A unified CRM is what’s required to thrive in a competitive landscape. The tools and data integration that it provides enable all of the company’s teams to seamlessly achieve synergy. They enable you to gain more insights and deliver a better experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the ways Insightly’s unified CRM software can have a transformative impact on your business.

What is the CRM process?

The CRM process can be best described as a business strategy that enables companies to better identify and interact with current and potential customers. 

The idea here is to improve personalization for every customer interaction for enhanced customer experience and loyalty through data analysis and segmentation tools.

The same approach is also leveraged for prospects to convert them into paying customers. The five core steps of the CRM process signify a collaborative effort between the key departments in a company.

The 5 steps of the CRM cycle

1. Increase brand awareness

Typically the marketing team’s domain, the first step in the customer relationship management process involves introducing prospects to the business. It requires in-depth research on the audience’s demographics and interests.

Audience personas are created based on this market research to launch marketing campaigns that will theoretically have a greater chance of resonating with the audience.

2. Acquire more leads

The lead acquisition step is generally handled by the sales or marketing teams, or in some companies, both. This is essentially an effort to get prospects to engage with the business. 

For example, the marketing team might offer downloadable content as a lead magnet to website visitors if they provide an email address. The sales team could then pull that data from the CRM to proactively target prospects to convert them into customers.

3. Convert leads into paying customers

Reps nurture leads to get them to convert to paying customers in this part of the sales process. They usually rely on lead-scoring data in the CRM to identify prospects that may have the highest probability of a sale and follow-up diligently with the lead.

Converting prospects into new customers is more of an art than a science. Sales reps must be skilled at building trust to inspire confidence in the leads to convert them into paying customers.

4. Retain customers with customer support and customer success

The job doesn’t end when the lead converts into a customer. Providing them with exceptional customer service is key to ensuring that they remain loyal customers.

The most widely used metric in customer service is CSAT or customer satisfaction. This data is used to track trends and identify and fix any issues impacting customer service.

5. Extract more value per customer with upsells/cross-sells

Upselling and cross-selling are great opportunities to proactively meet the needs of your customers by utilizing the data in the CRM. Companies should be mindful of the fact that customers’ needs may change over time. 

This can be achieved by leveraging purchase data to provide personalized recommendations on the products and services that would provide further benefit to the customers.

Why the CRM process is flawed

Not all companies are created equal. The customer journey will always be different for every company. What works for one may not necessarily work for the other. This crucial fact tends to be overlooked by the CRM process. 

What ends up happening is that the data gets compartmentalized in different tools. It turns into a mess as data discrepancies inevitably occur when all teams are not entering data into the same system.

This causes friction between various teams, including sales and marketing, since they effectively work in silos with complex ad hoc data sync processes.

Employees thus end up not trusting the data as it doesn’t provide them with a holistic view to make empowered decisions. They come to question the integrity of the data because it doesn’t appear to be cohesive and comprehensive.

They also find it difficult to achieve synergy with colleagues on other teams. Alignment across teams is crucial to close more customers and to improve retention.

A real-life CRM process example

A legacy CRM is effectively used as a suite of apps by a company. All of the sales, marketing, and service data is collected and managed in separate silos. 

Thus, in reality, these so-called “integrated” CRMs are actually “assembled” CRM software where features and functionality were added over time in response to customers’ needs. 

These solutions don’t fit the customer journey, particularly for companies that offer multiple products and services. The many teams that work on them use different tools that all do the same thing but don’t allow for seamless data integration. It’s impossible to have confidence in the data when it’s scattered everywhere. 

There’s no continuity between the various tools in the CRM system, which prevents them from having an up-to-date and comprehensive view of the customer journey.

This will prevent, for example, the hardware and software sales teams in a company from leveraging the upsell/cross-sell opportunities that may exist with their customers simply because their data is all over the place. 

Trying to fully integrate the scattered data is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, often making efforts to achieve that futile.

A better, adaptive approach to the CRM process

1. Start with the customer journey

The customer journey is a vital part of any CRM integration. Most solutions go about it the wrong way by forcing the customer journey to adapt to the CRM process. 

Think about it, what works for a customer who wants to buy hardware might not work for someone who’s buying software. The same CRM strategy can’t be used for both.

It should be the other way around. The CRM process needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the customer journey. This increases the potential of converting leads and enhancing retention regardless of what stage of the sales pipeline they’re in.

