“Your success of failure depends on the ability of a company to adapt to the modern business climate.”
If you are reading this article, you are probably interested in how CRM and marketing automation can help you bring your business to the next level. But, before we go on spewing the benefits, let’s talk a little bit about the chaos so many are experiencing in their business lives.
Are you living in business chaos?
You walk into an office, the desk piled high with notepads, business cards, post-it notes, and yesterday’s lunch. At this point, you don’t even know what color the desk is. A computer sits atop the desk, inbox open, and about 100 starred or unread emails. Sounds like a chaotic nightmare if you ask me. Yet, until the advent of CRM and other business software, this is how businesses operated.
Excel sheets were a way to organize and track your contacts, and read receipts and replies were all you had telling you whether your emails were received or not. And forget about remembering when the last time you called John Smith was, because it is lying on a sticky note somewhere between your multicolored folders, coffee cups, and to-do lists. Unless you were pristinely organized, this was what a day in the life looked like for executives everywhere. Although some might claim otherwise, there was no rhyme nor reason to how this system ‘worked’ or could even be called a process.
It is this chaos that inspired tech innovators to develop systems that make an organization more organized, efficient, productive, transparent, and, most importantly, successful.
Now, I am not saying that there were no successful businesses in the past, because obviously that is not true. What I am saying is that consumers are more involved and educated than ever before. Therefore, they require exceptional service, quality offerings, and, most importantly, a deeper relationship with the brand they choose to engage with. Technology, especially CRM, has made building and managing these relationships a whole lot easier. This is what I like to call, putting the ‘C’ back in CRM.
CRM is not a new term, but its accessibility, and the idea of a Complete CRM, on the other hand, is quite a new trend, and one that is expected to grow significantly in the coming year.
What is Complete CRM?
First, I would like to define the term, ‘Complete CRM’ as this is a term not widely known. A Complete CRM is a customer relationship management software that integrates both sales and marketing operations into one package. Why? To gather the most robust data about your leads and customers without having to invest in multiple third party integrations, and lose data by trying to migrate it all. A Complete CRM takes out the guesswork, and provides an organization with both a birds eye and detailed view of your business and how leads and customers move through your funnel and engage with your brand.
Let’s put on our consumer hats for a moment. We all appreciate when a business knows our name, and what we have purchased from them in the past. This personalization makes us more inclined to trust the brand, and purchase from them in the future. If your experience as a customer is positive, the more likely you are to become a loyal follower and brand advocate, am I right? This customization and superior customer experience is what a Complete CRM can help any business accomplish.
So, what is really the purpose of Complete CRM?
Some naysayers think that CRM is a management ploy, while others see it as complicated and unnecessary. Well, lets take a look back at the first picture I painted for you. How can anyone build a relationship with a potential customer if they do not understand who their customer is, let alone find their number amongst the hundreds of business cards scattered about.? I encourage you to comment if you disagree.
The purpose of Complete CRM is simple. Its purpose is to help a business make more money. Yep, it’s that simple.
So, how does a Complete CRM help a business make more money? By giving you the information that you need to provide the best customer experience possible. What do I mean by customer experience? Everything from their conversation with your support, the content on your website, engagement on social media, and so on. Only a complete CRM has the ability to collect this information, analyze it, and utilize the data for future communications, both on and offline.
Complete CRM:
– Enables you to collect valuable insights on your customer from every touch point including:
o Social Media
o Email Marketing
o Offline communications
o Website visits
o Conversions
o Events attended
o Sales (CRM)
o Surveys
o Ticketing (Issue tracking)
o Chat
o Signup forms
o Mobile (SMS and Inbound Call Management)
– Utilize the data collected to acquire news leads and drive them down your sales funnel with the use of:
o Automated emails and texts
o Personalized content delivered in the way they want to receive it
o Lead scoring
o Predictive Analytics
– Establish deeper and longer lasting relationships with current clients by:
o Understanding how they interact with your brand
o Understanding their buying behavior
o Providing personalized experiences when they engage with your brand
o Giving them unique content based on their past purchasing decisions and current interactions
How does your organization stack up?
I like to think there are four different phases that a company exists in. After each phase, I bullet point the key characteristics of each. Be honest with yourself, where do you stand?
Chaos: Take a look back at the beginning of this article. That is chaos, pure chaos.
– No accountability
– Lost or hidden information among departments
– Fragmented software that doesn’t integrate, or, if it does, requires a deep pocket investment without guarantee that data won’t be lost
Controlled Chaos: A little better than chaos, but let’s be honest, this is not going to cut it in today’s business environment.
– Grouped contacts, custom data collected, basic processes
– Dedicated marketing team in charge of email, social, mobile, content, etc – but with no real strategy in place. I like to call this “Willy-nilly marketing.”
– Sales team know what a CRM is, but that doesn’t mean they are using it!
Order: At this point, you have a CRM and are in the beginning stages of implementing automation and personalization into your strategy. Basically, things are looking up for you and your team.
– Marketing automation in place, including workflows, drip campaigns, auto-responders, etc.
– Lead scoring is setup
– Measureable offline/online ROI
– Ability to adapt strategy based on results
Creative Order: This is where every business wants to be, at the top, owning their sales and marketing strategies, and becoming hugely successful as a result!
– Personalized content
– Predictive analytics driven by integrated information
– Data-driven, collaborative culture
You know where you want your organization to be, but you have to be honest about where you are starting. Transforming a business takes persistence, time and dedication. Thankfully, technology, and in particular, a Complete CRM helps you achieve the creative order mentioned above.
Your customers are your business. There is no way around it. So, get on their level. Give them what they want, and make them love you. Engage them, communicate with them, and invest in getting to know them on a personal level.
What’s next?
I dare you to sit down and evaluate where you are as an organization. Ask yourself the following:
– In what ways do we engage with our leads and customers
– How do we move our leads down the pipeline?
– How are we tracking and managing the data we collect?
– Are we sending out mass emails or personalizing our content?
– How do we know what marketing strategies are working best?
I could go on, but I think this is a good place to start. Once you start answering these questions, you can better assess your needs as an organization, and start to set your transformation in place.
