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Case Study · Financial Services · Connecticut

Rebuilding Salesforce trust for an equipment finance & leasing company

A B2B financial-services team had Salesforce — but still ran the real pipeline in spreadsheets. Here's how we found out why, and closed the gap.

When the Pipeline Still Lives in Spreadsheets
The signal

The company had invested heavily in Salesforce — yet the team still managed the real pipeline in spreadsheets. That gap was the signal. Salesforce hadn't earned enough trust to replace the workaround.

The challenge

Salesforce was customized — but it still wasn't the trusted place to work.

Salesforce felt cluttered
Important updates were hard to track
Reports didn't reflect how the team saw the pipeline
The root cause User updates were being overwritten by automation no one understood. Once people see their work changed behind their back, they stop trusting the system — and the real work moves to spreadsheets.
The diagnostic work

The first step wasn't to lecture the team about adoption. It was to listen.

1
Listen to the team
Understood their actual complaints — not assumptions about "resistance to change."
2
Review the spreadsheets they really used
Found what those gave the team that Salesforce didn't — they were compensating for real gaps.
3
Inspect the environment
Configuration, user experience, the pipeline-tracking process, and the accumulated clutter.
4
Trace the rogue automation
Identified the automation changing data after users entered it — the source of the broken trust.
The solution · what changed

Make Salesforce the better option — not force people off spreadsheets by policy.

Before
  • Spreadsheets were the real source of truth
  • Mystery automation overwrote user updates
  • Cluttered, hard to navigate
  • Reports didn't match the team's view
After
  • Salesforce trusted as the system of record
  • Automation understood, corrected, under control
  • Cleaner UX, aligned to how lending & leasing runs
  • Updates stay put — reporting people can trust
Why it mattered

This wasn't an adoption problem. It was a trust problem.

When a team keeps spreadsheets next to Salesforce, they're telling you something: they don't trust the data, the reports, or that their updates will survive. Leadership sees one version of the pipeline, the team works from another — and forecasts get hard to rely on. The work was to close that gap.

The result

A cleaner, more reliable pipeline the team actually had reason to use.

2 → 1
sources of truth — the pipeline moved back into Salesforce
Resolved
the mystery automation that was overwriting user updates
Restored
team trust — spreadsheets no longer the "safer" version of the truth
Services applied
Data Trust Audit Automation Audit Cleanup Sprint Pipeline process review User-adoption diagnostics

Seeing your team in this story?

If the real pipeline lives in spreadsheets, there's usually a fixable reason. Let's find it.

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