Have you inherited a marketing automation platform? It’s a challenge in itself to birth a MAP at an organization—by that, we mean being the first to implement a MAP at a company—however, it’s a whole other challenge to inherit a MAP from the previous owner at your company. Helping clients figure out what they have adopted and how to proceed is something we do on the regular, and these 6 steps can help you keep your marketing automation moving forward when you, too, inherit a MAP.

Step 1: Audit Your Instance

When you start a new job, you are drinking from the fire hose trying to learn everything about the company, your role/goals/responsibilities, and your new team. It makes sense to get a 30,000 foot view before diving into all the details. You want to get the lay of the land with your new-to-you marketing automation instance and learn what is working and what isn’t working in your MAP (and other systems).

An audit is the best way to do this. You, someone on your team, or Definitive Results will go through your instance and point out any areas of major concern that should be addressed ASAP, areas to keep in mind but are not urgent, and areas that are doing really well. This gives you the information you need to make a plan of how to prioritize and focus your efforts.

Step 2: Tackle Your Red Flags

Once you’ve completed your audit and you know what’s working well, what can be left on the backburner for the time being, and what needs to be addressed immediately, it’s time to jump in and tackle those red flag items. Red flags are the things that are preventing your campaigns from performing properly, or worse, creating a bad experience for your contacts. Determine the resources you can devote to this work and create a schedule in which each item will be completed.

Step 3: Prioritize Your Yellow Flags

Once you’ve addressed any immediate concerns, you can start to prioritize those backlog items based on your business goals. While they are not necessarily directly impacting your ability to do your job or creating a bad experience for your contacts, addressing yellow flag items should help improve your workflow and your user experience.

Step 4: Leverage Your Green Flags

Because your green flag items are working well, you shouldn’t have to change, alter, or update any of those tools and processes, however, by examining what’s working well in more detail, you can learn how you might be able to leverage those tools and processes in other areas of your MAP. If it’s working well here, it could potentially work well over there as well.

Step 5: Decide What (and If) to Purge

Many new owners want to know what they can get rid of and how they can clean up their MAP so that it’s more orderly, in their eyes. Sometimes purging is an option, but it depends on what you are looking to purge and how you do it.

Step 6: Organize your own way

It’s very common that when there is a new owner of the MAP, the business structure has also changed a bit. There are times where re-organizing your MAP will better set you up for successfully using the platform, but you should wait to completely re-organize your MAP until you’ve had time to understand how it’s currently working, to address the red flag items, and to figure out how the new team works together.

Inheriting a MAP is a lot to sort through and figure out. If you’ve got too much on your plate, with all of the other things you are trying to figure out, OR you just want to ensure you get it right in an efficient way, we are here to help—it’s what we do!