Identify the Important Characteristics to Amplify Marketing ROI
To obtain more return on your investment in your CRM system it is important that you capture
important information that amplifies your marketing effectiveness and in effect provides more high quality leads meeting your ideal prospect profile. Without CRM your marketing is definitely missing the mark and costing your business money and lost productivity. With helpful information in your CRM you’ll be hitting the target and be able to implement a much more valued marketing plan.
Consider the following characteristics (fields) that must be and should be included in your CRM:
1. Identify the source of the lead/account/contact.
Every record for leads, accounts (companies) and contacts should have a field to identify where the lead came from. What is its place of origin. For example, in SalesLogix CRM this is known as the “Lead Source” and is found on a lead, account, contact and opportunity detail record:
Additionally each lead source also identifies a type of activity or classification such as email, web, trade show, advertising, etc. providing advanced metrics.
2. Identify characteristics about the business account.
The SIC-standard industry code, Industry classification, account type and subtype come to mind. Depending on your business the NAICS code may make better sense. For example, paint and coating manufactures that we support with SalesLogix CRM have a SIC code of 2851 and NAICS 325510.
For greater ability of account classification we recommend the use of a hierarchical link of type and related subtype for each account. For example, the account could have a type such as customer, prospect, competitor, partner, or referral source and then different subtypes for customers, prospects, referral sources, etc. Now you can easily filter all customer accounts and drill down to a specific subtype….
And don’t forget to include some type of active status prompt. If the account is not active then it may be skipped or placed into a nurture marketing campaign.
3. Identify characteristics about the people contacts.
This is where the rubber meets the road in business relationship development. People make decisions and do the influencing and buying. Contact fields include the critical first name, last name and title. How many times have you gotten an email that started with “Hi , ” because they did not have a first name.
Other items are email address, buying decisions role, contact type, their preferred method of contact (phone/email/face-to-fact), and active status. If the contact is not active, they have left the company or are deceased, you don’t want an inappropriate correspondence to happen.
Make sure your CRM system also provides the ability to indicate who NOT to correspond with and that each contact record especially contains a “Do not solicit/email” status flag. No reason to become black-listed as Spam….
Identify if the person is on a newsletter list, a Christmas card list, or a member of a business/trade association:
4. Identify what they have purchased or intent to purchase from your business.
For the sales opportunity standpoint your CRM system can provide the related products and services linked to each opportunity. Once the opportunity closes as won those same products and services become part of sales history of past purchases.
Having more targeted information such as this greatly enhances marketing effectiveness with targeted marketing instead of rather useless shot gun approach.
5. Other characteristics to consider that our CRM clients have used include:
- Rating of the influence level of the person within their organization
- Rating of the influence level of the person within our business
- Filtering by the number of days since last email, last meeting, last phone call, or last other correspondence
- Indicate level of interest from past emarketing campaigns (great for sales calling follow up)
- Track Year to date sales and current year compared to last year sales
- Identify those who buy products but not supporting services and vice versa.
- Use an internal A/B/C rating of account or contact to help set priorities.
- Identify contacts associated to other accounts such a being a member of a industry or trade association.
So stop wasting valuable resources, integrate CRM with marketing: identify where your leads come from, identify what most interests your best contacts and more importantly consistently build a stronger bond with people of interest from shared knowledge found in your CRM system.
Sound like time to start a conversation? Dick or Julie at 269-445-3001.
More on eMarketing effectiveness or Making your business work smarter with CRM...
What are other important characteristics does your business need to identify in their CRM system to enhance marketing effectiveness?
