Merging 3 CRM into 1 New CRM - After our divestiture and initial acquisitions, we decided to start fresh with a new Salesforce org. This allowed us to take a fresh set of eyes on our sales processes and data. This implementation and integration was definitely the idea of “sailing the ship while building it” and was fraught with huge risks. We had just acquired one company as we started, and acquired another company in the middle of the project. And the employee org structure was growing and changing so rapidly, that entire subgroups in sales were being created and staffed on almost a monthly basis. Because we wanted to take advantage of this rare opportunity to re-imagine our ideal CRM, we completely deconstructed it before putting it back together. It felt like bringing 3 cars into a shop, stripping them down to nuts and bolts, then building a cruise ship out of the parts. But in May of 2022, we went live with our MVP (Minimal Viable Product), and quickly pivoted to our Phase 2 projects.

The desire for a new CRM originally started with the head of marketing needing better data and tools. But because of the nature of creating a new instance and merging 3 into 1, the marketing enhancements had to be layered on last. And to make things even more complicated, we needed to track not only our end client opportunities, but also the strategic partnerships and referral partners who gave us leads. As well as gathering multi-touch data, because our services are highly relational, and may involve multiple marketing efforts to result in referrals or end client work. Building out Salesforce campaigns is one big piece of the puzzle, along with connecting various systems such as ActOn and other marketing technologies.

And in efforts to digitize handouts at trade shows, we collaborated on a QR code system, so the code could remain constant on pop up banners, while the marketing pdfs could be swapped out easily on the back end.

As we expand into the UK, I work closely with both the US and UK marketing teams. To help enable them as they align domains, branding, websites, email signatures, and other systems and collateral.

As the company has grown, our sales leadership began building out sales enablement, sales development reps, and other roles to compliment our business development sales functions. So I’ve worked closely with our VP of RevOps and his team to help configure and implement solutions such as SalesLoft, People.AI, Salesforce “Inbox Availability” for meeting scheduling, and other tools that allow our new team of Sales Development Reps to succeed.

in addition to that, in Salesforce we built out a process for pre-sales estimates of benefit. And a post-sales onboarding tracking process. Now these functions automatically create Salesforce Cases. And views and dashboards give visibility into those areas where a baton in the relay race is being handed off between sales, customer service, and our service lines.

As a service to our Certified Public Accountants (CPA), we offer free continuing education courses. In addition to the marketing webinar aspect, it is also a lot like running a mini university. So IT has been working on various systems to better manage and automate the manual processes. In fact, we created a specific “CPE module” in Salesforce to help. This ensures compliance with our accreditation governing body, as well as smoothing things out and speeding them up both for internal employees, and also the CPAs who are taking advantage of this valuable resource.

Showing gratitude and promoting brand awareness. Because of IT overseeing “office operations” at our Fort Worth headquarters, we also manage the shipping and fulfillment department. And one of the more creative and fun aspects of this, is coordinating with marketing on appreciation gifts for both clients and employees. But as we continue to do that, we also need infrastructure and tracking so the affect of these gifts can be measured, and we can ensure that any follow up from these gifts is being completed. So using Salesforce Campaigns and our sales engagement tools is important. We also created a custom “Gift Module” in Salesforce for visibility into what gifts were given to contacts over time.

Working closely with RevOps (Revenue Operations) is important for providing internal support for our Sales and Marketing organization. We created a Salesforce email to case queue specifically dedicated to this important function. The queue is managed by a cross functional team of RevOps and IT. And this collaboration between RevOps and IT is also helpful when finding and implementing additional communication and sales enablement tools.