There are numerous things to do to bring a marketing automation system online - there are setup decisions, building (or re-building) asset fulfillment, building numerous smart campaigns to run behavioral scoring models, etc.
For most small(er) businesses, setting up a MA system can be relatively painless. Your Salesforce.com environment is without a lot of customization, you have less records to account for, and your sales teams are pretty straight forward (one lead owner, one product line, one lead routing plan, etc).
My plan is to share our trials & errors, funny stories, lessons learned, and best practices to setup a highly unique, highly customized Marketing Automation system for an Enterprise sized deployment connected to a highly customized, highly unique Salesforce.com environment. Hopefully, others can learn from our adventures! And as for the title of this blog installment?
My UK colleague came to Detroit to "build" the Marketing Automation system on September 10th - and we joked about how many Diet Pepsis it was going to take for us to bring the system operational in 7 weeks (our "Go-Live" date).
So at the conclusion of our build/setup over the 7 weeks, I snapped pictures of my growing Diet Pepsi soldiers that contributed to my contribution to helping take the system "Live".
Here is the "final"* picture of the soldiers that I collected over the 7 weeks:
All in all, I consumed 3216 ounces of Diet Pepsi.
Not that I'm recommending this approach - but this is the first part of telling our journey. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of note taking, a lot of test/re-testing - and in my case - a lot of Diet Pepsi.
Hopefully, you'll find some nuggets of wisdom that you can take away toward your Marketing Automation project. If nothing else, you'll read some funny tidbits about our adventure.
Until the next installment!
B
*I know that I missed some of the soldiers that went missing - so the final number is much higher.