2. Integrate with your existing tools

A single customer view that centralizes all customer data is a powerful tool to achieve synergy. Its integration with all of the existing tools that a business uses is also of vital importance. 

Insightly AppConnect is a tool that allows for integration automation. Companies can use it to link and integrate Insightly’s unified CRM system with the other apps they use in their organization. 

This allows for powerful new workflow automation between applications. AppConnect also features over 500 pre-built connections to popular business apps.

Even non-technical users can build seamless integrations by using its simple drag and drop interface without writing a single line of code.

3. Take a unified approach

Companies can both extract the most from their CRM implementation and improve customer service by adopting a unified approach that no longer relies on redundant tools and the compartmentalization of data in silos. 

They can achieve synergy and data integration by unifying the marketing, sales, support, and project management on a single platform. All of the teams work together with a holistic view of the customers’ needs and expectations.

​​One of the biggest benefits of a unified solution for teams is that they can complete many tasks in one single system. They no longer have to switch between multiple applications to use various tools just to access data, a task that unnecessarily slows them down. 

Insightly puts this unified approach at the heart of its CRM solution. Teams’ productivity increases through automation. With business intelligence built in, Insightly can also be used to create data visualizations and real-time data dashboards for unmatched visibility.

Insightly unifies your CRM process

Insightly empowers organizations and even small businesses to align sales, marketing, and support teams so that they have complete visibility over customer relationships. They can use that insight and knowledge to improve customer service. 

Automatic lead routing ensures that leads are routed to the right person in real-time. With workflow automation, companies can create complex, multi-step business processes to better serve their customers. It can even execute custom business logic to sync with external systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

AppConnect ensures that the ecosystem of tools that a company uses every day isn’t disrupted; rather it’s integrated seamlessly with the CRM. AppConnect comes with more than 500 pre-built connections to the most popular business software apps. This makes establishing seamless integrations between the CRM and apps very straightforward.

Interested in learning more about how a real single customer view can enable you to improve customer retention and to better connect with them? Try Insightly for free to feel the unified CRM difference for yourself.

The post The CRM process is flawed. Here is why. appeared first on Insightly.

This misalignment has led to tension between sales and marketing teams. It also leads to companies missing revenue targets. Because of this, many companies have made strides to align marketing and sales teams. You may hear these referred to as revenue teams. By putting sales and marketing in lockstep, these companies keep the bottom line top of mind.

If you’re a marketer, navigating a move toward marketing and sales alignment can be a challenge. You may need to make changes in your day-to-day work. Here are a few ways marketers can work with sales teams to achieve better alignment and exceed revenue goals.

Why marketing and sales alignment matters

Marketers and salespeople working together smoothly and aligning their operations can create advantages for both teams.

Improved lead management 

Your junior sales team likely spends the bulk of their time qualifying leads. They use an integrated CRM, online research, email, and phone conversations to determine if leads have the potential to turn into customers. Instead of following up on low-quality leads, sales can use this time to start to warm up leads who fit their ideal customer profile.

This gap begins to close when sales and marketing work together to create lead scoring and grading models to qualify leads. Once sales and marketing agree on lead qualification criteria, they’ll reduce friction between the teams and start improving lead conversion rates. It may take some time and testing to figure out the best lead qualification model, but as long as sales and marketing are working in tandem with each other, they’ll be able to find what works best faster. 

Sales can leverage marketing programs

Once these leads are qualified, sales teams are responsible for converting them to customers. Here’s where marketing can help. Marketers have content, programs, designs, and events that can be repurposed into sales collateral. Sometimes there is a dedicated product marketer who focuses on using marketing to enable sales. This is especially useful during a sales blitz, an outbound sales campaign common with account-based marketing (ABM).

A marketing blog post can become a case study. A webinar can become a product tutorial. A trade show can be a way for a potential customer to meet your team. By repurposing assets, marketing provides sales reps with more tools to help them guide customers through the buying journey and close deals.

Integrated programs have the best chance of success

Companies are moving to hyper-targeted, integrated campaigns. If your company is using account-based marketing, the buy-in of sales and marketing is crucial. ABM campaigns require sales results, account management expertise, agile digital marketing, and creative thinking. Your marketing and sales leadership must be in lockstep as to how the campaign will operate, who is responsible for each aspect, and how to measure its success. If your marketing and sales teams aren’t on the same page, your ABM campaign will struggle—or fail outright.  

