(sales x marketing) to the power of technology = extraordinary results

CRM for Marketing: It’s time!

One of B2B Marketing’s greatest challenges is providing well qualified leads to sales and yet they all too often don’t have the systems that support that effort. What would a Marketing CRM system look like? It would include:

1. Having an engaging interactive marketing website that has relevant and timely content and is easy to use. It should be easily adaptable for the times when new email campaigns drive traffic to the site.

2. An email blast capability that allows targeting to specific audiences. When they arrive at your site, the ability to know that not only did they open that email and clicked through to the site – but also to know what they actually did at the site. You have the capacity to track prospects from the email through the time they spend on the various pages of your site.

3.  An integration with Sales’ CRM so that when the lead wants to have a meeting with someone, that meeting can be scheduled in your CRM system with the appropriate sales person.  That sales person can add information they learn in the prospect meeting to what is known about the lead so that if there isn’t an immediate opportunity, that lead can continue to be nurtured by marketing – and not just dropped by sales.

4.  Allowing the sales person to know all the information that the lead has been exposed to and looked at (their Interest Profile), so sales can gauge their interest levels, and present information that furthers the conversation, rather than starting at the beginning.

5.  Being able to get metrics on leads that become customers, so you can know Marketing’s contribution to revenue, as well as everything provided along the way.

That’s just the start of what a Marketing CRM system could provide to an organization, if they wanted to upgrade their interactive capacity and the value they deliver to the organization. And such systems are available for less than a fulltime, experienced IT headcount on an annualized basis.

What’s the ROI? For one of my customers, implementing this type of a solution resulted in 35% increase in sales the quarter following the first full quarter the tools were implemented and used. If your company earns $3.75M per quarter, that’s a $1.3M increase – and that’s only over a single quarter. In the next few months I’ll be exploring more lead nurturing techniques on Sales x Marketing and demonstrating why Marketing CRM can give such a dramatic increase to your company’s bottom line.

Is your customer data flat?

When you look up customer data in your company’s CRM system, what does it look like? Does it come in a flat little wafer of: name, contact info …. and then …. nothing? If CRM/web interaction only captures this stock lead info then you’re missing the differentiation dimension that will help you build a relationship.

Maybe you keep notes about birthdays, special occasions and interests. If you do you’re ahead of many sales organizations, but you haven’t really experienced what today’s technology can do to maximize your customer data.

Of course you want to be talking with customers and prospects, hearing their interests and needs, but in addition you want access to the data about the time they’ve spent on your website, the pages they’ve lingered over and reports they’ve downloaded.

If your CRM system isn’t set up to capture this information, there are extensions available to do this. The future of CRM includes extensions that automatically update your prospect and customer data with information about their interactions with your website.

You should be able to pull up a prospect/customer screen and see that this particular person downloaded a report on a specific service you provide and spent 8 minutes reading that section of your site. I've been building this kind of functionality into software for the past 5 years and its ability to bridge the communication gap between marketing and sales is heartening. For more information about how gathering customer data can enrich the sales process, visit the Einsof website's research section.