Capturing more market share starts by knowing the top 10 marketing program questions to ask.
The best way to solve any business challenge begins by asking the right questions.
So, what are the top 10 questions that the best CRM consultants ask when they meet with you to improve your marketing program?
Let’s start here:
1) Execution: Do you launch marketing campaigns quickly?
Delivering marketing messages quickly is essential for maximizing campaign relevance. But taking time to first test and refine marketing campaigns, using small groups of users, also makes them more relevant. For example, Cloud Sherpas worked with a division of global credit information group Experian to help it more quickly test campaigns (on thousands of people) before fully unveiling them (to millions).
The result has been more relevant campaigns, leading to stronger customer uptake and higher revenues. In other words, the best marketing groups can quickly test, hone, and then execute campaigns — all before the message grows stale.
2) Campaign ROI: Do you measure the revenue generated by marketing?
Today, only about half of our customers can connect the dots between each and every marketing campaign — and the leads it generates — through to sales. All businesses want to do this, but it can be a challenge.
Well, some industries have it easy. Consumer products manufacturers, for example, can use email marketing campaigns — and coupons — to trace consumer uptake and revenues.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, pharmaceutical manufacturers must attempt to influence the prescriptions that physicians write, because they typically can’t access data about who’s using their products. In fact, they usually only get access to brick-level data that shows how their products are prescribed based on zip code. Even so, they excel at measuring every possible ROI angle, and it’s a model for success that any industry can emulate.
3) Selling: Do you “sell” leads to sales and track the success/failure of every lead?
Another problem can be cultural disconnect. Marketing gathers the leads, then hands them to the sales team. The sales team looks at the leads and says, “How do we know if these are any good?” Time is money, and salespeople want proof, or else leads go out the window. That was the challenge faced by software and services giant Citrix, which saw a high lead-rejection rate by salespeople, backed by complaints of overspending on leads that didn’t matter.
To address this challenge, Cloud Sherpas helped Citrix design a lead-nurturing program. Now, instead of simply gathering and handing off leads, the company’s marketing program works closely with sales users to gauge which leads succeed and why, to continually hone and improve the quality of the leads that marketing supplies (or chooses to withhold). The result has been not just increased uptake of leads by the sales team, but also greater productivity and higher revenues.
CRM ANSWERS? ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
The above are just three of the top 10 questions that our consultants ask when working with organizations to improve their marketing program.
How did we arrive at this top 10? At Cloud Sherpas, we’ve taken our experience of working on over 2,000 projects with more than 800 customers — including the likes of Panasonic, Genzyme, The Hartford and AXA — and distilled it into our CRM Excellence Framework.
The framework helps organizations understand, “What’s the next, best step that we should take to make our sales or CRM program better?” Because to succeed at CRM, that’s the first question you should ask.
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Work with Cloud Sherpas, one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages, to better adopt, manage and enhance your CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Cridland.
