I highly recommend The Power of Habit Why we do what we do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg to humans, particularly Salesforce administrators and architects.
As mentioned before, at Optimum Energy we have a self improvement book club and we just finished The Power of Habit. The first section of the book is about individual habit formation. The second part is building habits in an organization. Third part is how habits develop and are morally evaluated in society.
While I particularly enjoyed thinking about how to break my own personal bad habits, (Hang on. There are Top Pot Donuts in the kitchen)…. I found myself contemplating how to help users develop the habit of using Salesforce.
Is there one essential task in Salesforce that can serve as a “keystone habit”?
“Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are ‘keystone habits’ and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.” Duhigg
Dashboards are key to drive user adoption, says my coworker and super-user Dana. If I can get a project engineer to view his dashboards at the start of every day, he may eventually dig deeper, explore individual records, and decide he wants to track additional data points.
A manager may require her staff to keep better records so that her dashboards are accurate. (Leadership buy in is, of course, essential for user adoption). By building the habit of logging in simply to view dashboards, you get over the first hurdle – logging in!
That’s all well and good, but we need to make sure that the most essential data is tracked in Salesforce in the first place. What program, system, products, etc, would serve as the key place to drive user adoption and improve your business?
“The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.” Duhigg
What data is tracked elsewhere, or not tracked at all, that will steer your users into Salesforce, and clamoring for more? At Optimum Energy, we work in energy plants and before my boss came on board, our Salesforce instance was strictly out-of-the-box Sales Cloud. The first process that he shifted was around pricing. Now we track chiller plants, boilers, air handling units and sundry equipment, and users have grown from the sales team to our engineers and project managers.
While you’re brainstorming about your own company or organization, go pick up this book. It will make you (want to be) a better person. Look at me! I’m developing the habit of blogging! I’m thinking big thoughts! I’m on a sugar high from that donut!
