Single customer view (SCV), also called a unified customer view, is the process of presenting a single, accurate record for each customer. SCVs allow cross-functional teams and organizations to use aggregated data to drive higher value business outcomes and provide high-quality customer experiences.

Single customer views are imperative for organizations looking to maintain a competitive edge and provide superior customer experiences. In many organizations today, customer data is stored across several different platforms, accessible by individual teams and access is limited or non-existent for many others. This decentralization and inaccessibility leads to missed opportunities, poor customer satisfaction, and lower value business outcomes. 

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data:  

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
• Project status

Next, we’ll discuss what types of data you’ll want in your single customer view, and the six core benefits you’ll experience once you put yours in place.

What types of data should be in your SCV?

The single customer view is crucial for business success. Data can no longer be stored piecemeal in one platform or another and isolated from the rest of the organization. Instead, data must be shared and instantly accessible across your organization. Single customer views allow you to make critical business decisions with a full picture. The types of data that make the biggest impact are listed below.

Behavioral Data 

Single customer views aggregate a customer’s behavioral data, including website interactions, form submissions, and time on site data (among many other metrics) to allow marketers to make split-second decisions on their audiences’ preferences and buyer’s journey. This data is typically isolated to marketing. With a SCV, sales reps benefit when they know what content piece or pages a prospective customer viewed that prompted them to talk to sales. 

Sales Representatives’ Interactions

SCVs include the most important driver of revenue in a business: sales representatives’ interactions. Pre-sales follow-up and high-quality interactions with customers (driven by background information and superior customer intelligence) are some of the major reasons customers choose one brand over another.   

While most organizations believe they win or lose on price, it’s often service that is the bigger factor, according to recent research from DoubleCheck. In one of DoubleCheck’s recent new win/loss program client onboarding sessions with a midsize enterprise software vendor, the CMO stated, “We felt like the pre-sales support we received wasn’t great, so we didn’t think the solution was worth the extra price.” 

Flaws in pre-sales support can be a major reason C-suite execs or Product Managers often pass on one particular solution in favor of another. SCVs expose this interaction data to your entire organization to create a complete picture of how all teams share in the sales process. For instance, marketing and customer service can get better insight into the sales process when they see phone call frequency/notes, email chains, or in-person interactions (events or quick meetings) that the sales team conducts. Perhaps a customer success rep can better serve a client with a support question if he or she knows that the client is in talks with a sales rep about upselling to the next level of service on your platform.

Customer Service Representatives Interactions

The support tickets that customers submit give insight into how they are using your product or service.  Your technical support team can field hundreds of support tickets per day. Having customer service interaction data at the ready for all teams helps improve understanding across the organization when all teams can see the most common concerns coming in. 

For instance, if a sales team member is on an upsell call with a customer, it’s helpful for that person to know that the client has three open support tickets. Engineering may be interested in seeing what’s causing concern within the user base in real time. Marketing, the team most likely to be monitoring social channels, can benefit from knowing if there are issues with a feature that may come up in social posts.

Marketing Channel Interactions

The number of MarTech applications has risen astronomically in recent years. Chances are, your marketing team has a sizable MarTech stack with tons of valuable information on various platforms. 

Single customer views allow your organization to consolidate fragmented marketing channel interactions into actionable data. It is essential for marketers to clearly understand what is happening across social platforms, SEO tools, ad platforms, SMS tools, marketing automation platforms, and more.

With single customer views, marketers in your organization will no longer be required to waste time and effort logging into multiple platforms to monitor campaign data and conversions. SCVs simplify the work for data analysts by providing a holistic, easy-to-customize view of a customer’s journey across channels, providing a window into the customer’s behavior – tracking their journey from search, to clicks, and ultimately helping you better understand how, when, and why they purchase your product. Better yet, this data is shared across teams like sales and customer success for better communication.

6 Single Customer View Benefits

1. No more data duplication

SCVs eliminate the widespread issue of data duplication across your organization. When data is duplicated, there is a strong likelihood of errors.

2. A better understanding of every single customer

SCVs combine all of the random decentralized fragments of data collected across your organization and then build a true roadmap that clearly presents a holistic view of how your customers interact with your brand, make purchases, and interact with your customer service teams. SCVs allow you to:

• Instantly view each customer interaction and get up to speed on ticket statuses to avoid going into a conversation unprepared or ill-informed. 
• Avoid the frustration of working in standalone service applications.
• Access multiple data points in a single platform – communicate faster, deliver better experiences, and resolve customer issues faster.

3. Improved personalization opportunities

A 360-degree view allows customer service agents and marketers the ability to custom-tailor solutions and interactions as they track each and every touchpoint your customer has with your brand. 

• Understanding your customer’s behaviors allows your organization to build 1:1 relationships and rich, personalized experiences.
• Improved personalization increases brand credibility and enhanced authenticity.
• Better customer experience and more opportunities for customer engagement result from a deeper understanding of customer intent.

4. More efficient marketing campaigns

SCVs allow your team to improve targeting and reach customers at their decision point rather than dragging out marketing campaigns due to poor understanding of each segment’s customer journey. 

• Single customer views ensure better audience segmentation and improve campaign performance.
• Enriched data allows you to improve your ad spend and laser-target your marketing messages to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.

5. Faster customer service inquiry resolutions

A 360-view of each customer enables you to empower your teams to quickly solve customer challenges.

• Mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.
• Your team can close tickets and share information across your organization faster than ever.
• Understanding churn rates and churn risk tells you where and when to intervene, re-engaging customers throughout the renewal cycle.

6. A better user experience

Rich user experiences increase the likelihood of future purchases and ensure customer delight across all segments. Delivering world-class experiences will set you apart, drive growth, and improve your brand’s positioning as a leader in your industry. 

Get a 360 degree Unified Customer View in a Unified CRM

Your SCV can be a reality; choosing the right CRM is a first step. Insightly’s Account Plan feature is a great way to set the vision for your SCV. If you’re ready to choose your first CRM switch from your current platform, it’s time to check out Insightly, a unified CRM that combines sales, marketing, project management, and service into one platform to unify your teams. Plus, with Insightly AppConnect, you can build low-code or no-code integrations to connect Insightly with all of the other tools you use throughout your organization. 

Know your customers. Build stronger relationships and unify your fractured data with Insightly’s unified CRM. Schedule a free needs assessment and a demo today.

The post Single Customer View: What it is and why you need it appeared first on Insightly.

But how can your company be strategic when data are created and stored in so many different locations and formats? Email inboxes, social media sites, document repositories, and other third-party software tools are just a few of the places where your data live.

Integrating your CRM is certainly an option, but where should you start? Is integration worth the effort?

In this post we’ll explore CRM integrations and discuss five important integrations to consider in 2021.

Why use CRM integrations?

Before we dive into specific integrations to consider in 2021, let us first examine why CRM integrations are necessary. After all, you’ve already made a considerable investment in your CRM. Shouldn’t it do everything you need without relying on other systems?

Not exactly. Here’s why.

Even the best CRM can’t do everything

Last time I checked, no CRM will run a profit and loss report or statement of cash flow. Nor should it. And, although CRM technology continues to advance and encompass more aspects of daily life for businesses, the reality is that CRMs are not built to support every process and workflow. System consolidation can be wise, but total elimination of non-CRM technology is simply infeasible (at least in 2020). Therefore, integrating mission-critical apps to your CRM makes good sense.

