Salesforce and How to engage your Team

Salesforce and How to engage your Team

As an Instructional Designer I am always on the lookout for new technologies and learning methodologies.

Last year I was introduced to Salesforce and more so Trailhead. I have to say I found the platform to be quite addictive. I was particularly impressed at how Trailhead allowed the learner to get hands on experience using real life scenarios and the way in which Salesforce has used gamification. I was also surprised at the amount of training on Trailhead, it doesn’t matter if you are learning to become an Administrator or if you are a Business User, you can learn all aspects of Salesforce.

Having completed some of the trails and modules and obtained my badges, the question I had was, what if you are a Manager and you want to know how well your team is learning to use this platform? How do you know if your team are embracing this technology?

I couldn’t see how to achieve this until I came across Trailhead Tracker. Trail Tracker is a free App on Salesforce’s App Exchange and has been available for a while now.

The app will help you to guide your colleagues through their Salesforce learning journey using the material found on Trailhead, so you can track and assign Trailhead badges earned by your team using the reports and dashboards. Trail Tracker can automatically sync with your team’s activity, so you can monitor progress within your Salesforce org instead of having to login to Trailhead each time.

As a Manager you would probably get your Administrator to install the app but as I have a Dev org I thought I would get my hands dirty and install it myself. There were a few challenges, but the support documentation is very comprehensive, and I found answers to what I needed and completed the install.

With the install configured I then waited for the scheduled task to run and pull in the information from Trailhead. Setting a daily scheduled task will pull in the progress of your team showing you what badges have been completed, what new trails have been started, and what the most popular badges are to name a few.

I was using my Dev Org rather than a client’s system, so I only accessed my own Trailhead for testing purposes, but the Dashboard showed me my progress such as how many badges I had completed, average time, most popular etc. From a reporting side I could ask it things like “how many badges have been assigned but not yet started”?

I haven’t implemented this yet, but you can personalise your onboarding and use Workflows and Notifications to engage your colleagues. I have watched a number of case study webinars where well-known companies have used Trailhead and have found it to be a very successful tool especially when you bring in the competition side of it and offer prizes for the most badges.

So, my next question is “how do you create your own learning programme within Salesforce”? I have installed a couple of apps which are available and they have worked well, especially through mobile devices for “on the go” learning, but I understand that Salesforce is due to release their MyTrailhead which I shall be very interested in seeing.