You’re Overthinking It: Why Doing Too Much Slows Your CRM Implementation

Salesforce CRM, Marketing Cloud, or any other customer relationship management (CRM) packages can be extremely powerful and generate amazing results for your business. They come with an incredibly robust set of features. Literally you can do almost anything with some of these tools. But the fact that you can do anything does not mean that you should do everything the day that you start. 

Yes, before you bought the product you saw a truly amazing demo and yes, great technology salespeople are good at anchoring buyers on the really sexy features. But you may not yet be equipped to leverage those features from a data, technical skills, or audience engagement standpoint.  

I hear myself saying this often enough that it needs a full discussion: If you can’t scale it, you shouldn't do it. Meaning, if you’re trying to cram everything into your initial implementation, you are not building a scalable understanding of performance that will help you operationally while also contribute to revenue. 

I get it. It’s tempting to want to get up and running, bells, whistles and all. You were wowed in the demo by all the customizations. But an overcomplicated implementation risks lack of user adoption, faulty logic, and future fixes that need to be made. Not to mention the prospect of cost overruns, problems with support, and erosion of your investment. 

Remember that, even though you purchased a CRM to address specific challenges and you’re anxious to get beyond ‘out-of-the-box' functionality, simply leveraging these tools in their plug-and-play way is often an advantage for the organization.  

Here are 3 primes (Tria Prima means ‘three primes’...see what I did there?) to help you start slow, steady, and then scale. 

• Bring in experts to keep your ops team focused on running the business and your sales team focused on growing the business. When implementing a new CRM, the most important thing you can achieve is consistency of use by your sales and account management teams . If you're utilizing a marketing tool like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, recognize that the most important thing is consistent volume. And remember that volume of outbound marketing does not require you to utilize every feature of the software before sending your first message. Bringing in a consultant to assist you is often the fastest way to help your team mature from the basics of volume to more personalized high volume. 

• Take time to consider current and future process needs so your goals and roadmap are clear. You may be experiencing pressure to move rapidly, or you may be pressuring yourself to do so. But momentum without assessing where you’ve been, what you know you need, what you think you need, and the objectively logical steps to help you accomplish those things often ends up being a lot of motion, without a lot of forward movement. Pause to deliberately outline process objectives and requirements. Your future self will thank your past self. 

• Keep your roadmap in mind and revisit it often. Like the previous item, it’s easy to spin off in a million directions, especially as you and your team gain confidence with these tools. Keep your roadmap visible and go back to it to ensure you’re sticking to the plan by focusing on what matters most.  You had goals for your purchase; ask yourself if the complexity gets you closer to that goal or if it is better suited as a roadmap item that can compete with other value adding initiatives. 

We're not advocating that you go backwards if you're converting to a new tool. If you already had extremely sophisticated marketing, you should probably seek to replace that with your implementation plan, but most clients that we work with are not in that position. Just know that complexity often follows new habits, so if you are not yet doing so, just take things one step at a time and leverage your roadmap. Prioritize new conventions that automate and make life easier first, then worry about the super sophisticated features second. 

Focus on your current (and simple) capabilities and grow complexity as your CRM or Marketing Cloud chops improve.