Some tools become more useful when enriched by data stored in your CRM

You’ve put great effort into making your CRM the central source of truth for your organization. Maximize the usefulness of that data by making it accessible in other mission-critical apps, such as email inboxes and team collaboration platforms.

Not every team member requires direct access to your CRM

Sales, marketing, and project teams tend to be the heaviest users of CRM technology. That being said, there are many other teams who do not (or should not) require access to your CRM. Does your freelance graphic designer really need a CRM license? Perhaps not. On the other hand, she does interact with customer-related projects. What’s the right answer? Integrating her workspace to your CRM could be the perfect solution.

Managing relationships is messier than ever

No matter how much thought you put into engineering the perfect customer journey, some relationships do not fit into a nice and tidy box. Creating additional web-to-lead forms and autoresponder emails will never stop some customers from circumventing your ideal workflow. In today’s digital world, customers have more ways to engage your company than ever before.

Building integrations to third-party platforms (in particular to social media and email) makes your company better prepared to handle these situations, avoid data loss, and elevate customer relationships.

Integrate these five things in 2020

So, what should be on your integration to-do list in 2020? Here are the five system integrations that will deliver the most value to your organization.

1. Inbox

Stop and think. How much time do you spend in your inbox on a typical day? Now, multiply that across your entire staff. If you’re like many companies, email is still your most frequently used tool. Email offers a convenient platform for outreach and engagement, but it’s not ideal for organizing relationship data.

A better approach integrates your CRM and email, allowing users to quickly access and edit relationship data without leaving their inboxes.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly Sidebar for Gmail makes it easy to view and add contacts without leaving your inbox. You can also save email messages into Insightly with a click of a button. The Insightly Sidebar for Outlook is also available for customers who use Outlook.

2. Financial data

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. When customers fail to pay their invoices on time, your company suffers. Unfortunately, for many organizations, customer relationship management and billing fall into two separate departments that rarely speak to each other.

Integrating proposal, invoice, and payment data into your CRM creates transparency for front-line staff who are most likely to engage with customers, thereby reducing past-due situations and increasing cash flow.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly integration for QuickBooks Online pulls in invoice and payment data into a dedicated tab on the customer’s record in Insightly.

3. Documents and files

Your CRM is an excellent place to collect customer contact information, notes, memos, and small chunks of relationship data. However, some data sources are best retained in their original format (i.e. complex pricing spreadsheets, photos from trade shows, and product spec sheets).

Attaching downloaded copies of files to CRM records is one option, but a better solution integrates your CRM to a cloud document management system. Linking to live versions of an online document maximizes collaboration and minimizes the possibility of confusion caused by revisioning.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly offers a number of document integrations, including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, and others.

4. Team chatter

With the advent of remote work and collaboration apps, such as Slack, team members spend more time “chatting” than ever before. This online chatter represents real business value, but value is decreased when data remains isolated from your primary source of truth. In a similar way, online conversations become much less meaningful when collaborators do not have direct access to CRM data. Manually logging into a separate system to search for records is not always feasible, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Ideally, your team collaboration system should have a direct line into your CRM, thereby enabling data-driven conversations and avoiding the creation of new data silos.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly for Slack allows users to quickly search for, find, and add notes to Insightly records without ever leaving Slack.

5. Everything else

Your CRM vendor cannot integrate to all of your mission-critical apps. That’s why integration platforms are so useful. For example Insightly AppConnect is a no-code integration tool that connects Insightly CRM with hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization. Learn more here.

Move faster with CRM integrations

In summary, connecting your CRM to mission-critical applications will help your company build a more data-centric culture that elevates efficiency, reduces data confusion, and, ultimately, helps your teams move faster.

Check out Insightly AppConnect to browse the complete list of integrations. Not a customer? Request a free product demo and CRM needs assessment with an Insightly rep.

Request a demo

Last updated in July 2021

The post 5 key CRM integrations in 2021 appeared first on Insightly.

Marketers tend to be heads-down. Many of us are running a dozen programs, managing teams, and trying to keep up with a changing industry. When we’re underwater, it’s tough to remember to come up for air and ask: what do our customers actually want from us?

Understanding the voice of your customer can help you answer this question.

What does ‘voice of the customer’ mean?

The voice of the customer is what your customer wants and needs. It’s how your customers share their experiences with your product and services to inform your product and marketing.

It may seem like a simple concept. Of course, we listen to our customers. Yet, as companies and the number of stakeholders grow, what the customer wants and needs can sometimes get lost.

The customer’s voice can include negative and positive feedback, and it can be delivered in a variety of ways. Understanding your customers’ wants and needs can inform any number of programs across your company.

The benefits of listening to your customers

All companies have the best intentions when listening to customer feedback. In many industries, ‘the customer is always right.’ In others, customers must raise issues many times to feel heard.

When you’re listening to the voice of your customer, you learn what your customers value the most in your product and how they use it. You can use this feedback as market research to inform your marketing programs, product development, and customer success programs. Understanding the voice of the customer is the first step to becoming a customer-centric company.

How to create a customer voice strategy

Listening to your customers should be baked into your marketing strategy. Consider implementing consistent feedback mechanisms that can influence your programs.

Different kinds of customers can provide valuable feedback. Here are some ways each kind of customer can inform your strategy:

Loyal customers

Loyal customers are often the easiest to identify and to request feedback from. They are excited to share their feedback. Even though you have the strongest customer relationships with them, they are often the people to turn to for specific critical feedback about your product. They will also let you know how you can engage them better and keep them as a customer. Their familiarity and dedication make them a great sounding board.

Churned customers

It’s never fun to have a conversation with your ex. But your churned customers—especially those that may have been with you for a while—can often provide some of the best customer feedback. They will be more critical of your product than your loyal customers, but they also tend to be more straightforward. They may even be able to give you insight into your competitors.

“Lazy” customers

Some customers might stop by and buy your product whenever they feel like it. They may have an unpredictable buying pattern, but still appear to enjoy using your product. These customers can give you a lot of insight into customer motivation and how your product fits into the market.

Best practices for your customer voice initiative

Here are some of the methods to hear the voice of your customer:

Interviews or focus groups

There’s no replacing a face-to-face (or face-to-Zoom) conversation. By speaking with your customers one-on-one or in small groups, you not only hear their feedback, but you can understand how they feel. In these situations, you can read body language, hear intonation, and capture emotions. This can give you a human look into how your customers feel about your product.

Surveys and net promoter score

Post-service surveys are—unsurprisingly—one of the most popular ways to collect customer feedback. They’re simple to administer and inherently quantitative. You can aggregate your surveys into a net promoter score, a key metric in measuring customer satisfaction.

Customer feedback on site

A comment field or feedback email address allows for unbridled criticism, but perhaps that’s exactly what your company needs to grow. An open form for anonymous customer feedback can encourage trolling or spam. Yet, it also encourages feedback that your customers don’t know how to give otherwise.

Customer service data

Your customer service team is the frontline of the customer voice—they hear it every day. Ask your team for service tickets, recorded phone conversations, chatbots, and email conversations. You can uncover a buried treasure of what your customers are  trying to tell you.

Sales data

Your sales team is having dozens of conversations with potential customers. They are hearing their concerns and hopes for a new solution from your target market. Aggregate the recordings, notes, and data from sales calls for more insights into your customer voice.

Social media

It’s quite possible your customers are already talking about you. They might use LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to share their thoughts on your company and recommend it, or not, to other people in their peer group. Use social media listening tools to scrape brand mentions and related conversations.

