People buy from people they like and trust. When building any business relationship, it pays dividends to listen to your clients’ needs and react accordingly. However, when juggling multiple client accounts, it’s easy to lose focus on the individual and slip into a one-size-fits-all sales and marketing routine. This impersonal approach won’t work for you, your client, or your wider organization. In fact, it’s more likely to waste your time and cost you more in lost opportunities than winning new friends. Therefore, you must treat every client like an old friend with whom you have a genuine interest.
This more personal approach takes a lot of care and effort. This is particularly true when dealing with a long list of prospects and clients. Thankfully, there are several tools that make the job of building fruitful business relationships much easier. This process starts with the implementation of a solid CRM strategy.
Relationships Are Built in Your CRM
Any business without a carefully managed and maintained CRM system is at risk of falling into absolute chaos. Imagine multiple salespeople hitting the same customers with mixed messages, marketing campaigns flying out in all directions, and finance teams unable to guarantee that invoices are accurate and paid on time. When this happens, it’s easy to see why so many business relationships are so fragile. Luckily, this worst case scenario is quickly resolved with some CRM hygiene.
CRM Hygiene
Good CRM hygiene ensures that every single customer engagement is carefully recorded in your CRM system. This means every telephone conversation, every email, every website interaction, every social media engagement, every purchase, every customer service issue, and every invoice status is recorded in detail in your CRM. This also means whenever a client connects with anyone in your organization, all the information required to manage that engagement is available with a few clicks.
CRM hygiene requires a little training and a lot of encouragement to ensure your data is as clean and up-to-date as possible.
When your sales representatives and customer service agents can see how a few CRM best practices can make their jobs much easier, the task of checking and updating records after every touchpoint becomes a rewarding habit rather than a time-consuming administrative task.
However, for your CRM strategy to be truly efficient and effective, it requires a little more effort than everyday human engagement. It requires a much more comprehensive integration with your MarTech stack.
Supercharge Your CRM with Marketing Automation
When you combine the power of your marketing automation platform with your CRM system, the business of running your sales and marketing operation becomes much more efficient. Let’s think about this for a moment. Your CRM system is the central repository for all the data your business needs to run. Your marketing automation takes this data and enables you to do more with it.
Consider the following benefits:
- List Segmentation: Imagine automatically segmenting a list based on your customer’s interaction with your email campaigns, social media activities, and website visits. No more juggling spreadsheets or creating new lists for every email sent. You set the rules, and the technology does the slicing and dicing, ensuring you only ever send the right email to the right person at the right time.
- Campaign Personalization: Email marketing has changed. It’s no longer about bulk sends. Instead, it’s about delivering highly personalized messages based on specific customer information. When campaigns are perfectly tailored to individual recipients’ needs, engagement rates are dramatically enhanced, and email fatigue becomes a thing of the past.
- Lead Scoring: Too many leads are almost as big a problem as insufficient lead flow. If your sales team cannot get to the hottest leads in time because they are too busy dealing with tire kickers, those red-hot leads will quickly go off the boil. Combining your marketing automation platform with your CRM system will guarantee no more firehose lead distribution. Instead, your sales team will only be presented with the hottest leads. Moreover, they will always be presented with the most up-to-date information, highlighting what marketing collateral their prospects have engaged with, helping to guide the sales conversation and close more deals. Lead scoring will also help you take greater control over your marketing funnel.
- Funnel Management: Stop thinking of your sales funnel as a pot of leads or subscribers. These are living, breathing individuals and depending on what is happening in their business environment, they can run hot and cold. Balancing your prospects’ temperature with your ability to manage their needs (based on current sales and marketing resources) means you will be better placed to guide their journey through the sales funnel at a manageable pace. Remember, not all prospects who enter your sales funnel will become customers. Therefore, having the ability to identify and manage them out of the process automatically will save you time and money in the long run.
Native Applications
When building out your MarTech Stack, it’s always preferable that any integrations are as seamless as possible.
The emfluence Marketing Platform’s native integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system creates a marketing automation environment that is already familiar to users of the CRM. This familiarity reduces training needs and ensures better time and employee management, as users don’t have to jump between platforms.
Learn More
To learn more about how emfluence’s native integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM can help make your business a more organized, efficient, and profitable operation, speak to our marketing automation experts at expert@emfluence.com.