How marketing can better understand sales

Even when teams are integrated, there are still fundamental differences between marketing and sales. There are a few things that marketers can do to better understand salespeople and improve the value they deliver to sales. 

Sit in on sales calls

The best marketers do this regularly. By sitting in on one with sales each week, marketers can get insight into the results of their programs. Learn more about the characteristics of a good (or bad) lead, what the biggest concerns are, how they describe a problem they are trying to solve, and if your marketing materials resonate with prospects.

Understand the sales funnel

Marketers know how the sales funnel works: leads get qualified, turn into prospects, then opportunities, then customers. Yet, sales teams know the ins and outs of their funnel specifically. Perhaps there’s a smoking gun that can tell a salesperson that someone is a great potential customer. Conversely, there may be a red flag that tells a sales rep that someone should be disqualified immediately. Are there specifics that impact your company’s sales process? As the marketing team learns these, they can focus on generating leads that are a better fit for the funnel.

Integrate and align your customer relationship process

We all know there’s a slew of sales and marketing tools out there. Yet, what about tools that align the goals of marketing with the goals of sales? A unified customer relationship management (CRM) system, like Insightly, is the first step in orienting marketing and sales results. Sales management uses a CRM to organize and manage sales processes and customer interactions. Marketing can use CRM data to extract customer insights and learnings to inform programs and initiatives. 

Review sales results 

We all know the sales process doesn’t end when we generate a lead. Your sales team is likely using their CRM to collect and crunch plenty of sales-related information. This shows how leads move through the funnel and how they convert to customers. 

Three ways marketers can become indispensable to salespeople

Once marketers understand how the sales process works, there are a few easy ways we can help sales close more and bigger deals.

Provide them with content to help warm leads and close deals

Create a comprehensive content plan that includes blog posts, tutorials, videos, and other agreed-upon resources that sales management and account executives can share with prospective customers. Also, figure out the best ways to repurpose materials in different formats so that you can maximize the value of every piece of content you produce.

Offer social media training and reviews

Many sales managers rely on social networks like LinkedIn to help them qualify or prospect. Marketers can offer reviews and recommendations to sales’ social media accounts, as well as provide a plan that includes post content and suggested language.

Create loyalty programs to improve customer engagement

Marketing doesn’t end once the deal is closed. Implementing best practices in customer engagement can improve customer experience. This gives salespeople more leverage in offering benefits to customers. 

How salespeople can help marketers

Sales teams can also help marketers improve programs, which in turn generate better leads. Here are a few specific ways that salespeople can provide insight to marketing.

Help marketers build an ideal customer profile

An ideal customer profile is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing and targeting enterprise-level customers. An ICP relies on sales information to understand the process by which the ideal customer goes through the sales funnel. Marketers can integrate both quantitative and qualitative sales results into the profile. 

Identify customer advocates

Customer testimonials strengthen marketing. There’s no better way to convince a new customer than the recommendation of a current customer. Along with customer success, salespeople can help marketing identify strong customer advocates who can be quoted on the website and speak at marketing events.

Measure marketing return-on-investment

You don’t know if your marketing program is successful until you get regular feedback from sales and see the final bottom line. Request regular reporting from the sales team on the results of marketing programs, including revenue generated from specific campaigns. Incorporating this assessment will ensure that marketing programs align with sales success. A unified platform for sales and marketing, like Insightly, can help to keep both teams in sync from lead generation through conversion and ongoing customer engagement campaigns. 

Conclusion

We are all striving toward perfect sales and marketing alignment. Consider the value that each team can provide to one another when interacting and planning your joint revenue efforts. What tools, processes, and elements of culture can help your sales and marketing teams to better collaborate and tackle challenges? 

The post How marketers can work more effectively with sales appeared first on Insightly.

Before you draft a marketing plan, do a competitive marketing analysis—a research initiative that will give you insight into how similar products are being marketed and help you to identify the best opportunities for your launch.

You may also want to complete a competitive analysis in marketing if you’re starting a new business, presenting to an investor, or need to refresh your marketing strategy.

Here’s how to write a competitive market analysis, and how you can use these competitive analysis methods to inform and improve your marketing.