How do you determine the most effective way to collect customer feedback? Consider a mix of strategies. Some customers may be more comfortable with one method than another. By using a few methods, you can ensure that one method doesn’t show a bias over another.

How to measure and understand your customer voice

So, you’ve collected all your customer feedback. You’ve got a spreadsheet, a folder full of sales calls, notes from a focus group and a smattering of net promoter scores. How do you make this feedback actionable?

Here are the steps to organize and measure your customer data:

Aggregate the data using one common method

Your customer voice should be singular and consistent. In order for the customer feedback to be actionable, it must be standardized. Streamline your customer data using one or more of the following tools:

• An integrated CRM that can mirror your feedback directly with your customer data
• A dedicated customer experience tool, like GetFeedback, to collect feedback across channels
• A qualitative research tool, like FocusVision, to run focus groups and collect customer data

Determine if there are any gaps or issues with the data

Once you’ve aggregated your data, it’s your job to look for holes. Did you leave out feedback from a certain age bracket or demographic group? Was all your feedback collected during a busy season, or a slow season? Did you forget to ask a key question?

If a mistake was made, now is the time to correct it. The customer voice relies on complete and full data. Without it, we don’t know if we are representing our customers.

Identify trends

It may be tempting to pick out a juicy data point. Maybe you have one customer who has been with your company for 20 years. Maybe you have one customer who churned and came back a year later, Or, maybe you have a customer that said something really cruel or untrue.

When understanding your customer voice, trends are more important than outliers. Take time to understand the commonalities. Your customer voice will never represent all customers, but it should represent most of them.

Don’t fall into data analysis traps

Data analysis is not a perfect science. There are a number of biases and common analysis blunders that come into play, and can impact how you present your final data. These include:

• Errors. Does your data meet quality standards?
• Too small of a sample size. Did you survey enough people to have meaningful results?
• Confirmation bias. Did you ask open-ended questions, or did you use the data to confirm an already-held belief?
• Misinterpretation of results. Did you explore every possible reason for the results that you received?

What if your market research and analysis show no meaningful results? This does not mean your experiment was a failure. It could mean that you need to do more research, or that you need to ask questions that reveal customer similarities, rather than differences. It might also mean that your customers are not ready to give feedback in the way that you asked for it. In the case that trends do not come to light, be sure to use this as fodder for your next customer feedback round.

Report on trends and determine action items

It’s crucial to communicate the trends you uncover to product leaders and decision-makers. The voice of the customer can become a litmus test for new product decisions and marketing programs. It is your responsibility to speak on behalf of the customer using their voice.

You can present the voice of the customer in a brief presentation, a detailed report, or a series of recommendations.

Some immediate action items you can take with customer voice include:

• A webinar to educate customers on relevant product features
• Improvement of your customer relationship management (CRM) system with integrated and updated customer data
• A re-engagement campaign for churned customers, with a renewed understanding of their priorities
• Development of your ideal customer profile
• A ‘surprise and delight’ campaign for loyal customers who have expressed what they value

Conclusion

The voice of the customer is something marketers always think about, but rarely go through the exercise of quantifying. By going through this process, marketers can better understand who they are selling to. This will create stronger products and marketing programs to help their company grow.

Sources:

8 types of bias in data analysis and how to avoid them George Lawton. TechTarget. October 26, 2020

What is voice of the customer (VoC)? Qualtrics

The post Level up your strategy by listening to the voice of the customer appeared first on Insightly.

Considering drastic changes in mobility and the way people work, the use of business technology is becoming a key differentiator between companies that succeed and those that fail in the digital economy. How does your company stack up?

One way to find out how well business technology supports your team and goals is to perform regular tech audits. Keep reading to learn how to perform a tech audit.

The tech stack

A tech stack is simply a group of technology-based tools that help a business operate more efficiently, market more accurately, and enable sales and services teams to provide a stellar customer experience.

As a business adapts and grows, the tech stack will change. This is also the case for post-pandemic operational needs, as people seek to lower costs and maximize efficiency. Some organizations used this time to clean shops and go lean. Others introduced new technology to improve digital operations and meet new customer trends.

You may find that certain systems have poor integration, run too slowly, or lack the security for an at-home setup. It may be time to evaluate your tech stack.

Why is it important to audit your business technology?

When it comes to modern business needs, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. Each brand has unique needs, goals, and challenges. Considering also that new apps and platforms are developed each day, it’s helpful to audit your tech stack to stay on the right track.

A consistent review will help you to:

• Gain better ROI on all software and tools
• Reduce labor costs and employee time
• Consolidate systems and improve integrations
• Maintain a universal source of truth for all data
• Provide better customer experience

The more systems you have, the more critical it is to perform an IT audit. Every app used should be tied back to business strategy—everything from accounting to website management, to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, to social media accounts.

What types of tools are part of a tech stack?

Consider all the tools you need on a daily basis. The best tech stack can include, but is certainly not limited to:

Marketing

• Marketing automation
• Content management system (CMS)
• Lead management, including lead scoring and tracking
• Email automation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Data analytics
• Ad management tools
• Social media management
• Creative asset
• Chatbot automation

Sales

• Customer relationship management tools (CRM)
• Meeting scheduler
• VoIP/call tracking
• Data management
• Video recording/editing
• Sales enablement

Service

• Ticket management
• Live chat
• Knowledge base
• Help desk automation
• Time tracker
• Survey automation

Signs it’s time to audit your business technology

The major reason to audit your tech stack right now is the shift in the global economy and rise of the remote workplace. From productivity to collaboration to customer management, needs are changing and you may need new and different tools to meet them.

Other factors that will indicate it’s time for a technology audit include:

Data silos

A good sign it’s time to audit is when you start seeing data silos that hinder productivity. When the tech tools you are using don’t communicate with each other, it takes longer to get the job done, causing inefficiencies in both individual and team schedules.

Data silos also hinder collaboration between teams. If departments aren’t pulling the data from the same spot, it’s going to impact the success of operations. It will be hard to distinguish what is working from what is not.

If a system doesn’t easily integrate or is taking up too much time, consider getting rid of it or replacing it with a flexible alternative.

Bad data

If you are brewing mistrust for your data, it’s time for a tech audit. Inconsistencies, errors, duplicates, and problems with shared information can all lead to disaster.

If not right away, the loss of labor over time (to fix these issues) can certainly add up. Don’t let problems go unresolved. If a system isn’t working, fix it, upgrade it, or get rid of it.

Wasted time

As more people start working from home, businesses are brutally aware of wasted labor. If people are used to operating with mediocre software, all their time is spent working out the kinks, rather than shopping for a better solution.

Spending too much time on tools because you don’t know how they function is also a sign it’s time for a system audit.

Consider adopting easy-to-use, intuitive systems and training new staff around the tech stack as part of the onboarding process. This ensures high adoption rates and consistent usage of key systems.

Duplicate functions

Sometimes your tech software features overlap. If two separate systems do the same thing, you probably don’t need them both. You may decide to choose to keep only one or purchase a new system that can completely replace both systems.

Budget changes

If you need to get a new budget approved, it’s time for a tech audit.

Here are a few questions to consider:

• Are you seeing a return on investment (ROI) from the technology you use now?
• Are the number of paid users the same as the number of people using it? Or, what is the system adoption and usage rate?
• Do the tools fit in with your long-term goals?

