How well do you know your clients? Sure, you might have created those detailed customer personas to build your marketing campaigns around. You’ve probably then gone to great lengths to imagine how your organization can help these imaginary customers overcome their most pressing pain points. But how well do you know the real people behind the data that pours into your various MarTech systems every day?
Too many marketers still view marketing success in terms of lead volume or subscriber numbers rather than by the quality of the relationships they create. In fact, for many marketers, those relationships end the moment a lead is created and only ever revisited with the occasional jab from a barely targeted follow-up campaign.
If you are going to make any New Year’s resolutions this year, how about committing to taking the time to know your clients?
Your CRM System Isn’t Just a Bucket Full of Contacts
A well-maintained CRM system is a beautiful thing. It’s a resource where anyone in your organization can look at a contact and immediately know everything about them. Where did the connection come from? Are they a customer? What products do they use? Do they have any issues with your service? Are they paying their bills?
Behind every piece of data in your CRM, there is a real person. And with every new contact and subsequent engagement, there is a potential to generate new income and protect existing revenues.
In the right hands, this information isn’t just ” good to know” — it’s the kind of business intelligence that real marketing success is built upon. But this kind of business intelligence doesn’t grow on its own. It needs to be planned and carefully nurtured. So this approach is more than just a marketing responsibility. It’s a whole company priority.
Build Your CRM Dream Team
At emfluence, we are passionate about breaking down barriers between departments. While marketing might steer the conversation, your sales, customer service, and finance teams also need to be fully engaged.
We’ve previously shared many best practices for building a cohesive, cross-departmental CRM strategy on the emfluence marketing platform blog. But if you are looking for a great starting point, click here. The process becomes much easier when every department understands how adopting CRM best practices will make life in their specific department much more straightforward. For example:
- Your sales team will be reassured that they will only be presented with the warmest leads with the best possible chance of conversion, while more lukewarm prospects are nurtured by marketing until they are sales-ready.
- Your customer services/support teams will be reassured if prospects are removed from marketing campaigns that undercut or contradict existing contracts.
- Your finance team will be reassured if customers with bad debts are removed from ongoing campaigns and highlighted as not to be contacted until their accounts are brought back into good standing.
- Your senior leadership team will be reassured by the promise of a clear vision of the current health of your marketing funnel. In addition, this opportunity will help them make more informed decisions regarding managing resources and budgets across your organization.
Do You Speak Fluent CRM?
Building a cohesive, cross-departmental CRM strategy is only the start of your journey. It’s not enough to have everyone in your organization buy into the dream of the perfect CRM strategy. They need to be fluent in the language of CRM.
For example, does everyone on your team know the difference between lead generation and demand generation? They might sound like the same thing but have very different definitions. How about the concepts of lead scoring or dynamic content? While these marketing automation strategies might be very familiar to you, if your wider team is talking at cross purposes, you may need help to deploy a strategy that helps you reach your objectives.
This requires ongoing cross-departmental training and regular communication. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your CRM system is; if your colleagues are not shown how to use it effectively and are encouraged to maintain those high standards, your CRM marketing will quickly dissolve into chaos.
The marketing experts at emfluence will not only help you set up and integrate the CRM and marketing automation systems that your organization needs to remain competitive. They will also show you how to use the information stored in your CRM system to benefit everyone in your organization.
Learn More
To learn more about how emfluence can help you become fluent in the language of CRM and marketing automation, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