Identify your competitors

Most marketers and salespeople talk about competitors often. When figuring out who else is in your space, you might compare similar companies based on product offerings, size, revenue, or number of customers. These types of product competitors are extremely useful when developing marketing programs, because you want to know how to position your product against your closest similar offering.

However, similar products are not your only competitor. In fact, they may not even be your main competitor. Sometimes, your biggest competitor is simply ‘doing nothing.’

Further, your company may be playing in someone else’s yard when it comes to marketing. Let’s say your project management tool is great for salespeople. Now, you’re not just competing for share of voice with other project management tools—you’re competing with every other sales tool as well.

When you identify your competitors, start by making a list of similar products. Then, expand. Who is each competitor competing with? And who else is playing in that space? What is every feasible alternative to someone buying your product? That’s your true place to start with a competitive analysis framework.

Understand competitors’ marketing strengths and weaknesses

Once you know who your competitors are, it’s time to give them a little credit. They wouldn’t be your competitors if they weren’t any good, right?

Analyzing your competitors’ strongest marketing programs

We tend to think of our competition as, well, competition. Instead, start to think of them as learning opportunities. What are they doing that’s working? You can find this out by:

• Analyzing their social media presence
• Noting how they talk and write about their product
• Analyze their paid media on Google Adwords
• Use SEO tools to see how they are ranking on different keywords
• Talk with their current or former customers about their experiences

Once you complete, see if you can carry out some of these programs at your company. If your competitors had a celebrity cameo at their multi-million dollar conference, you may not be able to capture that same marketing juice. However, if they’re competing on low-cost keywords and doubling down on a content or social strategy, your team can integrate these learnings into your own strategy.

Determine the competition’s weaknesses and your opportunities

You can learn just as much from what your competitors are not doing. Are there channels that they’ve ignored, or abandoned completely? This could mean that your target audience isn’t in these channels; or it could mean they are an untapped resource.

Often, B2B companies are the last to pursue trendy channels and tend to stick to what they’re used to. Because of this, the first-actors in these networks get to reap many benefits. They are able to quickly build more dedicated following and figure out if there’s potential to turn social media channels into lead sources. They also get to learn the ins and outs more quickly. Not every channel is a winner, but those who pursue them are able to determine this more quickly.

Your competition’s weaknesses are your chances either to capitalize on, or learn from. When you’re completing your competitor analysis framework, you can analyze the possibilities for your team to pursue these opportunities.

Examine your competitors’ approach to digital marketing

With digital marketing, we’re all playing in the same sandbox. There’s only one Google, one Twitter and one LinkedIn, so we have quite a bit of visibility into each others’ strategies.

By poking around, you can start to map your competitors’ digital marketing approach.

Here are some questions to get started, and some tips and tools for finding this information:

What networks are they using?

You can run their name through Namechk to get a list of which social media accounts they’ve created under their brand name.

Do they have an SEO strategy?

Use the ‘Site Explorer’ tool in Ahrefs to check their domain authority, which of their pages are ranking, and if they’ve had changes over time.

Do they use Google Adwords?

Tools like iSpionage allow you to take a look at what ads your competitors are running and how much they’re spending. This is a huge indicator of whether you’ll be able to financially compete with their marketing spend.

Digital is the easiest place to replicate, test, and measure. Using your competitors’ strategies, you can experiment to see if these items also improve your marketing metrics as well.

Analyze pricing and packaging

Marketing is a catch-all term for so many different programs. Yet, pricing and packaging is one of the most crucial marketing elements that does not typically fall under our umbrella. The price of your product, and what comes with it, are usually the most critical decision factor for attracting customers to your product.

When working on your competitor market analysis, you can assess which products cost the most and the least. When assessing price, it’s also important to consider what features are included in that price point. Special discounts? Lifetime customer support? Unlimited user seats?

These items are all part of your value proposition, which you can use to communicate your product to your target market.

Packaging and pricing is not a perfect science. When analyzing the value of each offer, work closely with your product and sales teams to determine what is actually being offered, and for how much. You’ll be able to get additional insight from these teams about how your product fits into this mix and if you’re competitive. Adjusting your pricing and packaging offerings can inform your market strategy.

Evaluate your competitors’ lead flow and customer acquisition

Marketing doesn’t stop after visitors land on your site. The alignment between marketing and sales is crucial to making sure your leads become customers. Examining your competitors’ lead flow can give you some insight into how the marketing and sales teams work together.

