One of the best investments you can make in your Salesforce CRM success is to have a clear plan. Just as you wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint, you don’t want to start with Salesforce CRM without a plan. A plan will help you to communicate with everyone, to do things in the right order, identify key resources, and keep a clear end date in everyone’s mind.

As you plan and prepare to get Salesforce CRM up and running, complete the following steps (in this order):

• Build your team
• Define and prioritize your goals
• Define your process
• Map your process to Salesforce functionality
• Define the reports you need
• Train your administrator
• Communicate with all your users

Ready? Click Plan and Prepare and watch the plan unfold.

This section tells you how to take the next steps by setting up your basic company information in Salesforce CRM. These settings include:

• Company Profile
• User Profiles
• Organization-Wide Settings
• Role Hierarchy

Ready? Click Set Up Salesforce to define how Salesforce CRM works behind the scenes.

When you sign on with Salesforce CRM, it's ready to use as is. But you can easily modify (customize) Salesforce CRM so it's a good fit for your business and your users. In fact, the more you customize the application to fit your specific users, the more comfortable they're likely to be - and customization can do great things to boost your adoption rates.

In this section, you'll learn about customization and get links to step-by-step procedures for making Salesforce CRM your own.

• Customization tips and tricks
• What can you customize
• To lead or not to lead?
• Capturing leads from your web site

Ready? Click Make Salesforce Your Own to customize Salesforce CRM for your users.

When you have Salesforce CRM set up the way you want it, you’re ready to add users. The final task before you’re ready to go live is to import your data into Salesforce CRM . To help you, Salesforce CRM has wizards to walk you through the process and provide some tips along the way. When the import is complete, you’re can start to train your users and announce that Salesforce CRM is ready for business. Note: This import step is probably the most complex task in any Salesforce project. For that reason, you may want to look into getting help from a salesforce.com partner or from Salesforce.com Consulting.

In this section, you'll learn about:

• Adding users
• Importing your data
• Training your users
• Sending out the go-live announcemenet

Ready? Click Ready Set Go to prepare to go live.

Now that you’re up and running with Salesforce CRM, you’re ready for the next steps that will make it a blowout success and take your sales process to the next level.

Here’s what to do next:

• Encourage user adoption
• Increase user adoption with additional functionality
• Manage data quality
• Join the community
• Manage releases

Ready? Click Make Salesforce CRM a Success to ensure great adoption.