September saw us host our third Salesforce Republic meetup and this time we took the event off-site. The team at Salesforce consultancy, 4C, allowed us to use their office space to host the third in the series all about CRM convergence.
Speaking at the event we had two experienced Salesforce professionals, both passionate about sharing their knowledge of CRM convergence. Salesforce Technical Architect and Director at Think Contracting, Andrew White and Business Analyst at Janus Henderson Investors, Frangeskos Mastropavlos.
Overcoming the challenges of CRM Convergence
Andrew kicked-off the evening with his guidelines on how to approach a CRM convergence scenario. He started off with a definition of what CRM convergence actually is: “Multiple companies, or subgroups within a company, wishing to change from using multiple CRM orgs to utilising a single CRM org” and quickly moved onto the potential challenges Salesforce professionals can face when merging CRMs.
With a fantastic reference to Aristotle and Plato, Andrew described three of these key challenges (on-platform functionality, off-platform systems and intermediary architecture) and how to overcome them.
Below is Andrew’s guidelines for overcoming challenges and essentially achieving a technical happy medium when it comes to CRM convergence:
• Accept there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for convergence
• Understand your preferred solution and what would be needed to reproduce
what is there today
• Work with the business owners and your BA to understand the scope for
change within the business
• Understand that you must use technical complexity to fill the gaps that can’t
be standardised
• Use this information to design a solution at the right point on the scale
• Look for pre-built third party solutions to reduce risk and workload on your
technical team
• Work in stages to provide a minimum viable solution then build from there if
you have available scope
Finally, Andrew opened the conversation to the floor inviting any questions and prompting further insights into CRM convergence within the world of Salesforce.
Delve deeper into CRM Convergence
Frangeskos really did talk all things CRM convergence, explaining in more depth what a CRM convergence project is, including, the fact that for most convergence projects there is a general rule (streamline processes) and then an exception (unique processes) which applies to each individual business and their culture, size, industry etc.
In the interest of providing a wide overview of all things CRM convergence, Frangeskos offered insights and tips across the areas below:
• Business model and account hierarchy
• Sales funnel, opportunity types and pipeline
• Quotes, products, pricing and contracts
• Territory management, forecast and quotas
A key takeaway from Frangeskos’ talk, was to remember that CRM convergence is a marathon, and not a sprint. It’s important to take your time to understand the requirements and listen to the individual business needs in order to achieve success.
We’d like to thank everyone who attended the event, as well as our fantastic speakers Andrew and Frangeskos for contributing to such a great evening. There were some really interesting conversations had and insights and experiences shared.
The date and location for our next meetup has been released. Don’t miss out, sign up today!
