: HOW TO UNLOCK THE VALUE OF YOUR CRM DATA Kynetix Technology Group
Introduction People who remember using a Rolodex to keep track of their clients consigned this little piece of history to the back of their minds long ago. Even the most sophisticated paper-based systems have now been replaced with CRM solutions that help acquire new clients and stay in contact with them. There s an excellent business case for any firm to have some kind of CRM system. Their core strengths are in the management of the sales process as well as the ability to have 360 degree visibility of any client and its complex web of relationships. Removing company silos and centralising data (both client and prospect) in a CRM system has obvious benefits for supporting customer centricity of an organisation. However, where most CRM systems concentrate on supporting the sales function it s traditionally been to the detriment of the marketing campaign functionality. Therein lies the big opportunity. Wouldn t it be good if you could use an additional application that could unlock the value of this stored client data improving the ROI of your CRM whilst making your sales and marketing functions work more successfully together? In this white paper we ll explore how marketing automation does just that. 1. Why is marketing automation important? The short answer is because in recent years the B2B buying process has changed. But of course this change is not just a B2B buying process phenomena. In much the same way that consumers now expect to be able to research products and services through product and price comparison sites and draw down information before even setting foot in a shop or on a site, so too does the B2B buyer or team of buyers (as is more often the case). Sales engagement with vendor organisations now takes place 60-70% through the buying cycle and the buyer is firmly in control. Teams of buyers carry out in-depth research before they engage. They expect to be able to carry out their research anytime, anywhere and to have an exceptional digital experience in doing so. This has shifted emphasis from sales to marketing who now own a much larger proportion of the lead-to-revenue cycle. B2B marketers have a lot more going on taking responsibility for engaging with the prospect through most of the buying cycle. This means ensuring that appropriate content is available for them to draw upon through every phase of their research (awareness, consideration and decision making). Kynetix Technology Group 2
It is no longer good enough for marketing to assign leads to the sales teams that are too early in the buying process. They will not respond positively to sales contact until they are ready. This change is borne out by a recent McKinsey* study of technology buyers who cited too much sales contact (in person, on the phone or by email ) as the most destructive sales activity carried out by B2B businesses. This type of intelligence is forcing companies to adapt and rethink their sales and marketing processes. Having a surfeit of personalised, relevant and therefore valuable content for prospects at every stage of the buying cycle is now essential to demonstrate that a vendor is worthy of consideration. Nurturing prospects through this process until they are ready to engage is not catered for in CRM but this lead management process is one of the core attractions of marketing automation. Marketing automation tells us what specific content prospects are consuming, where they are finding the content and what they do next. With this information marketers can provide targeted content and a personalised experience for prospects. Ironic isn t it that an organisation needs to become more automated in order to get more personal with its prospects? Leads are collected through web forms or purchased list import to CRM. This forms the start of the lead management process. Emails then start the conversation with a prospect and this helps shape their nurture program one that contains the most relevant content to the prospect s needs. Every activity within the lead nurturing process is monitored and acted upon. Are the emails being opened, links clicked, papers downloaded, landing pages visited? If not why not? This information is aggregated and a lead score assigned that reflects the sales readiness of the lead. Leads can then be prioritised and, if appropriate, follow up calls scheduled. The more information that is gathered, the more improvements that can be made to the campaign and the better the returns. 2. Marketing automation tool features Typically the following features will be contained within a marketing automation tool: Email marketing for message delivery Lead nurturing trigger-based emails and sequenced campaigns Landing pages to encourage interaction *Source: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/the_basics_of_business-to-business_sales_success Kynetix Technology Group 3
Lead scoring based on demographics and behaviours Activity tracking Integration with CRM In-depth marketing analytics and marketing reporting These types of features together with the sales functionality in CRM allows you to improve the effectiveness of both sales and marketing whilst improving the ROI of your CRM solution. 3. What are the benefits of CRM systems? CRM solutions have been around for many years, delivering value through the sales and marketing functions to the organisation. Its useful to examine their strengths so that we can fully understand the opportunities for further improvement with marketing automation. CRM was originally developed as a platform to help manage a customer and prospect relationships to enable sales people to track the sales process and to give them a true 360 degree view of their customer. To this day it retains that relational infrastructure bringing together customer data and sales-based workflows that help companies manage, track and profitably leverage their customer relationships. CRM solutions provide centralised access to client information offering a single version of the truth providing a single repository and allowing access to all those in an organisation that need the most up to date contact information on any client or prospect. This can include name, job title, address as well as a full history of interactions with them. CRM also manages sales lead tracking activity - organising the processes and work of the sales team members, making it easy to update contacts, record win/loss information as well as logging calls and emails. Keeping track of sales opportunities in a centralised location allows accurate forecasts to be made and the pipeline to be managed more effectively. For marketing teams the benefits of CRM lie in data segmentation and management, campaign management and a way to calculate marketing effectiveness from win/loss stored information. For some highly regulated industries, such as financial services, a CRM solution has spin off benefits which can help with the burden of comprehensive record keeping needed for compliance. This is especially true since the financial crisis and the stringent measures imposed by EMIR and Dodd Frank. Kynetix Technology Group 4
