Sales and Marketing Forum

What Makes for the Best CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) is back! What a difference a few years makes. Not too long ago, surveys were reporting that 70-80% of all CRM initiatives failed. That was yesterday. This is today. While CRM implementation results leave a lot to be desired, it is amazing what can happen when best practices and best features are leveraged to build a successful system.

In our experience the critical items are as follows –

Ease of Use \ Adoption - Is the system easily used by salespeople in the context of the tools they are already comfortably using to do their jobs effectively. Traditionally this means seamless integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook - Email Tasks and Calendar?

Customization - Can the system (i.e. imports, data fields, reports, workflows) be easily configured by an internal business analyst (with a little training) and not be dependent upon an application developers for updates and maintenance?

Automation - Does the system have a set of built in tools (Business processes, Workflows) which can intuitively be used by an internal business analyst to template repeatable business processes?

Full Customer Life Cycle - Do the features \ modules of the system provide a ‘cradle to grave’ approach to appropriately handle your approach to Marketing (Awareness), Sales (Acquisition) and Service (Delivery) for your solutions?

Reporting - Can the system easily generate reports from the data captured which allow you to make the best business decisions today with the available information?

Flexibility to deploy \ Integrate - Does the system have the flexibility to be implemented in various deployment models to match your business and technology – SaaS \ License, Cloud \ On-Premise. And do these implementation approaches leverage the ability to use the system in an integrated manner with your current technology investments?

We hope that you can use this review when evaluating the best CRM system for your business.

For more information on integrating marketing, sales and customer service to drive the greatest lifetime customer value, please contact us at info@bb2e.com or visit us at www.bb2e.com

Tougher times create opportunities to focus marketing programs.

An alternative to a cutting marketing and sales budgets is to re-focus on only

the most effective channels and campaigns.

 

Intuitively, we know that some channels are more effective than others.

We just don’t know the degree of that effectiveness.  i.e. the old expression

“I know that I am wasting 50% of my marketing budget. I just don’t know which 50%."

 

In good times, when there is a great deal of competing marketing noise, we resist cutting back or trying something new for fear that our competitors will take advantage of us.  Now that many competitors have cut marketing back to the bone and competing marketing noise is at a minimum it is the perfect time to re-focus.

 

Put a stake in the ground and choose the one or two channels which are critical to

your success and eliminate the others for the moment.    Now, specifically measure

independent effectiveness of these two channels -  Leads, Proposals, Revenues, Cycle times. Play with increasing and decreasing the budget to see how these results change.  Once you have these results you know a much more defined baseline for your two most critical channels without the noise of other channels affecting results.

 

By adding one channel on top of this baseline will give you a good idea of the incremental value of the next channel.  You can then determine if the results of this added channel activity was worth the additional costs.

 

Please give us a call at (720) 529-5574 or look to www.nextiersales.com for additional resources.

 

Marketing in a Google World

A number of new tools/techniques have evolved for effectively marketing in this so-called Google era.

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The Google era requires a different mind-set. No longer is the focus on getting your message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Now marketers need to focus on targeted messages and message relevancy. Paid-search advertising is a leading cost-effective form of marketing because it allows marketers to place highly relevant messages in front of a target audience at the exact moment they express interest in a particular product or service.

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However, these tactics are useless if you can't properly measure the results. Tools and techniques which integrated Google AdWords search-marketing campaigns with CRM are the new approach. This enables us to understand the source of all inbound Google AdWords leads. Once those leads are pulled from a web site into a CRM, they are tracked through the pipeline, funnel, sales cycle, from keyword to close. By integrating CRM with Google AdWords, a clear picture of ROI is achieved.  You don't have to guess what campaigns and keywords are delivering new business. You know!

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Please review additional articles on CRM, Internet Marketing and Marketing ROI at http://www.bb2e.com/resources.html

Web / eCommerce Studies

Two excellent studies were recently published which provide a great deal of insight into online buyer behavior and how to address this user experience to enhance your return on invested online marketing dollars.

First, is the Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR) which can be downloaded for free through this link. ISAR provides industry benchmarks for Web site development and is based on data collected from 9,748 Web site evaluations since 1997.  The report evaluates average scores in more than 80 industries to create defined benchmarks in seven categories, including design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting and ease of use. Specific criteria are used to rate the best and worst of web development with links to examples of each.  Both competitive and functional insights can be gleaned within these industry sectors.

Second, is the "E-Commerce Metrics: Top Trends for 2006 published by MarketingSherpa.  A summary of this report with key trends noted will is available at BB2e.com's Resources. The entire report can be purchased at www.marketingsherpa.com.  Critical eCommerce trends are highlighted with recommendations to enhance online sales and customer loyalty.