Customer Relationship Management. Three words that strike fear into the heart of marketeers. Here's a phrase, four words that show you where the balance lies:
Sales and Marketing (Insert "Team/Manager/Director/VP" here).
Sales first, marketing second. And I get that, without sales you don't get to survive as a business. Though without marketing can you get sales? You'd like to think that these two operations would work in total harmony with each other, like those Von Trapp kids singing at a Nazi concert.
But no, when it comes to sales and marketing working seamlessly it's more like all the Von Trapp kids are taking a piss on stage. Sure, they're singing, but they're focused on each other's pissing competition.
The general debate that happens between marketing and sales is that marketing spends money, but sales can't prove that it supplied the leads. It was all the sales effort. Conversely, marketing teams can't demonstrate that sales are doing a great job in converting the leads that their campaigns provide to sales.
No one knows what's working. The way to get greater insight into the sales and marketing efforts is to be transparent with the CRM process. Everyone needs to know their place and how they can influence each stage of the CRM.
Customer Relationship Management. Three words that strike fear into the heart of marketeers but should be seen as the tool to achieve the holy grail: relating marketing activity to sales.
In our experience, we've noticed that CRM software, like SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics or Nimble, is usually the domain of the sales team. Marketing doesn't get to see the magic that happens within the CRM. At Good we feel that sharing the access across marketing and sales makes for better marketing campaigns that lead to stronger sales results.
When we start talking to clients about CRM we start out by looking at four simple stages:
1. Find
Where are the people that you want to target? Look at your customer journey map and understand what moments you can inject yourself into and become useful. Identify these areas, on and offline, and move onto the next stage.
2. Win
How do you then get these people into your CRM? It depends on what line of business you're in. Sometimes it’s an enquiry. Sometimes it's by asking them to sign up to something. Other times they’ll come to you. When we get their details into the CRM, it’s a win, but when you have got that new person there then the work starts.
3. Keep
How do you keep these beautiful people in your CRM? Email? Automated marketing? Direct mail? Personal visits? How do you keep these people engaged when they may not be in a buying cycle? How do you keep yourself relevant and, most importantly, useful?
4. Convert
What do we mean by win when we’ve already converted? Buying! Or recommending! A whole lot of ways to do this, it comes down to the strength of your activity during the "Keep" stage to trip someone into a purchase or a recommendation.
We find that this four-step process can bring the marketing and the sales teams together to make the entire customer journey a measurable experience. What worked and how do we improve? What was wasted effort that we should just bin?
And guess what? The golden thread that runs through each stage is your brand values. You’ll lose at winning pretty quickly if you don’t understand what it is about your brand will attract the people that you're trying to find. Also, without a solid understanding of your brand values, you won't be able to keep people subscribed to a mailing list or engaged in your social channel.
Most importantly it is the North Star between two areas of a business that can't operate with each but are, at times, at odds with each other. The values that your brand promotes must come together to influence every stage of your CRM. Adopting these values, every day, binds everyone together in a common cause: marketing, sales and, more importantly, your customer.
Sorry about that Von Trapp thing.