Taking ownership of an existing CRM instance for your organization can be a very daunting task, especially for the B2B marketer that has no prior experience with CRM administration.

Salesforce.com is the most popular CRM for small and mid size organizations due to it ease of implementation and on-the-fly configuration that allows it to meet changing needs over time.  Finally – powerful tools like chatter, data.com and a seemingly unlimited host of 3rd party apps that can be installed via the AppExchange make it the choice for B2B marketers worldwide.

Darren Young is interviewed on the B2B Marketing How To to share his suggestions on what marketers that find themselves in the driver’s seat for their organization’s Salesforce.com CRM do to ensure they are getting the most from their implementation.  Darren has previously worked for SalesForce.com as an Account Executive and now works at Deloitte Canada as a SalesForce.com consultant.

Darren’s top three things to do if you are taking over your company’s existing SFDC instance:

1. Understand the History:  Have a conversation with the previous owner (if he/she is still with the company) and ask what sections of the system are being used today, which sections aren’t and why.  Make sure to also interview at least one team member from key functional areas such as sales, customer service, support, implementation and product to obtain multiple data points on usage.
2. Understand Your Data:  Vet random account, contact and opportunity records with their owners to build your confidence of what is in the CRM.
3. Identify the most important data elements to the organization and build compliance plans around those data elements only.  100% compliance on every field is not possible – even for the most data driven organizations.  Be realistic and focus your energy where your organization will get the most return.  You might be surprised how few fields of information this really is!

I also asked Darren to share his top resources for the new B2B marketer getting to know SFDC:

1. Leverage the Premiere Support Service (this is subscription level dependant but in all likelihood you may already have access)
2. Tap into the user community (always free)
3. Download the dashboard packs from the AppExchange
4. Take advantage of the training webinars 

Next show will be part two of our Salesforce.com discussion where we will invite Darren Young to guest again to talk about what considerations marketers need to observe when planning their implementation of SFDC from scratch!

Listen to the Show:

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