Are You Ready to Use Costumer Relationship Marketing in Your Business?

Marketing is key to the success of your company, because without new customers your business will eventually grow stagnant. The exception is if you are constantly offering new products that your existing customers will be interested in. With either scenario, your marketing is important for your success.

You can do everything you need to do manually. People have been marketing manually for decades, but the question is why would you want to when you have a powerful tool like the CRM system. You can be far more effective and it will allow you to grow your business much easier. For many years CRM systems cost so much that small business wasn’t interested, but in recent years that’s changed significantly, so do yourself a favor and explore whether a CRM system would be beneficial to you.

Let us first look at what you will need with CRM:
CRM means you have to spend money, but the real cost is more than just the fee you pay each month. CRM must be correctly implemented once you have chosen the right solution for your business. It will need to be integrated with your other software. You will also have to hire a specialized staff or contract person to take care of the integration and train people.

If your sales team is entering the information consistently and right after any sale, you will have a very strong base for leads and generating marketing campaigns, but if they aren’t interested and are not doing it correctly you will waste your money.

If your lead flow is low and you have a slow growth trajectory, you might want to use a spreadsheet for now. It isn’t fancy but it will do the job until you increase your leads and customer conversions.

Now let’s look at when you need to have a CRM system working for you:
If you are growing out of the small business, phase or you are already out of the ‘mom and pop’ stage that we talked about earlier, then you need CRM. The earlier you implement it the better. Many successful small companies have significant growth early on with leads growing by leaps and bounds. Then you NEED a CRM system now. Manually trying to track your customers and potential customers will quickly become a nightmare.

Think about it.

Tracking 20 or 30 customers or leads in a database is easy. Tracking a 100 becomes very time consuming and over a 100 not only is it slow and a waste of your valuable time (time is money) you will have a cumbersome system that is not very effective. It’s time to get your CRM setup and running, otherwise, you’ll have a large part of your labor force focusing on maintaining a spreadsheet rather than doing their marketing or selling jobs.

Why Do Marketers Use CRM Systems for Their Metrics?

Recent surveys have indicated that today’s marketers are turning to CRM systems more than any of the other tools available to them to see their marketing metrics. Realistically, this is a good choice, since the CRM system when used properly can be a key player their marketing campaigns. There are three great reasons why you should be using your CRM system to measure your marketing results. Let’s have a look at them.

• Improves Working with Sales Dept.
  When marketing and sales meet to explore the impact of marketing that measures success it will directly impact your revenue. Usually the information you as a marketer need to see is much different from the information the sales department needs to see. Sales people spend most of their time in the CRM software tracking opportunities, measuring their sales and doing forecasts. Marketing results can have this same information made available to them. So rather than your marketing team trying to determine why data is mismatched, both your sales and marketing personal can focus on driving revenue more effectively.

• Executives Can Compare Results
• For the executives the CRM software make many parts of their job much easier. CRM software doesn’t just track revenue; it tracks the source of that revenue, which is broken into channels, marketing campaigns or sales.
• This means marketing can easily see how they compare with other company investments. It’s common for marketing campaigns to be strong at bringing in a high volume of potential customers, but often the sell through in the sales department is slower and takes time for those prospects to actually mature and make a purchase. Executives can see these numbers and they can direct according to the company’s goals.

• Marketers Can See Sales Relation to Marketing Campaign
• The CRM system stores pipeline date, which is core information. Sales staff will often create new opportunities within the CRM system that may have initially came through a marketing campaign thereby starting the beginning of the sales cycle. When the data is tied together marketing team through contact information and campaign responses then the marketing team is able to the influence of a campaign to a sales opportunity with accuracy. This is important to knowing whether a campaign is effective and providing a good ROI.
• Taking full advantage of your CRM software for marketing is a great way to increase your customers, your ROI and ultimately your revenue.

Traditional CRM Software vs. Marketing Automation Software

There seems to be a lot of buzz around CRM software and marketing automation. If you aren’t really sure what the difference is, or why you are being told to use your CRM software as part of your marketing strategy, you’ll want to read on.

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Traditional CRM software focuses on sales, while marketing automation software focuses on marketing. Okay, you probably already figured that much out. So let’s delve in a little further. CRM traditionally tracks customer information such as name, address, email, phone number and purchases along with complaints or calls for customer service.

On the flip side, marketing automation software streamlines and automates the marketing process and then provides tools to measure the success. Marketing software stores similar information such as names, address, email, phone number, etc. Marketing software lets you follow a prospect’s activities at the top of the funnel.

For example, when they opened an email, visited a website, stopped by a social media site. Marketing software also lets you schedule your marketing campaigns.

This is where most companies begin to track the interaction with the prospect who is now a customer, using CRM software. Now when the sales team speaks with a customer they see a full picture of whom that customer is thanks to the profile that’s been built.

CRM software can become part of your marketing strategy. Most CRM packages will integrate with marketing automation software. Of course, you will need to do your homework to find the best blend for you. Newer CRM programs are also being released with a marketing component built right into them, which is the perfect scenario.
By integrating your marketing with your CRM, it provides some powerful information. Now the sales staff knows a lot about this prospect before they ever have made their purchase, which sets them up to better do their job.

In addition, integration allows the tracking of the entire time in the pipeline.

Depending on the product(s) being sold this can be a slow process. Knowing all of this helps to better determine the success of a particular marketing campaign and whether changes need to be made. You can also easily determine your ROI, which is important.
In today’s hi-tech world, your CRM and marketing software should be fully integrated if you want to really have a streamlined approach to sales.

Social Media Changes CRM

For tech watchers, this is pretty big news. CRM Software supports are quickly acquiring startups that allow businesses to comfortably manage significantly more social media platforms, as well as, a variety of platforms.

Oracle has purchased Vitrue to aid in the managing and publishing of social media campaigns. They’ve also purchased Collective Intellect to aid in the monitoring of social chatter. Salesforce.com, a strong CRM contender purchased Radian6 a sentiment tracking company. The list goes on.

The question is why the big shopping spree and why should you care?

It seems industry experts believe that the next five years are going to be key for chief marketing officers, who will spend a huge amount of money on CRM systems that will integrate social media. This is great news for any business that isn’t running around with a seven-figure technology budget. Early game players referred to as Social CRM adopters are setting the stage for much smaller companies who have limited budgets to be able to adopt these new method fast and within their budget. In addition, it will be without the problems that have troubled CRM programs in the past.
Traditional CRM is integrated to make life more efficient and faster customer service within an organization and its departments. It’s designed to increase profits, improve customer service with faster resolutions and many other benefits.

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However, when CRM programs are not executed properly they can actually they can actually make a company look very bad. Anyone who has received a mailout that’s supposed to look personalized but the name is spelled incorrectly or duplicates are received, knows that a company’s customer service attempts are far from personal.

Another great example is the automated telephone answering system that annoys customers to no end. Yes all of these things lower your costs but at what cost to your customer service end?

Traditional CRM systems turn people into data and that’s a problem. Relationships become rules of engagement and that’s an even bigger problem. Technology can’t be empathetic, which is what’s driving CRM companies to integrate with social media.
75% of American consumers use one or more social networking sites, which provides the opportunity for 24/7 exceptional customer service, smart branding, and endless opportunities to manipulate the consumer in your favor. A company’s data power increases exponentially. It’s adding an entirely new dimension to CRM and that’s exciting.

Take Advantage of CRM Marketing

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