About Me

eMarketing Association Membership

Contact me: netmarketing@comcast.net   >> Net Marketing Inc. Services <<

I got my start in internet sales and marketing 10 years ago as a Marketing Manager when I had an opportunity to pioneer the online marketing for a a modest $9 million company with a small sales and service staff. At the time I used traditional marketing tools — direct mail, print ads, catalogs, sales collateral to spread the word.  (by the way, word of mouth is still the killer app).

I was a reluctant hero when I showed the CEO how we could get to the top engine rankings in minutes using pay-per-click for a quick infusion of leads. After getting PPC management in place, I got to work learning about organic search. It took about six years to grow to a thriving $40 million global industrial sales organization with an e-commerce call center, service department, and outside sales team.  I was thrilled with this experience to bridge IT and marketing teams with “tech-marketing”. Eventually I trained some of the IT folks in this new marketing side so we could work together building a site that dominated the search engines at that time and the company still enjoys excellent ranking today for a majority of its products. Today the call center simply takes orders as fast as possible and makes very few outbound calls to get business.

Breaking it down…

Integrated Sales and Marketing

In an earlier post, I wrote about (Contact Relationship Management) CRM implementation. In this post, I’m calling attention to the fact that salespersons are paid to sell, and Sales Managers will want to know that any CRM tool is not going to slow their people down.  In other words, get in their way. The CRM software used here is Prophet21.

So the following approach can be used by Marketing to do the “backend work”, setting up contacts and tasks in the CRM for Sales to pursue. Here, rather than ask salespersons to set up their tasks, you, as the CRM expert, use your database marketing skills and intimacy with your CRM tool, to feed your salespersons the leads that they are to follow up on.

Integrated Sales and Marketing
(Making it easy to use)

Purpose:  Integrate Sales and Marketing activities using the Contact-By-Salesperson (CBS) report for managing outbound campaigns. Business Units (GM’s) and Support Unit (Marketing) will use this Customer List as a roadmap toward qualifying and placing contacts into the “Contact Pipeline” for generating new business.

The premise here is that rather than have salesperson set up CRM tasks in P21, Marketing will use P21’s Call Center Task Generation feature to push Tasks into P21 for each salesperson. The benefit is that with this approach, Tasks are Integrated, and Sales and Marketing are simultaneously targeting the contacts chosen in the CBS report.

ABOVE: Task Management can be used for salespersons and marketing to focus on accounts and contacts.

 

The activities required are:

1. 1.       Set Parameters/Expectations
2. A pre-defined number of contacts need to be touched monthly — either created, or qualified in the case of contacts existing in P21. A pre-defined number of Outbound Calls will be made by the salesperson assigned to the contact according to the CBS report.
   1. 2.       Data Cleansing
       Marketing needs to address:   1) Sales Rep ID not assigned   2) Contact Types (Customer or Ship To) inconsistencies. These issues are being addressed and require ongoing attention. During the Contact Pipeline management initiative. Reports are being generated on a weekly basis identify data discrepancies.
   2. 3.       Contact by Salesperson Report (CBS)
   3. The CBS identifies contacts and the salesperson responsible. This list is used by GM’s and Marketing to coordinate sales and marketing efforts in generating opportunities. These contacts are the ones placed into the CRM Contact Pipeline.
   4. Segmentation: The CBS can be filtered based on sales activity for contacts. For example, contacts with no sales history, contacts with sales history but need reactivation, etc.Note: Not all salespersons have the same capacity, so the requirement may vary.

 

1. 4.       Contact Maintenance Training
   Marketing provides continued training. To correctly enter contact information, the following must training must occur and become standard practice among users:

1. Marketing reviews Contact Maintenance steps with all persons who touch P21 contact information including basic contact setup, Ship To Address validation, setting the “Contact Type” and using the Classes tab.
2. Salespersons fill out a Contact Maintenance form to aid in capturing new contact information

Note: Historically (January 2011), salespersons create on average 2 contacts per day. With continued training, this is a manageable number of contacts to be entered correctly by each salesperson.

