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The CRM Marketing Revolution

All the Rules Have Changed and You Should, Too

by Kevin M. Turner

It happened officially about three years ago, in 2004. Your company’s marketing database became obsolete. A dinosaur. It was out of touch with current information about customers and prospects, not enriched by the knowledge accumulated by the sales force during the business development process. Not updated during customer support interactions. Not enabling customers to update their information and preferences via self-service. No longer a reliable infrastructure for your company’s marketing and corporate strategies. What happened?

The rules for marketing databases changed when CRM applications became a ‘must have’ solution for the enterprise, and the marketing feature set of CRM applications finally advanced to include sophisticated campaign management and lead automation tools. These two marketing milestones happened almost simultaneously when On-Demand CRM empowered business managers to deploy their own business systems, independent of the IT department. This meant that managers could control their own destiny by being able to deploy their own CRM solutions to support their goals.

The evolution of CRM brought with it a feature set for marketing that is far better than the Excel spreadsheets and Access databases that reigned over the last 25 years. New technologies make it easy to access and leverage a central corporate database of profiles, relationships, events, support interactions and knowledge, that can be used across the organization.

Marketing can support the business process from inquiry generation to upsell and customer retention. Internet-based business solutions have brought the dawn of a new generation of marketing tools and real-time data sharing to support the company’s marketing strategies.

Some companies have already begun their marketing revolution, having already implemented CRM solutions for sales automation but not yet leveraging their CRM for marketing purposes. Other companies have not deployed CRM yet because the technical obstacles were too cumbersome. Regardless, now is the time to re-think your marketing strategy using CRM as the central marketing infrastructure. New technologies are completely changing the way businesses organize, store and utilize their customer data, and smart companies are capitalizing on these capabilities to achieve previously impossible marketing strategies.

So what exactly can these integrated marketing tools do for you?

Lead Capture and Assignment

One sure way to boost marketing effectiveness is to improve the way leads are captured and acted upon. Old way: when an inquiry is submitted on the company’s web site, an email is generated and sent to the marketing department. New way: A new prospect record is automatically created in the master database that shows the campaign and lead source, scores the lead, assigns it to a sales representative, and emails the prospect with information or instructions.

Leads can be assigned based on territory, product interest, or any other defined criteria. Automated processing means faster routing and the ability to monitor lead progress on a real-time basis as leads are qualified and converted. Everything is processed and tracked in the CRM database, but more importantly, such workflow improvements result in greater conversion rates.

CRM marketing tools provide the infrastructure to support a broad variety of lead generation strategies, be it direct mail, email marketing, advertising or trade shows. It also provides the marketer with metrics that justify budgets and prove the value of marketing to sales and management.

Target Marketing

Getting the right message to the right people at the right time is crucial. Want to do an email blast to all prospects and customers within 500 miles of the next trade show? Want to target just the decision makers with a functional role of engineering for an invitation-only technical briefing at the trade show? In order to succeed, companies need to elevate awareness among their most receptive targets, at the right time with minimal cost and effort. CRM tools let you do that.

CRM enables an organization to leverage the valuable knowledge captured during existing customer interactions. Once you have CRM in place as your infrastructure, establishing and monitoring an effective process for getting sales and customer support CRM users to enter needed knowledge into the database is easy. Take a look at your marketing, sales and support workflows and business processes, and then identify marketing and communication opportunities. Combined with a focus on your marketing goals and strategies, you now have a plan to harvest the value in your CRM through target marketing.

Campaign Management and Effectiveness Tracking

Don’t blame marketing for struggling this long without a CRM database. Until recently, CRM solutions didn’t offer the features that marketers require to manage their campaigns. In the past, contact managers and sales automation tools did a fine job of tracking the lead source of a prospect, but they fell down when it came to tracking and analyzing all the marketing initiatives directed to a prospect, the status of each, and the potential or earned revenue that resulted.

Now, CRM solutions have integrated marketing tools to support full campaign management to conduct marketing campaigns, webinars, seminars, events, training, etc. Select your targets, send invitations, receive registrations via the web, send automated replies and reminders, generate attendee lists, and conduct satisfaction surveys. Every detail, online and offline, can be managed, monitored and measured as part of the campaign. Every touch that has been made with each individual prospect and customer is captured.

