Essential SOPs Part 6: Training Material Audits
You can build the perfect field. If nobody knows how to use it, it's just another box people tab past.
This is the sixth post in our Essential SOPs for Salesforce Admins series, based on my session at Texas Dreamin'. Part 1 made the case for routine maintenance, Part 2 covered user management, Part 3 covered backup and recovery, Part 4 tackled duplicates, and Part 5 audited the fields themselves. This week we shift from the data to the people putting it there.
Once upon a time, there was a field. The C-suite used it to make decisions, so the CEO asked for a dashboard built around it.
The dashboard got built. Then we started reviewing the data, and the discrepancies were everywhere.
Here's the thing: the field had decent adoption. People were filling it in. But it had never been consistently covered in training, and the training that did exist was all over the place. Over time, the team's understanding of the field drifted. Everyone was using it, just not the same way. By the time the dashboard went live, the data in it couldn't help anyone make a decision.
Nothing was broken in Salesforce. The field worked exactly as designed. What broke was the shared understanding, and keeping that understanding intact is the whole job of your training materials.
Why Training Goes Stale So Fast
Salesforce ships three releases a year. Your processes change every time leadership does. Your training materials change when someone gets around to it. A few reasons that gap opens up:
It was built for launch. Most training gets written for go-live and never touched again. The org keeps evolving. The guide stays frozen on day one.
It lives everywhere. An implementation deck, a Google Doc from the last admin, a recorded call nobody can find, a sticky note on someone's monitor. If people can't find it, it doesn't exist.
Tribal knowledge fills the gaps. When the docs don't answer the question, the person down the hall does. Their answer becomes the unofficial process, and it spreads.
Some tasks just aren't frequent. Some teams close a handful of deals a month. It's easy to forget what a good opportunity record looks like when you only build one every few weeks.
When the data looks wrong, it's tempting to blame the users or the system. Often it's neither. As we saw in Part 5, a field full of bad data is frequently an enablement issue, not a field issue.
The Cadence: Annually, Plus Triggers
At a minimum, review your training materials once a year. But the annual review is the floor, not the plan. The real rule is to revisit training whenever something significant changes, such as:
A Salesforce release changes a screen or feature your team relies on.
You add a new field, stage, or required step.
A process changes: a new sales methodology, a new marketing-to-sales handoff, new pricing.
A new team, a reorg, or a new leader who will be making decisions off the dashboards.
Your field audit (hello, Part 5) changed a label, rewrote help text, or retired a field.
You keep getting the same support question.
That last one is my favorite signal. Repeat questions are your users telling you exactly where the training is missing.
The Annual Review
For your yearly pass, work through these five steps:
Inventory what exists. Find every place training lives: decks, docs, videos, onboarding checklists, in-app guidance. Note when each was last updated and who owns it. If nothing has an owner, that's your first finding.
Map it to your personas. Who is each piece for? Executives, inside sales, account managers, customer service, and marketing all use the CRM differently. One 60-slide deck for everyone usually serves no one.
Check it against the real org. Walk through each piece in Salesforce as it exists today. Do the screenshots match? Do the steps still work? Are the fields leadership cares most about covered, and defined the same way your data dictionary defines them?
Watch someone use it. Ask your newest hire to follow the onboarding materials, or shadow a user for an hour. Where they get stuck is where the training is wrong. (Shadowing is also how you discover someone logging the same mass email 20 times.)
Decide: keep, update, or retire. Same rule as fields. And when you retire something, archive it so nobody finds the old version by accident.
Don't Forget to Train People How to Ask for Help
Here's one most training skips. How many tickets have you gotten that say something like "the record is missing information"? What information? Which record?
Add a short section on how to report an issue: a link to the record, a screenshot, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. It won't end the back-and-forth entirely, but it cuts it way down, and your admin will thank you.
Make It Easier on Yourself
Training audits feel heavy because rewriting docs feels heavy. It doesn't have to be.
Record instead of write. Most laptops can screen record, and Slack has clips built in. A two-minute video is often faster to make than a quick reference guide, and faster to redo when a screen changes.
Let AI draft, you decide. Upload your user stories or test scripts into your LLM of choice and ask for a training outline. Use it to tighten your announcement emails too. Just review everything; AI can be confidently wrong.
Mix your formats. Hands-on sessions for big changes, quick reference guides for lookups, short videos for "how do I..." moments.
Store it like inventory. One home, clear naming conventions, an owner and a last-reviewed date on everything.
Why This Matters Even More With AI
Every AI pitch you're hearing right now assumes your users are putting good data into the system. If they're entering the bare minimum, or entering it inconsistently, your AI has nothing reliable to work with. Adoption and data quality go hand in hand, and training is how you get both. It's also how you protect all the cleanup work from Parts 4 and 5.
Where to Start
If training materials are the pillar you're picking up first, here's the single move: hand your day-one onboarding materials to your most recent hire and ask, "What in here doesn't match how we actually work?" Fix the top three things they name. That's your first audit.
What's Next
This week was about the people using your org. Next post, we turn to the systems using it with connected apps reviews: where integrations hide, why you don't need to be a developer to find them, and the twice-a-year review that keeps every key to your data accounted for.