How to conduct a business technology audit

When it comes to performing the actual audit, every business has its own method to the madness. Start with the following considerations:

• How, where, and when a tool is used in business processes
• The cost to move to a different system
• The number of needs a single tool or system meets for the business
• Systems with overlapping functions
• Can you scale your business with the existing tech stack?

Instead of directing all your attention to the apps themselves, a better approach is to think about the business processes they support.

You should also consider how each tech tool affects employee performance and productivity. This will have a direct influence on the customer experience.

The audit process: step-by-step

The best way to determine if you have the right business technology in place is to make a list of what you already have. Ask the following questions:

• What tools am I paying for?
• How many licenses/users does each program have?
• What does each tool do?
• How are all of the systems connected to each other?
• What critical business needs does each system serve?
• How much does each solution cost?

Once you have a broader view of exactly what’s running operations, follow through with these IT audit steps:

1. Conduct a security sweep of the network and every device attached to it
2. Audit the software in use
3. Consolidate the hardware
4. Inspect all security and backup systems
5. Audit the document management system
6. Ensure the company has a strategic technology plan

Deciding on what you need

When it comes to accommodating the gig economy, there are a few solutions that are critical for success. Here are a few things you’ll need for remote workers:

Secure and easy access tools

If you provide remote workers with tools that are too complicated or have a sharp learning curve, chances are they’ll go back to using their own. If your VPN is too slow for company apps, workers may end up using unsanctioned online tools.

Remote collaboration apps make it easier for people to work from home—and that’s the whole point.

Leveraging the cloud

Most modern brands have a heavy hand in the cloud and SaaS space. This means fewer issues with bandwidth and remote access. The more data that can be stored off-site, the easier it is to reach.

In the new normal, it’s a great idea to increase your cloud footprint. Ways to save money using the cloud include:

• Auto-terminating development during off-hours
• Reducing the need for “on-demand” resources
• Using storage-efficient apps

User feedback

A business technology audit requires input from everyone on the team. Ask for feedback on the daily tools your teams use. Make sure these discussions focus on gathering the facts and the underlying business processes. Ask people their thoughts on the effectiveness of the tool and any suggestions on what else might work.

Customer relationships

Customer churn and retention is a major concern for businesses across every industry and vertical. People have shorter attention spans and competition is fierce. This issue only becomes magnified during a post-pandemic situation.

Any business technology audit you perform must have serious considerations for customer relationships. In fact, your main focus when shopping for new solutions should be “how can this make the customer happier?” It’s the means to every end.

Robust CRM tools can help insulate companies from economic downturns and push revenue growth even in the toughest of times.

Instead of using separate point solutions for marketing, sales, and services, you could consider a unified platform with built-in integrations with other systems, including finance and accounting, HR, and/or e-commerce.

Setting up for success

Ignoring tech tools in your arsenal can cost you money and hold your business back from growth. Consider performing a business technology audit on a regular basis, just like you do with finances. Once a year is a good practice, but it can be more or less depending on your industry and changes in the economy or consumer behavior.

To stay on track, create an audit schedule. A set schedule will help you and your team to prepare and construct a methodology for changes, including additions. It also helps to keep teams communicating and integrations running smoothly.

When was the last time you reviewed your tech stack?

Sources

Before the coronavirus, telework was an optional benefit, mostly for the affluent few. Drew Desilver. Pew Research Center. March 2020.

National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. March 2020

The post How to audit your business technology appeared first on Insightly.

According to a recent survey by Gartner, prospects spend 50% of their time seeking information from third-party sources.* Why not study their moves?

What is buyer intent?

Buyer intent looks at aggregated behavioral signals to identify potential prospects in the buying cycle. There are a variety of data points that can represent buying intention.

Intent data can include the following behaviors:

• Web site visits and the frequency of visits
• What specific articles or pages a user is reading
• Which topics seem to interest users most
• Engagement with sales or marketing emails

Essentially, intent data is any type of information that indicates a lead is in the buying phase of their customer journey. The main sources of intent marketing include web traffic, off-site activity, data from your CRM, social media metrics, search intent, and content consumption data.

How is intent data collected?

There are a few types of resources that help businesses capture buyer intent. This includes both internal and external buyer intent tools.

Internal data

Any data that a company collects on its own is considered “internal data.” Also referred to as “first-party” intent data, it is information that is collected in-house using a variety of systems, such as application logs, a marketing automation platform, or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Most CRMs will display metrics for what visitors are doing on your site. The benefits of collecting internal data include total control of what you capture and how, accuracy, and security.

Additionally, a business can act immediately on internal data and customize exactly what classifies as purchase intent. There’s no waiting for another party to deliver your data. This provides a good way to get started with buyer intent data.

External data

Another way of collecting intent data is through a third-party data collection company. This is typically sourced through cookies or IP lookups on specific websites. Because collected internal data can be complex, external data provides an easier means to the same end.

External data is distinct from internal business intelligence because it is generated by and purchased from outside agencies. This data is used by the purchaser to filter out potential buyers and is even packaged as marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

However, there are some disadvantages to going this route. The company you choose must always be GDPR-compliant. You’ll also need to set up clear expectations and closely monitor the deliverables for consistent accuracy and value of data you purchase.

Data should be sourced from leading industry sites that consumers are using to educate themselves. Research is usually based on search intent, prior buying patterns, and prior buying patterns.

Key indicators of buyer intent

In order to ensure prospects are exclusively a good fit, do your homework. You need to position the segmenting and targeting work around a buyer persona. Otherwise, you could end up with leads who, on the surface, look good, but may never buy a thing.

The first step is deciding what the company values as important and how to score interactions with key decision-makers. You should also account for who is interacting with your brand. There’s no point in spending time tracking and scoring leads that aren’t a good fit.

Key considerations when compiling intent data include:

Recency

How recently has a prospect engaged with the brand? This is super important data. If you wait weeks to contact someone after visiting the site, they probably already made a buying decision.

People waste no time these days and thus, speed matters in sales. The faster you react, the more deals you close.

Frequency

How often are people coming back? The more they return, the more likely they are to buy. If you see a lead frequently viewing pages for pricing or case studies, you can easily assume they are far into the buying cycle. At this point, the sales team needs to reach out.

Engagement

Most lead scoring systems count user engagement. If an individual is engaging with content on your site via chat, email, or other forms of interaction, it’s a good indication they are ready to talk.

How is buyer intent data used?

So, once all of this information is collected, what do you do with it?

You can use buyer intent data in a number of ways. For starters, it’s a key asset for customer acquisition. It works to greatly improve segmenting and targeting of account-based marketing campaigns. Intent data also helps to better align your messaging to buyers’ needs.

Some ways in which you can put buyer intent data to use today include:

Maximize outreach

Intent data gives your sales team a leg up. Sales teams don’t have to wait for buyers to complete an action to identify interest. With simple buyer intent signals, it’s now possible to prioritize outreach based on specific behaviors.

Reduce churn

After the sales team converts a prospect, a business can continue to monitor clients who research the competition. This data points to customers who may need additional support or attention. This usually indicates your product or customer service is failing in some way.

Set up triggers that request buyer feedback to help identify gaps for future product development. Intent data helps to uncover problems before buyers even utter a peep. This reduces the churn rate and adds to overall customer satisfaction.

Guide for messaging

Buyer intent data works to strategically target in-market prospects and convert them to quality leads. This type of data provides insight into prospect research history, including specific products and brands.

