What most agents and reps aren’t that interested in

Memorizing procedures

Supporting anyone’s “culture of documentation”

Leaning into self-service

What they ARE deeply invested in

Making customers happy and bringing in revenue

Sidestepping change, staying in their comfort zone, and avoiding feeling stupid

Saving their time and energy for more impactful projects

Having their hand held if/when they do seek help

2. Pin knowledge to Salesforce in just a few clicks

To win over your ambivalent adopters, your best bet is to make Salesforce dead simple to learn. How can you do that? By integrating your Salesforce training in-app to enable agents and reps in real-time, in their flow of work.

Too long; didn’t listen?

Embedding Salesforce instructions at end users’ fingertips > Asking them to read about, watch, or remember constantly evolving processes. 

Looking for more pointers from customers who use Tango for Salesforce?

Create a clearly defined glossary of terms to increase data entry and reporting accuracy

Identify the early adopters/super users among your end users—and incentivize them to get their teammates on board

Don’t just partner with your advocates (your detractors may actually turn into your biggest supporters)

Train senior leaders on Salesforce so they can lead by example and hold teams accountable

To avoid information overload, consider a phased approach with progressive instruction

Remember the most effective way to manage employee change is to minimize it

PHASE

Provide ongoing support

Tango research shows most employees prefer to learn a new process by having someone walk them through it step-by-step instead of watching a video or reading a document. But that kind of hand-holding also comes with delays and dependencies—and isn’t sustainable or scalable.

While you may be able to go above and beyond for a brief period (e.g. launch week), staffing ongoing Salesforce enablement is a different animal. For that reason, providing ongoing support is a critical piece of the SAL.

Tango makes it easy to: 

Provide Real-Time Enablement

Bring Salesforce tips and tricks into your Knowledge Base, Learning Management System, ticketing tools, chat systems, and anywhere else agents and reps look for help.

Help users get
unstuck, faster

Close any support tickets that need to be opened ASAP, with as little back and forth as possible (🙌 for your average ticket response time and first-touch ticket resolution stats).

Encourage self-service

Pin your best responses inside of Salesforce so other employees can see it when they need it.

Stay within budget

Avoid hiring additional headcount (to support an onslaught of FAQs for a complex tool that’s central to your business).

Provide Real-Time Enablement

Bring Salesforce tips and tricks into your Knowledge Base, Learning Management System, ticketing tools, chat systems, and anywhere else agents and reps look for help.

What they ARE deeply invested in

Close any support tickets that need to be opened ASAP, with as little back and forth as possible (🙌 for your average ticket response time and first-touch ticket resolution stats).

Encourage self-service

Pin your best responses inside of Salesforce so other employees can see it when they need it.

What they ARE deeply invested in

Avoid hiring additional headcount (to support an onslaught of FAQs for a complex tool that’s central to your business).

What’s the best thing you can do in <10 seconds?

Embed or link out to Tangos directly inside of your Salesforce dashboards and:
1
Reduce repetitive questions by making key information easily referenceable in the flow of work
2
Guarantee your agents and reps know how to adopt newly instituted processes
3
Help go-to-market leaders navigate the custom dashboard used to drive their weekly GTM meeting 
PHASE

Optimize adoption

You bought Salesforce to help your sales force. Who better to tell you what’s working and what’s not?
‍
“Ops people often think they know better [than their end users]. I don’t know better. I want their feedback pre and post-build.” -Joe Lehr, Revenue Operations Lead 
If formal feedback (and accountability!) isn’t easy to come by, Joe recommends asking for 15 minutes each week to review Salesforce activity data with management and end users and re-align on business priorities.
Say your company’s #1 goal is to increase qualified leads. To do that, you need account executives to follow your SOP for sending prospecting emails at scale. By building a dashboard to give visibility into folks who need follow-ups, you can quickly flag when an action needs to be taken—and understand how you might make your process easier to adopt.
With Tango, you can leverage pre-built analytics and:

See which Salesforce SOPs are getting the job done and which aren’t

Surface exactly where reps and agents are getting stuck

Pinpoint process adoption challenges (at the step level)

Deliver personalized help to users who need it (and might not be eager to ask for it)

Crowdsource improvement ideas in-app to remove process friction

Quickly clarify any confusing steps to prevent widespread confusion

One last thing to keep in mind?

~40% of business processes captured in Tango are cross-app—which means optimizing your Salesforce adoption over time might involve enabling users on complementary tools. Here are the top 12 tools we see most commonly used with Salesforce. 👇

Success story

TL;DR → Salesforce and Tango are better together. 🤝
About Berks Homes
Why Tango?
Testimonial
Q&A

Increasing Salesforce Adoption With Tango

Berks Homes, a family-run new construction home builder, has been dedicated to helping clients build and customize quality homes for over 50 years.
51-200
Employees
PA, USA
Location
After migrating to Salesforce from their rarely used legacy CRM, Marketing Analytics Manager Jessica Sickler needed a fast and easy way to roll out SFDC from scratch—in three months, as a team of one—and flatten the learning curve for sales reps. 
End goals → To make sales reps’ jobs easier, drive unprecedented process adoption, transform data quality, and introduce more accurate reports and forecasts. 

The challenge

  • 92% of end users were brand new to Salesforce
  • The 8% who weren’t needed to learn a fully customized platform
  • Creating SOPs manually was painstakingly slow
  • To embrace the change, sales reps wanted hyper-targeted help on demand (vs. during next week’s training and Q&A)

The solution

  • Use Click-to-Create to auto-generate simple and succinct Salesforce walkthroughs (in minutes)
  • Embed how-to guides directly into Salesforce dashboards to increase self-service
  • Drive process adoption and improve high stakes data entry with Guide Me (asynchronous, on-screen, step-by-step instructions)
Guide Me makes my sales reps feel like someone actually took the time to think through their processes and create a valuable tool for them.  
Jessica Sickler
Marketing Analytics Manager, Berks Homes

Q&A With a certified Salesforce administrator

What were you most worried about leading up to your Salesforce launch?

💡

[Beyond the technical setup and data migration] Whether my end users—who refused to use our previous CRM—would lean in. Admin work is not their thing!

What are your tips for creating SOPs that end users will actually use?

💡

Besides using Tango? Cater to your least technical user, break training up into chunks, and really learn your sales process so you can customize Salesforce to suit reps’ needs.

What are two tactical ways you use Tango to drive higher Salesforce adoption?

💡

I embed a list of Tangos directly inside of my reps’ dashboards in Salesforce, and I respond ASAP with a Tango if anyone gets stuck while serving themselves.

Learn more

From one Salesforce pro to another. 🫡
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