When creating your competitive market analysis, see if your competitors are:

• Collecting leads through web forms
• Employing a sales team (you can learn this from LinkedIn)
• Offering demos, free trials, or limited access to the product

By investigating these items, you’ll start to understand how your competitors are not only getting leads, but also acquiring customers. You can use this information to approximate their customer journey, which you can integrate into your greater strategy.

How to do a competitor analysis [TEMPLATE]

Conclusion

One of the many reasons to do a new competitive marketing analysis is to inform your own marketing strategy. Often, these analyses are significant to investors and senior leaders, and can remind them that you’re on the right path. The research phase of these analyses can take time. But, they pay off many times over when you can learn from your competitors’ successes and failures.

The post How to do a competitive market analysis appeared first on Insightly.

While sales is still the driving force behind most qualification efforts, organizations today need to work closely with marketing in order to properly qualify leads. One of the reasons for this shift is the need to adapt to the rapidly evolving customer journey.

In this post we cover the basics of sales qualification, why it’s important, and how to qualify leads in a way that makes sense for your business.

Sales qualification terminology

The first step in any lead management process is developing a shared terminology. The definitions presented in our previous article about lead disposition are probably a good starting point:

• Prospect: Anyone in your database who has ever expressed a basic level of interest in your product or service.
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): Prospects whose activity indicates that they are more likely to become customers based on prospect scoring (as compared to other prospects).
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): MQLs that have been reviewed and passed to sales for follow-up.
• Opportunities: Converted SQLs who have expressed a willingness and ability to buy.

For the purposes of this article, let’s add one more:

• Unqualified lead: Anyone who doesn’t show a clear need for your company’s products and/or services, or meet other sales qualification criteria.

Your definitions may differ from the ones above. The main point is to align your teams with a shared understanding of key definitions and their meaning. After all, it’s hard to qualify deals when no one speaks the same language.

Why is sales qualification important?

You might be wondering why sales qualification is even necessary. Isn’t the point of business to provide your goods or services to as many customers as possible?

Not every person who comes to your website or calls your business is a good fit. Prospective customers realize that they have wants and needs. However, they do not have perfect knowledge about how your solution can fulfill those wants and needs. Therefore, sales qualification is an essential process that helps you to:

Create order and avoid chaos

A good sales qualification process—especially one that effectively uses lead scoring—makes it easy for staff to identify prospective customers who are likely to convert. Instead of staring at a massive database of hundreds of raw contacts, sales qualification winnows the list to a manageable size to ensure your team is working on best-fit deals.

Increase return on advertising spend

Marketers spend a lot of time optimizing digital advertising campaigns and website content to maximize engagement. Downloading a whitepaper, requesting pricing, or subscribing to a newsletter are a few common ways that prospects may engage. However, not every person who provides an email address is ready to purchase—or ever will. Sales qualification provides marketers essential feedback for understanding the types of campaigns and initiatives that deliver high quality leads.

Provide a better customer experience

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Imagine that you have a need, and you come across a service that you think meets your needs. You ask to speak to a sales rep, who fails to ask any meaningful questions and then begins pressuring you to make a purchase. This doesn’t create a good customer experience. Therefore, sales qualification is a fair and prudent way to ensure a positive experience for everyone, especially for the customer.

Scale business

Processes help you scale and grow. Therefore, a sales process that qualifies prospects is vital for attracting and converting the right customers, even as your market share expands. Qualifying one customer is easy. Qualifying 10,000 customers is not easy, but a well-defined sales qualification process can make it more manageable.

Sales qualification frameworks

Sales qualification frameworks create a structured approach to qualifying prospective customers. One of the most widely-used approaches is the BANT framework, as pioneered by IBM in the mid-20th century.

BANT definition: A set of four criteria (budget, authority, need, time frame) that helps sales professionals objectively evaluate the viability of business opportunities.

With BANT, the prospect is evaluated across four key criteria:

Budget: Does the prospect customer have a budget, and does it fit with your pricing model?

Authority: Does this specific person have the authority to make the decision to move forward?

Need: Is there an actual need that your solution could fill?

Time Frame: By what specific date does the prospect hope to solve his or her problem?