The result: dramatically improved marketing administration efficiency and effectiveness, as well as a shared, current, comprehensive picture of every touch that has been made with each prospect and customer. The icing on the cake is that marketers can take advantage of the data captured to monitor real-time campaign metrics, and measure the effectiveness of individual campaigns by type, media or time period.

Email Marketing and Communications

An email marketing strategy is as core to marketing effectiveness today as mailing lists have been in the past. Email marketing is timely, inexpensive, and, when done right, effective. With CRM, sales and customer support personnel capture and update email addresses in the central CRM database during their normal activity. It’s critical to capture and maintain an updated email database of customers and prospects. Email addresses make an electronic marketing dialog possible.

If you do email marketing you’re probably using an email utility. Why don’t CRM applications have full email marketing utilities built in? Many of them do have the ability to send batch emails and track reads. But there is a broad market of established On-Demand email marketing utilities that “plug in” to your CRM application and provide significantly greater features to make creating professional email communications easier and improve deliverability. These email programs also help to address the complexities of government regulations, tracking, and deliverability. When used together with CRM, you have a full-function email marketing solution that is professional, compliant and effective.

Marketing Administration Automation

CRM can support marketing administration tasks, which in many cases are time consuming, costly, and impossible to administer without automation.

Newsletter List Management: Maintaining lists of subscribers for newsletters and alerts can be a full-time job, but the task can be automated by integrating a web page to the CRM database where lists are tracked. The integration enables the subscriber to login, view current preferences, change and add to their subscriptions, and validate requests-and can send the subscriber an email to confirm and thank them.

Literature Fulfillment: CRM applications can track inventories and re-order points, and route orders for processing. Additionally, system users want the ability to track fulfillment requests and see their order history. In some cases, literature fulfillment requests need to come from partners, prospects, or customers via your web site-of course, all this can be accommodated.

Event Management: Managing events requires lots of coordination. A location must be booked, vendors contracted, speakers scheduled, sponsors signed, announcements sent, registrations taken, fees processed, and of course the event must be conducted. By utilizing CRM for event management, the marketing department can easily and effectively conduct far more events, while building a database of resources involved that may be needed in the future.

Customer Surveys: A CRM system can support survey administration and in turn can improve end results for both the company and the customer. Survey invitations can be sent via email from the CRM system, prompting the participant to click on a link that takes them to a web survey on your site. Email address or a passed identifier embedded in the link can associate the survey to the participant’s record in the CRM database, where it can be reported upon and accessed. CRM workflow can also send notifications when a survey has been received.

Conclusion

Every company has its own individual requirements for the perfect campaign management solution. With robust feature sets and the ease of custom functionality, On-Demand CRM provides the infrastructure to transform your database into an integrated marketing machine.

While every company has its own unique requirements for the perfect CRM and marketing database solution, there isn’t a business out there that can’t benefit from the new On-Demand CRM technologies. With robust feature sets and the ease of adding custom functionality, On-Demand CRM provides the infrastructure to transform your marketing department into an integrated marketing machine.

Yes, the traditional rules about marketing databases have become obsolete, replaced by a new generation of On-Demand applications that are powerful, sophisticated yet easy to use. To win the marketing game you need to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented by On-Demand CRM for your company. Doing so will help to make you and your marketing efforts winners.

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Kevin Turner is a principal with Model Metrics, one of the nation’s leading CRM consulting firms. He has been involved in CRM since the industry’s inception and over the span of his career has worked with hundreds of companies to strategize, define, implement, and optimize CRM solutions.

Working with clients in a broad variety of industries has enabled Kevin to develop a strategic approach to CRM focused on gaining user acceptance. He has led implementations and studies with organizations including the Tribune Company, CME Group, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Blue Cross Blue Shield, MasterCard, AAA, United Airlines, Lands’ End, and many others.

Kevin is nationally recognized and certified by leading industry vendors and speaks and writes on a variety of CRM topics. As a principal partner of the advisory board of the DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership, he provides strategic guidance to the center’s curriculum and students. A past president of the CRM Association of Chicago, Kevin has delivered keynote presentations on topics including Human Factors to CRM Success, CRM Strategy, Business Process Improvement, and Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty. He has lead classes at the University of Chicago on Sales Management, and DePaul University on Sales Strategy & Technology.

Kevin earned a Bachelor's of Business Administration from the University of Michigan and MBA with a specialization in Entrepreneurship from DePaul University.