1. 5.        Integrated Sales and Marketing
   “Pipeline” refers to the Sales and Marketing activities that are triggered when Sales qualifies a contact (existing or new) and requests Marketing support.
   1. Step One: Marketing places contacts identified in the Customer List (See Section 2) into the Pipeline (P21 Task Maintenance) . Contacts now appear in salesperson’s P21 Task Maintenance window.Note: this approach eliminates the need for salespersons to set up Tasks. Marketing can batch enter multiple tasks that will appear in the salesperson Task Maintenance queue. This is made possible through P21’s Contact Fast Edit function.
   2.  Step Two: Salespersons select contacts in Task Maintenance and make an outbound call to pull up the contact and qualify.
   3. Salespersons choose to send qualified contacts an introduction packet using the existing CRM Literature Request drop-down. There is minimal change to what Salespersons already doing (e.g. literature requests) to trigger Marketing to follow-up with communications.

i.      Capabilities Brochure: personalized with stamped business card

ii.      Email Greeting: Personalized plain text email greeting from salesperson and a brief listing of our capabilities.

iii.      Post Card: Special offer on front, Salesperson contact information on back

iv.      Product Catalog (modify back to be self mailer

v.       First Order/Next Order, send gift

Salespersons mark their Tasks complete once they make the outbound call. This clears the Task from the Salesperson’s queue.

1. 6.       Benchmarks and Success Metrics:
2. Outbound Call Report
3. Measure revenue increases for all contacts, including new contacts in the Pipeline reached via Outbound Calls and Marketing Touches.

Summary: This plan is designed to coordinate Sales and Marketing efforts on the same group of customer contacts –in other words, working together.

Contact Relationship Management Planning

Does  your sales force need help managing their Targeted and Assigned Accounts?  Consider a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool. Microsoft Outlook is one example of a CRM tool, and most CRM software (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, Prophet21) perform like MS Office on steroids. I’ve led the implementation of these enterprise products for several organizations, and the key to success is adoption of their usage at all levels of sales and marketing as well as a training program.

Here’s an outline of the CRM Best Practices I implemented:

Important: If your organization has geographically disperse locations, form a Panel made up of Power User/CRM Champions  who assist in reinforcing day-to-day training at their locations. This person will also be the voice of users at their location, giving feedback to the committee.

What do you want to know? Sit down with your sales team and ask “what 10 questions about our customers do we want to know?

Task Scheduling: Meet with account representatives and review their Targeted and Assigned Accounts.2.            Agree on 5 Targeted Accounts to be cultivated over the next 3 months. Use CRM Task Scheduling Tools to Assign the Task to the salesperson. This will allow Task Notifications to send updates upon completion of the task (such as an Outbound Call)

Sales Force Automation: Completion of the Outbound activity should trigger marketing communications events. Become an expert at querying the customer database for your outbound marketing initiatives such as personalized email welcome messages, welcome kits and ongoing communications.

Have sufficient resources: Adding more contacts than you can actually follow up on will result in database full of unqualified contacts ! I’ve seen cases where more than 76% of Assigned Contacts had no sales.

Measure the ROI: CRM Task Reports should be linked with sales data (by Contact ID, Ship To ID, etc.) to show growth in revenue. Once you are able to do this, your organization will embrace CRM tools. Without the link to revenue, the perception of the tool over time may be that it is nothing more than MS Outlook with some bells and whistles.

I’ll end here with a graph that summarizes the process with emphasis on the maintenance of your customer database during your CRM implementation:

– Set Benchmarks, define what you want you want to accomplish and what success means

- Data Cleansing: Before you start reaching out to the contacts, do a little housekeeping

- Contact Report: Reach agreement on who the contacts are. Tag them for targeting.

- Customer Maintenance: Hold training on how contacts and company information should be entered

- Integration: Sales and Marketing need to be coordinated in outbound touches using the CRM

- Metrics: First cycle is completed. Measure how things are working. Improve with each cycle.