Written By:

The CRM Firm

For more than two decades, our Client (Client) has been the go-to advisor for middle-market companies seeking financial guidance. Specializing in mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, and strategic partnerships, the Client offers tailored solutions to propel businesses toward their goals. With a keen eye on sectors like technology, healthcare, and real estate, their team of experts provides personalized guidance to clients at every stage of their journey.

While the Client has been a trusted advisor to countless businesses for the last 25 years, their internal technology solution wasn’t the strategic asset they needed.

The Business Problem: Dirty Data, Poor User Adoption, and More

When the Client approached The CRM Firm (CRMF), they were experiencing issues with Salesforce adoption, data entry best practices, and overall data architecture. From user experience woes to inefficient reporting and a malfunctioning Outlook integration, they faced a barrage of challenges that tested their resolve.

As standard practice, The CRM Firm conducted an in-depth discovery to better understand the Client’s business needs, processes and procedures, and define roles and responsibilities. The CRM Firm had the following issues to resolve—

• • Poor UX/UI
  • Inconsistent Sales Operation processes, which lead to inaccurate data entry, user distrust, and ultimately, low user adoption
  • Poor Data Architecture, which caused duplicative fields and confusing relationships between key data points
  • Inefficient reporting
  • A broken Outlook integration
  • A partial Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) standup

Issue Impact: How A Broken System Impacted Their Ability to Do Business Efficiently

The Client faced serious negative business implications as a result of their poorly implemented Salesforce instance, and, predictably, the unreliable data led to a lack of trust in their system and low user adoption.

The team relied on manual processes and several third-party tools to regain control of their data and marketing efforts.

Datasite provided an alternative to Account Engagement and Outlook since both failed to meet the needs of their most crucial use cases. And the team leaned heavily on Excel as a data repository, and for reporting and data visualization.

Problem Solved: Clear Processes and Clean Data

Armed with a multifaceted strategy to overhaul the Client’s Salesforce implementation, CRMF left no stone unturned in their quest to troubleshoot, repair, customize, and, most importantly, train their team for success with their tech.

Over the next several months, CRMF took to troubleshooting and repairing the existing implementation, including reimplementing Outlook and updating Pardot (Account Engagement) to support mass marketing campaigns. CRMF built a custom solution that allowed their team to send emails from within Salesforce from selected outboxes to provide an on-platform solution and depreciate the need for Datasite.

Next, CRMF set out to merge, depreciate, and cleanse the existing, untrustworthy data, and accurately map data from appropriate sources to corresponding objects, ensuring data integrity. With reliable data, new data entry best practices, and clear business and sales processes, the Client was poised to move forward with Salesforce as their single source of truth, retiring their need for Excel.

CRMF then set forth auditing and deduping fields throughout the ecosystem including page layouts, and reports, and removing unused modules, fields, records, and more. They then optimized page layouts for improved UX/UI.

With processes to ensure data integrity, custom functionalities to streamline workflows, and a new Homepage view with revamped reporting dashboards for improved visibility, The CRM Firm was ready to take measures to ensure their new system was adopted by all.

CRMF hosted and recorded a training series to educate users on best practices and use cases within their ecosystem and set the team up for long-term success.

The Business Impact

This project took just under five months to complete and was done within budget. After several months of use, the Client confirmed consistent and noticeable improvements to their ability to conduct business efficiently.

With clean data, optimized automations, and enhanced user experience, the team saw renewed trust in their data and business operations and widespread adoption of their new system.

The Client stands ready to navigate the ever-shifting tides of the financial world. Through this process, a simple yet irrefutable fact became clear, clean data is key. This client’s journey serves as a testament to the importance of properly leveraging and maintaining technology as a strategic asset and enlisting the right partners to get the job done.

For help leveraging your new or existing Salesforce implementation as a strategic business asset with made-for-you processes and automations, trustworthy data, and more, contact The CRM Firm.