"We pay for Salesforce and nobody uses it": three causes, found in a week
It is the most common first sentence on our calls, and it is almost never a training problem. There are three causes, they are findable in a week, and they have different fixes.
Bohdan PyrihCEO, AdvirixWhat "nobody uses it" usually means
Logins are down. The pipeline review happens in a spreadsheet that someone exports on Monday. Loan officers or advisers keep their real notes somewhere else. The licences renew every year because cancelling would mean admitting the project failed. Training was tried; it helped for a month.
When we open an org like that, the adoption score in the Health Check is low, and the cause is one of three. Sometimes two. Rarely all three.
Cause one: the screen does not match the job
The org was built around objects, not around a morning. An adviser preparing for a client call needs household, accounts, last interactions and open tasks on one screen; what they get is six tabs and a related list. A loan officer needs the next best action and a script; what they get is a record. At GoodLeap, the fix for the front line was dynamic call scripting, claim queues and a role-based priority view. At 49 Financial it was one client view with every custodian's data in it; advisers became 60% more efficient because the screen finally did the job.
How we find it: the two interviews in the Health Check. We ask the process owner to walk through one real morning. Where they leave Salesforce to get something done is the finding.
Cause two: data people do not trust
If the report is wrong once in front of the board, nobody uses the report again, and soon nobody updates the records that feed it. Duplicates, fields that stopped being filled, imports that never reconciled. At Alterra Advisors the Salesforce environment matched the firm's own policies only about half the time, and the team spent 70–80% of the day inside it working around that. The fix was not a dashboard. It was reworking the household model so the data was consistent, then automating the referral workflow on top of consistent data, then the reports.
How we find it: the automated scan, plus one question in the readout: "which number on this dashboard would you bet on?" If the answer is none, the cause is this one.
Cause three: nobody owns it
The admin left, or the partner's project manager was the owner and the project ended. Requests pile up with nobody to take them; users learn that asking changes nothing; they stop asking and stop logging in. This is the quietest cause and the most common in orgs a partner launched and left. At Viedoc, 52 users had an org nobody on the inside had been told how to run.
How we find it: we ask who approved the last change, and when the backlog was last reviewed. If nobody can answer either, the cause is ownership, and no screen or data fix will hold without someone to keep it.
What fixing each looks like
- Screens: a Two-Week Wins. One role, one morning, one screen that does the job, released with a rollback. Two weeks, $5,500.
- Data: Data Migration and Cleanup without the migration: counts, de-duplication rules, validation rules switched on, from $4,500. Then the reports.
- Ownership: Run, from $1,600 a month: a named engineer who takes the requests, a monthly list of what changed, and a release process so changes stop being scary. Or an admin hired, with Run behind them while they learn the org.
What does not work
Another training session. A mandate from the CEO to "use the system". A dashboard built before the data is fixed. Each of those addresses the symptom, and users can tell.
A one-week plan to find out which cause
- Monday. Logins by role for the last 90 days, from the org itself. Which roles stopped, and when. The "when" usually matches an event: a release, a departure, a report that was wrong.
- Tuesday. A 45-minute interview with the person whose role stopped logging in. One real morning, step by step. Where they leave Salesforce is the finding.
- Wednesday. The scan: duplicates, fill rates on the twenty fields that matter, automations competing on the same object.
- Thursday. A 45-minute interview with the admin, or with whoever answers requests now. Who approved the last change, when the backlog was last reviewed.
- Friday. The readout: which of the three causes, what fixing it costs, and what to do in the next 30 days.
That is the Health Check, applied to adoption. It takes about three hours of your team's time, and it ends with a price, not a training plan.
The Health Check finds which of the three it is in five days, with a price next to the fix: how it runs. If you already know it is ownership, Run starts with a full review in the first week.