Although BANT is arguably the most well-known sales qualification framework, there may be other frameworks that better fit your business. Spend time researching sales qualification frameworks and find one that makes sense for your industry and business model.

Sales qualification questions

So, how can you know that prospective customers have the right budget, authority, need, or time frame? Ask them.

Sales qualifying questions form the foundation for determining if a prospect is a good fit for your business. By asking the right questions at the right time, you put yourself in a better position to understand the person’s situation, challenges, goals, and objectives.

But, what types of questions should you ask? Should you ask them all at once? Email or phone call?

Although there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, here are some recommendations to get your creative juices flowing.

Where to ask

Take a fresh look at your customer journey map. How do prospective customers typically interact with your company? Does every customer require an in-depth demo process, or do most customers just want to go through a self-service checkout process? Your business model, product or service type, and customer buying process will play a major factor in determining “where” to ask your sales qualification questions. Other than the obvious channels (such as phone and email), what are other ways to collect data about the prospect’s needs?

Here are a few ideas:

• Optional form fields, such as revenue size or number of employees
• Chatbot prompts that ask targeted questions
• Exit intent banners on your website
• Surveys that are powered by automated marketing emails

When to ask

As illustrated by the previous examples, the sooner you can begin to build a unified view of the prospect in your CRM, the better. However, some prospects are less willing to reveal information until a person from your sales staff proactively reaches out.

Developing an effective lead scoring program simplifies the decision to initiate outreach. Once a prospect has exhibited the proper level of “interest” by visiting certain webpages or engaging with a predefined number of emails, a lead scoring system will automatically adjust the prospect’s score to a higher level. Data enrichment integrations and social media discovery features in your CRM may provide additional context. Deals that reach a certain threshold are then flagged for further review and passed on to sales. In this model, data serves as the foundation for knowing when to ask.

What to ask

Questions asked via a chatbot could be quite different than those asked during a 30-minute phone call. It all goes back to the purpose of the question. Earlier in the process, you may just be looking for basic insights about the prospect. However, as the relationship advances, you may need to ask numerous open-ended questions that get to the heart of the situation.

Let’s use my marketing consulting business as an example. Using BANT framework as a guide, here are a few questions that I might ask a prospective client during an initial consultation:

Budget

• What types of marketing programs are you currently running?
• Are you working with another marketing consultant?
• Do you already have an established marketing budget?

Authority

• Who else at your company will be involved in this project?
• Do we need to include anyone else in these conversations?

Need

• What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve?
• What have you tried in the past?
• What is your vision of success for marketing?

Time Frame

• How quickly are you looking to move forward?
• Should we plan to kick things off next week?

It’s time to build a better sales qualification process

Implementing a scalable sales qualification process can be beneficial for both your company and the people that you serve. Your sales and marketing teams will find it easier to identify and convert likely customers into paying customers. And, the prospects who decide to convert will go into the relationship feeling confident that your solution adequately meets their needs.

Recommit to building a stronger sales qualification process. Your team and your customers will appreciate it.

The post How does sales qualification work? appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 2 of a sales process series based on conversations with Insightly VP of Sales, Mark Ripley.

The first part of this series covered the benefits of improving your sales process: richer data, better coaching, improved scalability, and revenue optimization.

Successful companies recognize that continuous improvement is not a matter of if. Rather, it’s a matter of how.

So, how do you go about improving your sales process?

According to Mark Ripley, VP of Sales at Insightly, the best way to improve your sales process is by focusing on the buyer. Here are five steps for building a sales process that mirrors your buyer journey.

1. Get buy-in from leadership

Before you make any major changes to your sales process, it’s important to communicate your vision and gain leadership’s buy-in.

“For something as mission critical as your sales process, it needs to start at the top,” says Mark Ripley, Vice President of Sales at Insightly. “Getting managers and leaders to buy-in to what you’re doing will increase your chances of gaining adoption.”

Getting buy-in from leadership may not be an easy task, especially when your sales and marketing teams are not aligned. After all, spending time to refine the sales process can seem counterproductive compared to other, more pressing matters—such as strategic product launches, time-sensitive advertising campaigns, or quarter-end reporting.

Your next move: Arm yourself with data from your CRM that supports the case for enhancing your sales process. Identify specific pain points, such as customer churn or waning customer satisfaction, that could be alleviated with a reimagined sales process. Revisit the tangible benefits of continuous improvement and be prepared to share them with leadership. Be ready to make your best sales pitch!