Research by Gartner found that “by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts.”*

Buyer intent data can be used to better craft unique and specific messaging that speaks to segmented audiences in different ways. Rather than using generic marketing tactics, you can better align your outreach with specific interest signals that buyers leave, such as cookie crumbs across third-party sites.

Pros & cons of buyer intent data

When it comes to using this type of data to conduct business, there are two sides to the coin. Here are some pros and cons:

Pros

Efficient prospecting

For a sales team, closing deals is the top priority. Buyer intent data simplifies prospecting with a layer of business intelligence. Knowing who is looking at what content means you can tailor messaging with more direct targeting.

It also means sales can engage leads as early as possible while collecting information on how and what prospects are researching. Sales will be able to prospect SQLs in a fraction of the time.

Improve outbound sales

This is about working smarter, not harder. The sales cycle can be long. Giving your team direct access to buyer intent data allows them to reach out to the most qualified leads and spend less time on people who aren’t really interested.

It also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts. See who’s reaching out and target more efficiently.

Sales prioritization

Practice advanced sales prioritization with buyer intent data that lights the way. Traditional lead scoring relies on adding points when certain actions are taken.

Intent data helps to uncover additional avenues a lead takes during the buying cycle. This can be used in a more precise way to predict purchase intent and prioritize contacts.

Personalization & targeting

Intent data helps both the sales and marketing departments to run more accurate account-based campaigns. Successful outreach, including buyer enablement, is built on personalization.

The most effective way to improve B2B campaigns is to provide a continuous stream of relevant content. It allows you to strategically nurture leads by segmenting lists and adjusting the messages accordingly.

Relevancy

When you closely understand consumer problems, you can create more relevant content. Buyer intent data helps to uncover common obstacles and issues people run into that pertain to the product or service you provide.

These insights can be used to better guide content creation and increase inbound leads. Create content that directly reflects exactly what people are interested in and watch the social return on investment skyrocket.

Cons

Accuracy issues

When it comes to purchasing buyer intent data from a third party, there is no true way to confirm the data is accurate. You are simply relying on good faith that the company is giving you correct information.

Leads can be anywhere

Third-party agencies that provide external buyer data include leads that can be anywhere in the funnel. Rather than focus on one buyer stage, most outside sources will send them to you along the entire journey.

That means, purchasing buyer data with the intent of using it for top-of-the-funnel messaging can be risky. Your business is going in directly for the sale when some buyers may just be getting to know you. It comes off as pushy.

Too specific 

Being too specific in targeting can lead a sales team right back to blind targeting. There is such a thing as over-personalization. Zeroing in on super-specific characteristics of a potential buyer can cut out people that are actually willing to buy.

You risk not reaching a wide enough audience and missing out on sales. You should employ critical thinking to determine the fine line between being too general or too specific in your messaging.

Waiting to reach out  

Having sales and marketing wait to respond to buyers reaching out can cost you. Sometimes outbound cold-calling is the best form of gathering new leads.

Non-compliance 

The worst issue a business can run into when purchasing buyer intent data is that it was captured in a way that’s deemed “non-compliant” with the latest data security standards and regulations. Control and management is necessary to ensure the data is being used properly.

If it’s not used correctly, you can face non-compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which can lead to some hefty fines.

Is buyer intent data worth it?

It all depends on how a business wants to spend its money. Top-of-the-funnel leads require a lot more time and attention. This means fewer leads for your money.

Perhaps a better option is to purchase buyer intent when prospects are part-way down the funnel and use CRM and internal data before that. You can then allocate resources to more profitable endeavors, such as ad spend, customer engagement campaigns, and content creation.

Buyer intent data is most valuable when a business has a well-crafted buyer persona and has the capacity to follow through with leads in a timely manner. A poorly crafted buyer persona or failure to pay attention to details means wasted money on missed opportunities.

Many businesses start targeting before they have fully segmented the audience. Narrow the focus and build out the value prop with relevant content. Then, it will make more sense to purchase buyer intent data. This establishes buyer confidence that your company can solve their biggest problems.

Sources:

*“Emerging Technology Analysis: Leveraging Intent Data for Marketing and Demand Generation.” Alan Antin. Gartner. February 11, 2020.

The post How to make the most out of buyer intent data appeared first on Insightly.

Customers want—and expect—a great product or service, amazing support, and a price that beats the competition. And, in an age of “cancel any time” and “no long-term commitments,” customers know that they have the upper hand. When companies fail to deliver, customers cancel and take their business elsewhere.

So, what should companies do to reduce cancellations and encourage long-term relationships? Let’s take a closer look at customer churn, how to calculate it, and what to do about it.

What is customer churn?

In business, the term “churn” typically refers to the act of customers cancelling, unsubscribing, or otherwise leaving. Adding up the number of customers that were lost during a specific period provides a company with its total churn metric. Churn is often tracked on an annual, quarterly, and/or monthly basis. Companies that have unusually high amounts of churn may choose to report on a weekly or daily basis, especially as they implement systems and programs aimed at reducing it.

How do you calculate customer churn rate?

Reducing customer churn is a top priority for businesses of all types—particularly those that offer monthly or annual subscription models, such as software as a service companies, no-contract wireless providers, consulting businesses on monthly retainers, and streaming media platforms. Unfortunately, improving churn is not as simple as it may seem. Customer journeys are complex and diverse. Seasonal buying patterns create artificial peaks and valleys for signups and cancellations. Just knowing what to focus on first can be a point of contention for many companies.

That’s why you need to normalize your churn data into a metric that accounts for the fluctuations in your business. That’s where customer churn rate comes in handy. Customer churn rate is usually calculated like this:

For a simple example, let’s assume that your company calculates churn rate on a monthly basis. On March 1, you had 1,000 total customers. By the end of March, your company lost 200 customers. This means that your monthly churn rate was 20%. Given a 20% churn rate, you could theoretically expect all of your customers to churn within a five month window. Or, stated slightly differently, your average retention period for a typical customer is five months.

5 tips for lowering churn

Maintaining a high churn rate is a recipe for disaster. There’s only so much demand generation that your sales and marketing teams can deliver. Here are five tips to consider as you develop a strategy for reducing churn.

1. Know your customers (better)

Keeping pace with customer orders and support requests can seem like an insurmountable job that leaves no time for strategic planning. However, it’s only by zooming out and seeing the big picture that your organization can identify issues that lead to cancellations. Invest more time in understanding your customers’ goals, objectives, and needs. Customer journey mapping is an excellent place to start.

2. Surround yourself with great people, systems, & processes

Does your company have the expertise and capacity to build a first-class customer success program? Perhaps you already have a qualified CS leader onboard, but he or she is in the wrong seat. Or, perhaps you need to go and recruit someone who has the right mix of experience and know-how. Start by surrounding yourself with people who are invested in the customer experience. Then, empower them to recommend and implement systems, processes, and technology that align with both your company’s and customers’ goals.

3. Focus on delivering great service & being customer-centric

An essential component of customer success is, of course, providing stellar customer service. Achieving and maintaining a one-hour response time on support tickets does not go far enough. Customers expect an amazing experience at every step of the journey—from interacting with chatbots to accessing thorough information on your support site to receiving helpful responses from your live agents.

Revisit your customer journey map and identify unnecessary points of friction. What adjustments can (and should) be made to provide a customer-centric experience? Strive to be more empathetic as a company and develop training programs that show staff how to walk in the customer’s shoes. Implement processes and metrics that hold front-line staff—particularly support agents—accountable for providing great service.

