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Our vision at Autodesk is to help people imagine, design and make a better world. In 35 years, we've seen a lot of changes. We've made software for people who make things in 2D, then 3D and now 3D in the cloud. Every aspect of our business strives towards the future we're helping to create, so it makes sense that our CRM needs to be at the forefront, too. To keep up with our development as a company, we decided now is the time to reinvent how we use Salesforce.
Autodesk has been transforming and becoming a leader in the design and make process. This transformation means we also need to re-imagine our Salesforce platform through Lightning. At Autodesk, we are empowered to be bold and decisive, so our teams came together and prioritized what needed to be fixed, stripped-down, simplified and optimized in order to do a big-bang release. Nevertheless, we were too ambitious, and moved forward when we weren't completely ready to go live.
The Autodesk culture values learning from experiences, so we went back to the drawing board. We came up with a new strategy—maybe as aggressive as the previous one—but with a better chance of success. One of the key factors we knew we had to address was the change management aspect for our end users. After wondering where to even start, our “Ah-ha” moment was Trailhead.
Trailhead is the perfect solution for us as it paves the way for us to reach multiple people, across multiple time zones, with the same, self-directed learning. At first, we specified all users should complete the Lightning Experience Features module to prepare them for the change, we then started to demo our live org to each group. But we need to scale. And we need to move fast. We want to have everyone onboarded during 2018, which means a lot of badges!
We decided to implement a pilot with a group of 20 users in different geos. All the training will be provided via Trailhead. We've curated the relevant Lightning modules and trails to create an internal Autodesk Lightning Onboarding Trailmix. Once each pilot user has completed the trailmix, we'll then mark them as “Lightning onboarded”.
One of the biggest challenges we face when onboarding new Sales Operation team members (especially the ones in other geos) is that there is simply so much Salesforce training to provide! Not everyone has extensive Salesforce experience, let alone an Admin background. Time is precious and I can't have my team stretched to the breaking point trying to train everyone in Sales Ops around the world.
This is where Trailhead is invaluable. It is our go-to material for training enablement. We used to issue a "to-do" list of modules for on-boarding new members. Now, we simply share our Trailmix and track each persons' progress.
As part of the Sales Automation and Analytics team, we receive reporting requests all the time. But we simply can't scale to building individual reports for every area of the organization that requires them. In this age of self-service support, we can now point users to the Analytics Dashboard Navigation reporting module. In fact, with a greater understanding of what's actually available to them, many of our users find they can actually create better reports themselves as they have a clearer understanding of the data that's available to them.
We've now mandated that users have this badge before asking us for support (unless the support they require is in completing the badge!). This has really been a valuable way to make sure users from Marketing, Sales, and Analytics, all have similar knowledge and that we can then talk the same language when looking at Report Types and the new Lightning Reporting.
With a global team, it can be difficult to keep everyone fully up-to-date on all areas of Salesforce expertise. Trailhead has become our number one way of ensuring everyone uses and understands Salesforce functionality. And, of course, to prove to all that learning Salesforce is fun!
There are basic questions that we receive that can honestly be better explained via Trailhead.
Our onboarding pilot program with Trailhead will certainly be key to driving adoption. Over the next two months, we plan to onboard over 100 users across all geos, who will collectively earn more than 700 badges by the end of April.
By using Trailhead, we've been able to save countless hours of time we would have had to spend creating presentations and holding multiple two-hour onboarding meetings during every two to three-week onboarding cycle. I just can't ignore how much more precious sleep I'm getting by not having to run late or early hour sessions with our APAC and EMEA teams!
Using Trailhead will also be the way in which our team pushes all future release notes to our users. We're planning on replicating Salesforce's release structure, allowing users to go back and see what the changes are and how they will benefit each group within the organization, which in turn will drive adoption even more.
Are our plans for Sales enablement and Sales onboarding ambitious? Absolutely! My director is already asking me a ton of questions on how we can further leverage Salesforce Lightning and Trailhead for future growth. So if anything, I see a larger adoption project in my future as we move forward.
But the point I can't stress enough, and the ONE thing I want you to take from our story is the power of Trailhead.
The gamification of learning just works. With Trailhead, training can scale exponentially, driving adoption across teams, functions and geographical locations. The benefits of switching our Salesforce org to Lightning are immense, but so too was the prospect of having to get the entire organization ramped up for the change—and fast.
Just like switching to Lightning, Trailhead just makes sense.
Trailhead is not only allowing us to reach more people, quickly, it will also drive a deeper understanding of the capabilities of Salesforce, breaking down long-held silos and empowering teams to trailblaze their own paths. All while having fun. If you're not already empowering your teams through Trailhead, why not?
