Get the biggest bang for your marketing buck!

In today’s competitive business environment, giving Sales and Marketing teams the right CRM solution will help them do their jobs better, shorten the sales cycle, enhance first impressions, follow through on all leads with the appropriate resource and generally become more productive. Read on for how...

Sales and marketing teams have been at odds with each other since the introduction of marketing - continually debating issues such as the quality of leads provided by marketing to sales and the effectiveness of sales in developing those leads into revenue.

This is an age-old problem that a comprehensive CRM solution can turn around - maximising marketing dollars and driving additional revenue for the company. Typically, companies spend 10 – 30% of their revenue on marketing activities and today executives are scrutinising every cent, with marketing departments now frequently required to quantify the ROI for every campaign.

That’s where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions can help. Integrating sales and marketing efforts makes it possible to connect leads generated by marketing to the resulting revenue generated by sales. A company that develops a strategy that offers true value to consumers in exchange for additional information may successfully increase its trust level with customers.

CRM can help build that trust by tracking how a customer wants you to communicate with them, whether by phone, email or in writing, capturing historical information about each interaction and then making that information available across an organisation – whether that’s down the hall or around the world.

Issues facing sales & marketing
Interestingly, an estimated 70% of the leads sent to sales are never pursued as the sales department believes they’re either the wrong leads or that the buyer isn’t ready to make a purchase. At this point, a significant amount of time & money has been spent finding prospects that are similar to an organisations best customers and developing a campaign to speak to them but without follow-up this is all wasted effort.

Only by getting the right lead to the right sales person at the right time, can such waste be eliminated. Another issue is that information learned about a lead during the marketing process isn’t shared with sales. It may take two or more touches before a prospect is ready to engage with sales. Each of these interactions can provide insight but sales may waste time gathering the same information again. Sharing information about a lead across an organisation can immediately differentiate a company from its competitors and close the trust gap between the sales & marketing teams and the salesperson and their prospect.

Plan for success
For best results, a lead management system must bring together the right people, processes, and information. In order to accomplish this, a system must:

1) Provide access to information across the entire organisation, including any pre-qualification resources such as a call center. With this information about every interaction, a better impression can be made on new prospects, improving the odds of winning their business.

2) Identify hot prospects and route them immediately. It’s critical to get hot prospects in touch with the right person quickly so they can respond immediately. With a fast response, even if it’s an automated response thanking them for their inquiry and informing them that the account executive for their territory will be in touch within 24 hours, a favorable impression is formed of your organisation.

3) Actively engage the remaining leads and nurture them. Marketing’s role is not just to attract new leads; best practice calls for marketing to nurture prospects and move them forward in the sales cycle. Marketing should continue to learn more about these leads and refine their messaging so it brings value to them, so they’re willing to share additional information. By building trust and interest over time, these prospects will move through the sales cycle until they are ready to have the sales team close the deal.

4) Track leads to closure. It is important to track all leads throughout the entire process to know what’s working and what’s not. By tracking leads and interactions with prospects, trends are identified and marketing processes can be refined.

5) Evaluate ROI of marketing campaigns. It’s important that you develop closed loop reporting that ties the leads develop with each campaign to the resulting revenue. Typically, it will take multiple touches in order to move a lead through the sales cycle. In addition to measuring ROI, which typically cannot be determined until well after the campaign is complete, consider using a ‘quick ratio’ which shows the impact of the campaign on your sales pipeline. This can be determined early in the campaign while you still have time to make adjustments to your messaging, list and offer. With proactive adjustments you can improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Lead management best practices
So how can technology help integrate your sales and marketing team to build a more efficient and effective lead management process? Here are a few best practices for transforming your sales and marketing teams to create a convergence for better lead management.

Create a ‘Corporate Memory’ that forms the basis for building business relationships. Sharing what you learn from each customer interaction not only builds a customer-centric focus, but also a true dialogue that demonstrates interest to customers when any member of your team can tell them “I remember you...” or “I see you were working with....” In today’s fast-paced business environment, it‘s difficult to differentiate yourself based on products and services alone. How a company interacts with its customers and prospects allows firms to set themselves apart from competitors.

Provide access for your entire company. Technology can connect your entire organisation any time and anywhere. Whether down the hall or around the globe, CRM technology can empower your office-based users, remote users or those highly mobile sales people who need real-time access to their contacts, calendars and activities via the Web or mobile devices.

Automate processes. Automating best practices can ensure that your sales and marketing teams are doing the right things every time without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’. With automated processes, prospects are moved through the sales cycle faster by making sure no step in the sales cycle is skipped and there’s less seepage.

Track all marketing activities. Seldom are you able to touch a customer once and make a sale. More often, it takes several touches to find a lead’s ‘hot button issue’. Tracking all marketing activities and learning from each interaction enables you to determine what’s important to the lead and helps you to refine both your messaging to that lead and your marketing campaign.

Nurture leads. A typical sales person will tell you that most leads from marketing are not the ‘right’ leads, and that is why they don’t work them. So, rather than sending out just any response generated, marketing should send only qualified leads. For less qualified leads, a campaign to nurture and move them forward in the sales cycle should be established. That’s where technology can help. Through automated campaign management, you can create an ongoing ‘drip marketing’ campaign to keep prospects engaged.

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