2. Understand your customer’s buying process

If you’ve already studied your ideal customer journey and built an accurate customer journey map, you’re ahead of the game. However, now might be a good time to revisit your assumptions and gain a fresh perspective about the customer’s buying process.

As Mark points out, “Fundamentally, all buyers go through three phases leading up to a decision.” The phases are:

Problem Awareness: The customer realizes that he or she has a problem.

Solution Identification: The customer considers his or her problem and creates a list of products or services that could provide a solution.

Cold Feet: The customer decides whether or not the problem is actually worth solving.

According to Mark, the “cold feet” stage is easy for sales teams to overlook, but it’s one that must be carefully considered.

“When buying anything of significant value, everyone goes through a cold feet stage—even after doing all of the research to find a solution,” says Mark.

Your next move: Dust off any customer journey maps that you’ve already created. Reevaluate your assumptions in the context of the three fundamental buying phases: problem awareness, solution identification, cold feet. Did you miss anything?

3. Think like a customer

Understanding your customer’s buying phases is a good start, but it’s not enough.

“You need to go a level deeper by looking at the world through the customer lens—not the sales lens,” says Mark.

Ask yourself these questions to begin thinking more like your customer:

• How does your customer decide that a problem actually exists?
• What mysteries must be solved before a purchase can be made?
• What information is necessary to make an informed decision?
• Which questions and concerns does your customer have?
• What is your customer’s process for gaining information?
• Is the customer more likely to watch an embedded video or read a technical whitepaper?
• Is there any information that might accelerate the decision-making process?

Avoid the temptation to jump to conclusions. If you don’t have enough historical data to answer these questions, send out a survey or invite customers to participate in brief, 20-minute interviews. Ask open-ended questions that help you understand their perspectives and the steps they went through to buy your product.

Your next move: Slow down and dive into what makes customers tick. Set aside your existing sales process for the moment and seek to understand customers on a whole new level. Get creative and use data to build a more complete picture of your typical customer.

4. Map your sales process to the customer’s buying process

With a data-driven understanding of your customer’s buying process and perspectives, it’s time to boil everything down into a simple diagram.

Map the customer buying process

Using diagramming software, a whiteboard, or even pen and paper, capture each stage of the customer buying process (step two) and related psychographic information (step three). Since you’re putting the customer first, this section should be documented at the top of the page.

Layer in your existing sales process

With your customer buying process clearly defined, use the space below to document the specific actions and workflows in your sales process. For starters, it may be wise to simply list out your existing process as it stands today (in the context of the buying process). You may be surprised how much sales effort fits into one stage—at the expense of another stage.

Begin developing an enhanced sales process

Examining your existing sales process next to the customer buying process is sure to identify gaps and bottlenecks. For example, you may realize that you need more resources in the “cold feet” buying stage. Brainstorm ways to create balance in your sales process and help the customer make an informed decision.

Your next move: Create your diagram and share it with key stakeholders. Start an internal discussion, look for misalignment between the customer’s needs and your existing process, and develop a list of opportunities for improvement.

5. Work with sales ops to implement your sales process

As you move toward a sales process that better aligns with the customer buying process, be sure to keep sales operations fully engaged in the conversation.

“Sales ops is usually the team that implements the process by adapting your CRM, setting up the measurement framework, and reporting the data,” says Mark. “It’s therefore really important to have a strong relationship between sales ops and the sales team.”

After collaborating with sales ops, you may realize that your current sales stack does not align with your optimal sales process. The good news is that there are plenty of systems on the market to help you accomplish your goal. Insightly’s intuitive UI and customizability make it a great option for adapting technology to your sales process—rather than force-fitting your vision into a subpar system.

“At Insightly, we’re very well known for having a high adoption rate,” says Mark. “It’s easy to use, which generates higher adoption and helps end users adhere to the sales process to maximize revenue.”

Your next move: Work with sales ops to adapt your tech stack for your ideal sales process. If that’s not easily done, consider evaluating other tools that meet your needs.

Future-proofing your sales process

Stay tuned for part three in this series about sales processes. We’ll be sharing tips for future-proofing your sales process in an era when most teams are still working remotely.

In the meantime, if you are ready to try or switch to a new CRM, reach out to the Insightly team to schedule a demo.

