💃 Incentives and Salesforce Professionals🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Clean schemas, slick automation, and scaleable security configurations.

Salesforce professionals are into these things 🥰.

And why shouldn’t you be? Your Salesforce certifications require you to be proficient at them. Those certifications look good on your resume, your Linkedin banner, and they increase your salary.

You are incentivized to get more certifications!

What about your users? What incentivizes them?

And your stakeholders? And your boss?

🤔….👇

WHAT IS INCENTIVE

What Is Incentive?

In a Salesforce professional’s world, incentives are the difference between biking uphill or coasting downhill 🚴.

The tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail 🐶.

The wind in your face or to your back 💨.

Incentive is a person making the choice, not the choice being made for the person. Think about it - do you like making your own choices or do you like someone making them for you?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Why Should Salesforce Professionals Care About Incentive?

People don’t resist Salesforce because they “hate change.” They resist because what you’re asking them to do doesn’t line up with what rewards them.

Ignore incentives, and you get resistance, bad data, and “Salesforce is too hard.”

Solve for incentives, and you’re swimming with the current, not against it. Adoption becomes natural, data becomes reliable, and executives finally get the insights they’ve been craving 🙌.

Here’s an example problem 👉 Pipeline Hygiene

Every sales leader wants reps to log their opportunities accurately and update them consistently. Every Salesforce professional has heard the complaints-

“The numbers in Salesforce aren’t right.”

“We can’t trust the forecast.”

“Why won’t reps just enter their deals?”

So what happens? You build validation rules, create required fields, and add automation to nag reps with reminders 🔔.

And yet… reps still game the system. They type “asdf” into required fields. They update Opportunities 5 minutes before pipeline review. They treat Salesforce as an afterthought 😥.

This isn’t a technology failure. It’s an incentive failure.

Reps aren’t rewarded for meticulous CRM hygiene. They’re rewarded for closing deals. So unless Salesforce updates help them close more deals, they’ll always see it as overhead.

Enter - Incentives. Here’s 5 things incentives solves for-

👍 Incentives Trump Rules - Validation rules and automation can enforce compliance, but compliance isn’t commitment and users are remarkably creative when it comes to avoiding things that don’t serve them.

👍 Incentives Drive Data Quality - Clean data isn’t a training problem, it’s an incentive problem. If accurate inputs make someone’s life easier (fewer questions from their boss, faster approvals, higher commissions), they’ll enter clean data.

👍 Incentives Create Natural Adoption - Adoption isn’t about forcing clicks. It’s about aligning Salesforce with how users get rewarded. When reps realize, “If I log my pipeline accurately my deals close faster,” Salesforce shifts from burden to advantage.

👍 Incentives Reveal the Real Problem - Often, when a project feels stuck, it’s not a workflow or feature gap, it’s that the human incentives aren’t aligned.

👍 Incentives Drive Executive Alignment - Executives want dashboards, but they don’t always realize the frontline incentives aren’t supporting clean data. By surfacing these misalignments, you become a trusted advisor who understands organizational behavior.

HOW TO LEVERAGE INCENTIVES!

How Salesforce Professionals can Leverage Incentives

So how do you bring this lens into your Salesforce work?

🗣️ Ask the incentive question early. Before building, ask “What’s in it for the user if they follow this process?” If the answer is nothing, you’ve found an adoption risk.

🤝 Design for win-win. For example - tie pipeline hygiene to faster commission payouts.

🚩 Surface misalignment. If leadership wants one behavior but the comp plan drives another, flag it 🚩. This is where you elevate yourself from a builder to a strategist.

🧑‍🔬 Prototype with incentives in mind. Don’t just test the Flow, test the human response. Would you actually want to follow this process given how you’re rewarded?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Stop thinking of Salesforce as primarily a technology problem. It’s an incentive design problem wrapped in technology 🫡.

When you start every project with the incentive lens, you’ll see misalignments faster, build solutions that stick, and finally solve that eternal Salesforce puzzle- how to make adoption feel natural.

Because at the end of the day it’s not about the clicks 🖱️. It’s about the carrots 🥕.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes