What's in a Successful CRM Team?

A CRM Team is a cross-functional team that manages a CRM strategy and implementation.  A successful one is able to effectively develop and maintain a strategy that provides direction for long-term CRM goals, and implement, operate, and improve a CRM application.

Successful CRM Teams have a strong executive sponsor who believes in the power of CRM, relies on CRM, and touts its benefits.

The team also includes representatives from the user base, a core of user advocates that provide feedback, and use the tool to its fullest.  They can be used as references and models for best CRM practices by the rest of the user base.  These could be senior sales reps and managers, or senior customer care agents and their managers.

Part of the CRM Team would be the day-to-day operational support team that helps answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and also provide feedback.  This team can also manage reports & dashboards, administer users, views, lead assignment rules, territories, account teams, and other light administration tasks.

A Master Data Management Team has representation in the CRM Team, as a successful CRM implementation relies on good Master Data Management.  They provide guidance, best practices, as well as the administrative function of account cleansing.  They may employ tools that assist in  cleansing, standardizing and duplicate removal.  They also establish relationships between accounts.

Also represented in a successful CRM Team is Corporate Communications and Learning, or some flavor of such.  They keep up with changes so that the training material is always up-to-date.  They also can be a conduit for feedback, both for the training material and the CRM application itself.  Communication is key when making wholesale changes to CRM.  The team members know who to communicate to, when the appropriate times are, and tailors the message according to the audience.

At the core of the CRM Team is a group of Salesforce-certified personnel, a mix of business analysts and administrators, to technical roles like developers and architects.  They act as the second level of support after the operational support team.  They also build and maintain the application, provide new capabilities, technical solutions, and integration.  They take feedback from the user base, review processes and improve upon them through process changes and automation.  They help other teams who rely on CRM data, for example, the business intelligence and analytics team, or the processes downstream that rely on CRM, like order management and billing.

Successful CRM teams are by nature, cross-functional, from users in Marketing to Sales and Customer Care, to Operations, IT, maybe even HR.  A cross-functional CRM Team is one of the key ingredients of a successful CRM implementation.