4. Collect actionable data to understand why customers leave

Customer data is more readily available now than ever before. Each customer interaction with your website, emails, and support team is another datapoint that can help you improve customer satisfaction and, hopefully, reduce churn.

If customer data management is not a strength for your company, here are a few data sources that are worth cultivating:

• Customer interviews: When a customer cancels, ask if he or she would be willing to have a 15-minute conversation. Expect a low participation rate, but also expect tremendously useful information from those who do.
• Built-in prompts: If you have a customer-facing user interface (UI), build in prompts to ask each customer why he or she is cancelling or downgrading. Sync this data directly to the contact or organization record in your CRM.
• Automated surveys: Use marketing automation technology to measure customer satisfaction throughout the entire customer journey.

These are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Collaborate with team members from support, marketing, sales, and operations and continuously look for ways to securely collect more data and improve churn.

5. Use your data to identify trends & correct course

Simply collecting large amounts of customer data is a fruitless endeavor unless you have a reliable way to track and manage it. Using an easy-to-integrate and customizable CRM, such as Insightly, makes life easier on staff when trying to make sense of customer churn data. Custom objects and fields provide flexibility for organizing data in a way that aligns with your unique business model and customer journey.

In addition, look for ways to harness data that already exists in your CRM. For example, your sales team probably tracks their lost deals and cancellations. Use your CRM’s built-in dashboards and reports to visualize this data, identify churn-related trends, anticipate problems that lead to churn, and develop new strategies for lowering it.

Build business relationships that last

At the end of the day, reducing churn is all about building business relationships that last. Companies that truly understand their customers, implement customer-centric systems and processes, and strategically use data are better positioned to build long-term, churn-resistant relationships.

The post What is customer churn rate? 5 tips to lower it appeared first on Insightly.

Customer experience (CX) and satisfaction are some of the driving forces behind modern business success. To meet customer-centric goals, new CRM tools with greater precision are being developed.

Every year, new trends come up in the CRM space. Keeping track of these trends will help you plan ahead, meet changing business needs, and gain a competitive edge.

So, here are the top CRM trends for 2021.

IoT technologies

IoT stands for “the internet of things” and is used to describe a network of physical objects that are tied to the internet through sensors, scanners, software, and other technologies.

In 2019, it was estimated that 93% of enterprises had adopted IoT technologies and by the year 2025, there are expected to be over 64 billion IoT devices worldwide.

One of the main purposes of connecting the physical and digital worlds is the exchange of information. There has been an upward tick of CRM integrations with IoT tech to make life a little easier.

Enriched IoT data

IoT technology helps to monitor and service clients in proactive ways. Data generated from these solutions is used to increase customer satisfaction and retention.

CRMs are integrating with compact resources that have flexible offline/online capabilities, such as:

• Wearable monitors
• GPS systems
• Cybersecurity scanners
• Smart appliances
• Energy meters
• And more…

These advanced solutions lead to greater visibility and cost efficiencies. The more mobile people become, the more IoT integrations we will see.

Workflow automation

Automation-enabled self-service is another emerging trend in 2021. The concept of self-help in the CRM world is catching on.

New virtual assistants are designed to not only ask questions, but engage customers, sum up details, and provide productive and personalized answers. Artificial intelligence (AI) can then automatically guide users through sales and marketing pipelines.

This synergy has enabled chatbots to complete more contact management tasks without any human interference. They can quickly guide users through the right channels and provide actionable insights. Integrate that with a CRM, and you have an entire workflow that’s completely run by machine learning.

This extends to email communications as well. The concept of self-service CRMs means customers get quicker answers with little to no effort on the part of employees. Entire drip campaigns can be automated to nurture sales prospects down the funnel.

Workflow automation enables a business to offer high-quality customer service while optimizing operational costs. This is something that CRMs are supporting in new and innovative ways.

Flexible APIs

In CRM, APIs are the roadmap to customer intelligence. An API is what integrates platforms together. It is the glue that binds enterprise systems and helps to capture greater revenue growth.

Flexible APIs create a valuable record of customer preferences, while driving successful strategies. It’s one of the key technologies that enable cloud-based CRM applications to flex in response to sales and marketing needs. They’re fueling an unprecedented level of data-driven insights.

Additionally, CRMs with open API integration are enabling entirely new business models. As the development becomes increasingly customer-centric, APIs allow for greater versatility and  flexibility in designing custom:

• Workflows
• Graphical user interfaces (GUI)
• Screen designs
• Process steps

Over time, APIs will redefine the nature of how cloud-based CRMs operate. Today, nearly every CRM will offer API features (some more scalable and mature than others).

Cloud-based CRMs have enterprise-grade APIs that orchestrate a wide variety of databases. Cloud management is helping APIs become more customer-oriented by providing scalable integration frameworks and technologies. This allows for greater collaboration across departments, teams, divisions, and channels.

APIs are facilitating a new era of integrated CRM systems that are innovative and data-driven.

Dynamic user interface

One of the top CRM trends for 2021 also involves dynamic user interfaces. As CRMs evolve, the need to manage multiple functions in one spot becomes apparent. Rather than using separate systems for sales, marketing, service, and operations, new CRM dashboards are multifaceted.

A business can condense robust sales and marketing tech stacks into a single spot. Brands like Insightly provide several dashboards for universal insight. Toggle between opportunities, projects, and leads with a simple click. Colorful visuals that include charts, graphs, and gauges help a business assess important data at a glance.

Dynamic CRM dashboards display a quick overview of your most critical reports. It presents complex information that’s easy to digest and share with the team. As CRMs continue to evolve, the user interface will convey more and more data streams, in less amount of time.

Voice & conversational AI

As technology like Alexa and other voice-activated hardware hit the market, business software will soon follow. Customers are getting comfortable with conversational AI and this means, CRMs are following suit.

According to an Adobe report on voice technology, 94% of users consider voice technology not only easy to use, but state it also improves the quality of life.

That means that conversational apps are critical for the evolution of CRM tools. Voice technology is a key factor for accessibility and helps to increase user engagement.

Voice-assisted virtual assistants within CRM infrastructures are helping salespeople track, manage, message, update, and notify teams about customer data in real-time. This leads to faster decision-making and a quicker close.

In the near future, you should expect to see an increase in the usage of voice assistants and supporting hardware in CRM processes and interfaces.

One last thought

Most trends in CRM are influenced by brands that can quickly pivot to meet evolving customer needs. In order to stay relevant to tech-savvy consumers, top CRMs need to offer tools with advanced automation, IoT integrations, flexible APIs, a dynamic user interface, and conversational AI technology.

Does that seem like a big ask? 

Not really. The truth is, most of this technology is currently in place. More intelligent and contextually-aware CRM applications already incorporate machine learning, AI, and business intelligence.

The companies that are getting ahead use CRMs to build lasting customer relationships, drive sales, measure performance, and contribute to business growth; all while keeping customer satisfaction at an all-time high.

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, customer relationship management platforms will continue to outpace all other business software growth. This is because the technologies and strategies that CRM applications support contribute directly to new customer acquisition and retention, gross margin growth, and a healthy return on investment.

If you’re looking for a CRM that stays on top of trends, Insightly is a great place to start. You can try it for free, with zero commitment.

The post Top CRM trends for 2021 appeared first on Insightly.

