The problem
You rolled out Salesforce. The implementation went well. The data model is solid and the admin knows what they're doing. And yet, six months later, a lot of your team barely uses it.
Some people still keep their own spreadsheets. Others log in only when someone asks them to update a record. When they need an answer, they email the admin, or they skip it and make a best guess.
This is what poor user adoption looks like, and it's common. It's also expensive: you're paying for licenses, and the data that makes Salesforce valuable gets thinner every week people work around it.
Why it happens
It's tempting to blame people ("they just don't want to change") or to blame Salesforce ("it's too complicated"). Neither is quite right. The real reasons are more specific, and more fixable.
People don't know where information lives. Salesforce organizes information in a way that makes sense to the system: accounts, contacts, opportunities, campaigns, custom objects. People think in terms of their work: donors, customers, clients, programs. Translating one into the other takes knowledge most people don't have and shouldn't need.
Reports don't match their questions. A report answers the question someone thought to ask when they built it. Real questions are messier and change constantly: "the same list, but only Florida," "and just the ones assigned to me." Every variation means editing a report or asking someone else to.
Salesforce feels like extra work. If entering data feels like a chore and getting something back out feels hard, people reasonably conclude it isn't worth the effort. The value has to be obvious and quick.
Training fades. People learn what they use every week. Everything else fades within a month or two, so the next time they need it, they're starting over.
Common solutions
Most organizations try some combination of these. Each one helps. Each one also has limits worth knowing.
- More training. Useful at launch and for new hires, but people forget what they don't use often.
- Documentation and how-to guides. Good for reference, but people rarely read them in the moment they're stuck.
- More reports and dashboards. Great for the numbers you watch every week, less so for the one-off questions that come up every day.
- Simplifying page layouts. Fewer fields and cleaner screens help, but they don't help anyone find information that lives somewhere else.
- An internal champion or the admin as the helpdesk. It works, until the admin spends their week pulling lists instead of improving the system.
None of these are wrong. They all try to make people better at Salesforce. The question worth asking is whether people need to get better at Salesforce at all, or whether Salesforce could simply be easier to use.
A simpler approach
Think about how people get answers everywhere else. They ask. They ask a coworker, a search box, a phone. They describe what they want in their own words and refine it as they go.
Salesforce adoption improves when people can work that way too: starting with a question in the language of their job, getting a clear answer, and taking the next step without learning where everything lives.
That doesn't replace your reports, your training, or your admin. It lowers the barrier for the everyday moments that currently send people back to their spreadsheets.
Where Hank fits
Hank is a simple Salesforce assistant built for exactly this. Your team asks questions in everyday language, like "Who gave last year but not this year?" or "Which deals are past their close date?", and Hank finds the answer in your Salesforce, shows what he checked, and helps with the next step.
Hank only sees what each person is already allowed to see, and he never changes anything without their approval. Salesforce stays your system of record. Hank just makes it easier to use, so more of your team actually does.