So for sales teams it s a great tool tracking progress and analysing their performance. However, CRM platforms have never had the means to manage and automate the lead nurture process and this is where marketing automation steps in. 3. The benefits of marketing automation The evidence for Marketing Automation is compelling: According to the research company, Aberdeen Group * Companies with Marketing Automation have: 107% better lead conversion rate 40% greater average deal size 20% higher team attainment of quota 17% better forecast accuracy Source: *Aberdeen Group, Marketing Automation 101: Ensuring Early Success with the Basics; Maturing Your Deployment for long-term ROI, June 2010. Marketing automation is far more than just a tool to create operational efficiency in mass email marketing campaigns. For prospects that have only recently engaged with your company at the top of the sales funnel marketing automation is the true engine behind prospect-led and prospect-paced content marketing. The process of automating responses to the interactions of prospects with your company via touch points such as web pages, downloads, responses and registrations to emails means that they are served up highly relevant material they need to the point of readiness to engage. The marketing automation tool s ability to learn and respond to preferences is the core concept that sets it apart from CRM. Given that the primary objective of any marketer is to generate leads that are ready to be progressed by the sales team, marketing automation tools carry out some welcome heavylifting in the process. Leads generated from events, the website, direct marketing campaigns, referrals and advertising need to be nurtured over an unspecified period of time. Manual methods of nurturing are time consuming, complex and admin heavy requiring close attention to detail and disciplined record keeping over prolonged timeframes. This is manageable with small volumes of leads but does not scale at all well. Kynetix Technology Group 5
A CRM solution can help in the process only so far providing alerts and scheduling calls. The real benefit of using marketing automation solution in addition is the huge boost in productivity that it gives to marketing. Campaigns are set up and run automatically so marketing needs less resource but can still deliver more and better qualified leads. In addition campaign set up is very rapid, making marketing more responsive to timely campaign opportunities. Advanced metrics then highlight campaign performance, giving marketing the chance to tweak and change campaigns to maximise effectiveness. Sales teams also benefit from marketing automation. The leads passed over to them have more background information and are prioritised by their lead score. This score is based on both explicit information about the prospect (company size, industry segment, job title and geography) as well as implicit information (gained from monitoring prospect behaviours during web visits, collateral downloads and email opens and clicks). Lead scoring in this way allows a business to customise and personalise a prospect s experience based on their stage in the buying process and level of interest - which greatly improves the quality and readiness of leads that are delivered to the sales organisation for follow up. When leads scoring is effective the benefits are: Increased sales efficiency and effectiveness leads of low perceived value are not sent to sales and therefore no sales time and effort will be wasted on them until they are assessed as ready. Prioritising sales effort based on lead score results in more efficient use of sales team resources and better returns on effort. Increased marketing effectiveness in quantifying what lead characteristics matter most marketing are able to target inbound and outbound campaigns and deliver more high quality leads. Tighter marketing and sales alignment lead scoring provides a common lexicon for defining lead quality during discussions amongst sales and marketing team members. Kynetix Technology Group 6
4. A word of caution: why marketing automation doesn t mean marketing autopilot Automating campaigns is one of the big attractions of a marketing automation system. For smaller marketing departments managing prospect campaigns and subsequent nurture programmes has been a major challenge and one that does not scale well. Designing and setting up automated campaigns is quick and easy to do making the marketing team more agile and responsive to market opportunities. However automated does not mean set up and leave to run. Whilst the core heavy lifting of a campaign is now successfully off your hands don t think for one second that this is job done. The time freed up allows fine tuning that results from improved analysis of the campaign giving marketing the ability to tweak content, messaging and data selections to best effect and improve the ROI for marketing dollars spent. 5. Why do I need both CRM and marketing automation? Maybe you are already paying a healthy monthly amount for your CRM solution. Why then would you want to increase financial outlay to include a marketing automation solution? After all weren t you promised by the CRM salesperson that it would do almost everything for your business except make the tea? As we ve already discussed - CRM and marketing automation solutions deliver very different benefits to an organisation. CRM s strengths lie in its ability to manage the sales process; including pipeline progression and providing a centralised repository for all client and prospect data. Adding marketing automation unlocks the value of the data present in that system and improves the effectiveness of both the sales effort and marketing investment. Kynetix Technology Group 7
6. Summary CRM and marketing automation enable organisations to respond to changes in their prospects buying behaviours - whilst continuing to improve the efficiency and performance of both functions. Here s a brief summary of how this happens: Lead prioritisation. All leads are not equal they are all at different stages on their own personal buying journey. Your CRM system will not differentiate which ones your sales team should be investing time in pursuing now and which ones should be left until a later date. Marketing automation will do this prioritisation through lead scoring. Better use of sales resources will inevitably result in better sales performance. Lead information Marketing automation will add a lot more information to each lead including full activity and social media history. Having more information means the first sales contact is likely to be more meaningful and take place at just the right time. Better data quality within CRM Marketing automation tools will be used to improve data quality automatically adding information to records and identifying and merging duplicates. Salespeople will have more confidence in the data stored in the CRM as a result. Metrics Marketing automation provides enhanced information about opportunities and their likelihood of closure based on data gathered through the nurture process helping to improve close rates and deliver more predictable revenues. Customer centricity You may not have the resources to employ a large marketing department. This does not have to stop your organisation tailoring communications based on your prospects individual stages in the buying cycle. Marketing automation will enable you to do this presenting a competent, customer centric appearance that will enhance your brand image. For more information and to find out more about marketing automation and the benefits it brings to your organisation and the value it can add to your CRM solution call us on 020 7836 1800. Kynetix Technology Group 8
About Kynetix Kynetix specialise in designing and building business applications that operate across mobile, cloud and web platforms and we ve been delivering successful CRM solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM for over ten years. We shorten the time to market for new systems by using Agile development techniques to deliver solutions within tight timescales. Kynetix Technology Group 9 www.kynetix.com