To scale in a way that is supportive of the customer journey, businesses are turning to automated systems that help them strike a better balance between growth and personalization. And marketing automation tools, such as Insightly Marketing, can be especially useful when implemented thoughtfully and strategically.

Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for automating your customer journeys.

Why marketing automation & customer journeys go together

As we discussed in a previous article, your customer journey map is a visual representation of the process that your buyer goes through from awareness to satisfied customer. A well-crafted customer journey map should help team members understand your buyer personas, their internal motivations, and their interactions with your organization.

Journey mapping is also helpful for improving the customer experience and overcoming internal inefficiencies. For example, you may find it easier to identify:

• Content gaps: Articles, eBooks, technical guides, and other resources that might help the customer achieve his or her goal faster.
• Unnecessary friction: Points in the journey that make life difficult for customers, such as confusing calls to action or redundant steps.
• Time-consuming, manual processes: Steps that, if automated, would benefit both the customer and your team, such as appointment confirmations.

Fixing these challenges is not easy when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contact records. That’s where marketing automation comes in especially handy. Unlike batch-and-blast email tools that offer minimal configuration options, marketing automation tools are built to enable highly customized, rule-based journeys that align with customer and internal objectives.

Marketing automation enables your company to systematize your processes and scale them to keep pace with growth. The net result? Better informed customers, less friction in the buying process, and improved efficiency.

4 marketing automation tips for a better customer journey

So, what’s the best way to align marketing automation with your customer journey? Consider these four tips.

1. Collect raw ideas & develop your automation strategy

Resist the temptation to start “doing.” Instead, invest time into the process and develop a game plan. Go back to your customer journey map and note any content gaps, broken processes, and improvement opportunities, such as:

• Implementing auto-responder emails for form submissions
• Automating the distribution of blog content to subscribers
• Regularly following up with leads who have requested pricing but failed to buy
• Accelerating the onboarding experience for new customers
• Asking customers to post reviews on social media and review sites

Ask key stakeholders in sales, support, marketing, and other departments for feedback. Aim to understand how much time and effort is involved in supporting existing processes and workflows. Quantify the potential business impact that could be realized through automation.

2. Sequence your work

Take all of your automation ideas and organize them into a central location. You can use kanban boards, which are visually intuitive and make it easy to organize projects into a sequential order for implementation. Start with the project that represents the largest value and least effort. Or, if you’re completely new to automation, perhaps it would be best to start with a very small project with minimal impact. This way, you can familiarize yourself with the marketing automation platform and reduce the risk of unexpected delays.

One additional note about sequencing: If everything is in-process, nothing is in-process. Therefore, it’s best to implement one automation project at a time. Focus on using automation to add value to the customer journey—rather than maximizing the amount of work.

3. Gain a clear understanding of your marketing automation technology

There are a variety of marketing automation systems on the market today. Some offer visually intuitive user interfaces, while others are somewhat antiquated and tedious to use. Some are natively integrated with your CRM, while others require a third-party integration. Regardless of the technology that you intend to use, it’s vital to read support documentation and familiarize yourself with the platform, UI, and terminology. (If you haven’t selected a marketing automation system, check out Insightly’s marketing automation checklist.)

Insightly Users: Insightly Marketing users should read What are Journeys? and brush up on important definitions, such as prospects, lists, steps, actions, triggers, and checks.

4. Use data to measure impact, avoid issues, & inform future decisions

As you automate various aspects of the customer journey, be sure to refer back often to your marketing automation system for data and insights. In addition to top-level campaign metrics, drill down into specific steps in the journey. Your system should make it easy to understand:

• Total number of deliveries, opens, and clicks for each email
• Top-performing and under-performing steps in the journey
• Opportunities to continuously improve the journey

One final note: Your business is continuously evolving—and so is the customer journey. Therefore, you must regularly update your automation rules as things change. Set a goal to review all active automations on a regular basis. Monthly or quarterly is probably a good cadence, depending on the amount of automation. Check for any automated workflows that overlap or detract from the customer experience. Look for ways to consolidate and simplify.

Automate your customer journeys, one step at a time

Automation can be tremendously beneficial to the customer journey. It can also be a little overwhelming, especially if your company has been slow to adopt new technologies. As you begin to formulate your automation strategy, don’t try to do too many things at once. Remember, any incremental improvement will be a net gain for your customers and team.

Keep it simple, focus on value, and keep iterating.

If you’d like to learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing automation, request a demo and get a free needs assessment.

Request a demo

The post How to automate customer journeys appeared first on Insightly.

Yet, there is a time when idealism can work for us. When developing a marketing program, consider building an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is an exercise and tool in understanding your target audience and optimizing your marketing efforts.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing (ABM) and targeting enterprise customers.

Ideal customer profiles are often used in B2B marketing. They allow marketers and stakeholders to understand the institutional needs of their target market. With an ICP, marketers can tailor programs to better meet these needs.

Why use an ideal customer profile?

If you ask any B2B marketer in the world, they could probably tell you it’s a company within a certain size range, located in a certain area in the world, who has a need for their product.

The problem? Some of these companies that fit this profile are ideal customers, and some are less-than-ideal. When you are budgeting your digital marketing efforts, you want to focus on the best match.

B2B marketers can use an ICP to understand the full customer journey and find a stronger product-customer fit.

What is an ideal customer?

Let’s say you have one extremely high-revenue customer. They are loyal and they pay you the equivalent of 50 smaller customers. Great, right?

But, they take up 80 percent of your server bandwidth. They have a half-dozen dedicated account managers. They need round-the-clock customer support.

Is this your ideal customer? Would you want to replicate this customer 100 times over? Or, is your ideal customer a bit more manageable, that would allow your company to scale and grow?

It can be easy to have dollar signs in your eyes when thinking about your ideal customer. In this case, it’s important not to equate the biggest invoice with the best value.

An ideal customer is one that is profitable, scalable, and a long-term fit for your business growth.

How do you create an ICP?

There are six steps to create an ideal customer profile.

Collect customer data

Start with what you already know. Consult data collected through your CRM, customer data platform and other analytics tools. This will begin to illustrate the quantitative trends in your target market.

You may want to use a spreadsheet or business intelligence (BI) solution to layer your customer data. This will allow you to identify trends and note your ‘best’ customers.

Identify ‘ideals’ in your customer data

When combing through your data, note some of the traits of your best customers.  Those may be tied to revenue, customer acquisition cost, and/or sales cycle length.

Once you identify the categories, get specific. Is your highest-revenue customer $10,000/year or $100,000/year? Were they expensive to acquire? Did they have the longest or shortest sales cycle?

Answering these questions about customer engagement decisively will paint a picture not of a customer, but of the ideal customer.

Document customer traits & demographics

Identify the things that you can see about your ideal customer. These might be their:

• industry
• location
• biggest decision-makers
• number of employees
• corporate structure
• annual revenue/share price (if applicable)
• board structure

Research the ‘unknowns’ about your ideal customer

You know how your customer interacts with your company. Yet, that’s one small piece of who they are.

Here are a few questions you can ask of your best customers when building an ideal customer profile:

• What was the pain point that led you to seek out our product?
• What are your company’s other pain points or immediate needs?
• Who at your company benefits most from using our product?
• What other B2B solutions does your company use?
• What is the outlook for your company and industry over the next few years?

Detail how your company helps your ideal customer.

So far, you have created a great ideal target account profile. How do you turn it into an ideal customer profile?

Document how your product serves your ideal customer. Your new understanding of their business should make this exercise clear. How does your product solve their pain points, and how will that continue into the future?

Document your findings in a customer profile.

Once you’ve completed your research, combine your findings into your final customer profile. It should paint a picture of the exact company you’d like to have using your product with great detail. This will guide your digital marketing and sales teams on whom to target.

Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona

Modern marketing programs rely on buyer personas, or fictionalized versions of potential customers. If you are selling a manufacturing product, your buyer personas may be ‘Project Manager Pam,’ or ‘Budget Owner Bob.’

Buyer personas are useful when using buyer enablement marketing on a personal level. XYZ Manufacturing is not going to click on your LinkedIn ad or read your blog post, but Project Manager Pam might.

Ideal customer profiles zoom out from buyer personas. They are a holistic look at the entire firm, rather than the pain points of the individual decision maker. Ideal customer profiles and buyer personas are best used in concert with one another.

How can you use an ICP?

The modern B2B marketing and sales process relies on a true understanding of the target market. An ideal customer profile can influence these revenue programs in several ways:

Improving your account-based marketing

An ideal customer profile serves as a template for an account-based marketing (ABM) target account list, Your account-based marketers can use an ICP as a template for finding potential customers.

Improve MQLs & SQLs

Use your ideal customer profile to qualify leads. If a lead is less than 50 percent similar to your ideal customer, you can take them out of your funnel. You can also use a rubric to compare leads against your ICP. By doing this, you focus on moving along leads that have the potential to be your best customers.

Improve your product-market fit

Your ICP may have revealed that your ideal customer has needs that you are not meeting. This profile can identify gaps in your product-market fit. These gaps are opportunities to innovate your product. This can lead to better, longer-term customer relationships.

Conclusion

Creating an ideal customer profile can refresh your digital marketing and sales focus. By completing this exercise, you can renew your focus on bringing in the best customers for your company’s growth.

If you’re looking for systems and tools to manage customer data, align your sales and marketing teams around the customer journey, and build lasting customer relationships, then check out Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing.

Request a demo

The post Why you need an ideal customer profile appeared first on Insightly.

Unfortunately, in today’s omnichannel business landscape, creating one map that represents the entire customer journey can seem daunting—if not impossible. After all, some customers are very candid about their motivations and desired outcomes, while others are less willing to open up. Some customers prefer to interact through face-to-face conversations, while others rely on non-verbal forms of communication, such as email, social media, or text message.

With so many personas, goals, motivations, and communication styles to consider, how can you ever develop a single document that represents the customer journey? One way to do it is to start small and develop your customer journey map over time.

Here are three mapping exercises to help you use CRM data in developing different types of customer journeys for your business.

1. Define your ICPs & personas

Customer journey mapping is a waste of time until you have developed a very specific understanding of your ideal customer. Start by clearly defining your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and personas before spending any time on journey mapping. If you do not have an ICP or personas, consider the following questions:

• If you could only sell to one industry, what would it be?
• Within that industry, what is your primary niche?
• Within your ideal industry and niche, what are the firmographic characteristics of your ideal customer ? (i.e., revenue size, line of business, number of employees, etc.)
• Of the companies that you’ve served in the past, which were less than ideal? Why?
• Who are the types of people (job titles, responsibilities) that your company interacts with?
• Which job titles tend to make decisions about your products or services?
• Which gatekeepers and other stakeholders are involved in the buying process?
• Who will be the actual users or consumers of what you provide?

There’s a lot to think about when developing your ICPs and personas. You may not have all of the answers, and that’s normal. Use your CRM data and build reports that help you answer the tough questions. Your sales team is also a reliable source of first-hand knowledge to help you check your assumptions. Collect all of the feedback and begin simplifying it for the next step.

Example: A manufacturing business that makes and sells assembly line equipment could theoretically have numerous ICPs and personas. However, for customer mapping purposes, it may be beneficial to focus on one industry at a time—especially if buying patterns and customer service requirements vary significantly by industry. Instead of trying to force all industries into a single map, the manufacturing company would be better served to develop one map for automotive, one for healthcare, and so on. The first step would be to itemize each industry’s ICP and persona(s) as follows:

2. Analyze CRM data for closed-won deals within each ICP

Once you’ve defined your primary ICP(s), it’s time to use data from your CRM to identify trends that are common to each journey. Drill down using tags or custom fields and quickly identify won deals that fall within your target ICP. Be sure to set a date range that provides enough meaningful data.

Do you notice any similarities? Things to look for may include:

• Similar interactions in the journey from awareness to close
• Content that was frequently downloaded or viewed on your website
• Marketing emails that helped move deals forward
• Lead sources that were responsible for a sizable percentage of closed deals
• Typical customer buying processes and the personas who were involved
• Objections that were noted during the sales cycle
• Average amount of time that was required to close each deal
• Post-close and implementation details

Note: Looking at closed-lost deals can also be instructive, but you may not need to do it if you have enough closed-won data.

Use actual deal data to build a more complete view of the customer profile. Going back to our previous manufacturing example, the company’s automotive ICP may look something like this:

3. Start building your customer journey map

Having enriched your ICPs and personas with reliable data from your CRM, you’re now ready to begin constructing a basic customer journey map. What’s the best format for your business? There’s no one-size-fits-all template that works for every industry and use case, so here are a few tips for designing a simple, yet effective customer journey map:

Grid layout

Most customer journey maps are built using a graph-based design and have horizontal and vertical axes. Above the grid, it’s important to have your ICP and persona clearly defined. If you’ve developed fictitious personas with names and photos, this might be a great place to use them. Remember, each map should be specific to one persona / ICP combination. If you have several customer journeys to map, start with the most important persona. If certain maps are very similar, you can always combine them or eliminate some later.

Horizontal axis

The horizontal axis of your graph will most likely align with specific stages that customers go through from pre-awareness to satisfied customer. Using your internal sales pipeline terminology could work, although it is better to describe the stages from the perspective of your customer. So, instead of “initial discussions,” you might use the phrase “research vendors.”

Vertical axis

Some customer journey maps try to squeeze as many criteria into the vertical axis as possible. This can lead to an overwhelming experience that defeats the original purpose of mapping. Decide on three to four important criteria as a starting point for your y-axis. Customer actions, customer feelings and thoughts, and common objections are good examples. You can always add more later.

Example customer journey map

Based on our previous example, here’s what a simple customer journey map might look like. You could build this in a document or spreadsheet and hand it off to a designer to pretty up later. The main goal is to get your basic facts on paper as quickly as possible:

Persona: VP Process Engineering – Plastics (Automotive ICP)

Notice that the map’s last row provides space to collect notes and ideas for streamlining each stage of the customer journey. In this example, developing “automated onboarding workflows” is listed as one opportunity to help the customer achieve his or her goal during implementation. Using a tool like Insightly Marketing can be an intuitive and effective way to automate various aspects of the customer journey—from initial awareness to repeat buyer.

Build better customer journeys

As the business world evolves at an even faster pace, smart companies are realizing the importance of building accurate and actionable customer journey maps.

Not sure how to get started? Keep it simple. Rely on data that already exists in your CRM. Focus on business impact rather than worrying about design effects. And, once you’ve built your customer journey map, use it!

To learn more about Insightly Marketing and CRM platform, request a demo.

Request a demo

The post 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys appeared first on Insightly.