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The post 5 steps to build a sales process that mirrors the buyer journey appeared first on Insightly.

If you’re like most marketers, you can rattle off a dozen ways off the top of your head. Ads, click-through rates, blog comments and Facebook likes, and industry research begin to scratch the surface. What about sales calls and customer success touch points? How about their deal size, billing cycle, or even their company holiday card?

To create a full picture of your customer, you have to gain customer insights from every angle. The easiest and most complete way to do this is by using a customer data platform.

What is a customer data platform?

According to the CDP Institute, a customer data platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.

This means:

• A customer data platform must be a single software, not a combination of products.
• A CDP must export a persistent, unified customer database, not a fragmented system.
• A CDP must be accessible to other systems, not a standalone export.

How is a CDP different from a CRM?

But wait, what about your CRM? CRMs, or customer relationship management systems, have become integral to revenue operations. They provide invaluable insight into your customers. Further, they integrate with marketing, customer service, and financial programs. You may even use a unified CRM, which puts many of these integrations into one central system.

Here’s how a customer data platform differs from a customer relationship management system.

CDPs are managed by marketers 

This is unlike a CRM, which is managed by a sales operations manager or a system administrator. A digital marketing manager or analyst can manage a customer data platform.

CDPs are not used to manage customers

A customer data platform is not used to send emails, make calls, or market to customers. Instead, it analyzes things that have already happened.

CDPs go above & beyond the CRM

A customer relationship management system is a great data resource. But, it is not the only data resource. A CPD can enhance CRM data with marketing, service and financial information as well.

Your customer has a story before and after they become a data point. A customer data platform helps your digital marketing team tell that story, without gaps.

What kind of data does a CDP collect?

The customer data platform should collect customer insights at every touch point to provide a 360 degree view. Here are some examples of the types of data a CDP might collect:

Web data

Tools like Google Analytics document your customers’ web behavior. A customer data platform can aggregate links clicked, time on page and bounce rate. Combining this with other customer data can show meaningful trends in user behavior.

Customer identifiers

Your CRM integration will enhance your customer information. With a robust CRM, you can use identifying information to segment customer profiles. Data like names, birthdays and addresses creates fuller pictures of your customers.

Customer histories

Has your customer been around for six years or six months? Are they paying six figures or on a six-week free trial? This sales information, also in your CRM, profiles customers by their purchasing behavior.

Email or social media engagement

Who are the customers who like everything you post on Facebook, but never upgrade? What about those who haven’t opened a marketing email in over a year? These digital marketing analytics are powerful when aggregated with your other customer metrics.

Customer service data

You can learn a lot about a customer when studying how they use your customer service. Combining data from live chats, phone calls, and emails shows customers’ behavior over time and likelihood to churn.

Financial information

At the end of the day, you want to know what customers are purchasing, and for how much. A customer data platform shows lifetime value and total investment into your customers, including acquisition.

Benefits of using a customer data platform

Marketing bridges the gap between your customer and your product. Marketers typically understand their product extremely well. Why shouldn’t you understand your customer at the same level?

Benefits of a customer data platform include:

Campaign optimization to suit your customer profile

A customer data platform shows you which campaigns resonate with your customers. With this information, you can segment your marketing programs to meet customer needs.

Improving your sales cycle

With integrated marketing and sales data, a CDP can identify blockers in your funnel. This information allows you to smoothly move customers from marketing to sales.

Identification of customer correlations

Say you have a hunch that organic customers are more likely to contact customer support. A CDP can prove you right—or wrong. These correlations let you find alignments in your marketing, sales, and support functions.

Reintegration of customer data into other software

Customer data platforms integrate both ways. So, your marketing and sales software can use CDP data to improve your day-to-day functions.

Driving revenue

Better customer understanding = better marketing = better revenue.

Using a customer data platform to improve your marketing

How, exactly, does better customer understanding lead to better marketing? Here’s how a CDP can impact the success of your marketing campaigns.

CDP shows which channels bring in the most revenue

A CDP will draw a direct line between your marketing channel and lifetime revenue. You can invest more in the channels that are high revenue-drivers, and retire those that aren’t. This will increase your marketing ROI and decrease your customer acquisition cost.

CDP helps to improve your product marketing

Product marketing helps your customer better understand your company and product. A CDP uses your data to show customer touchpoints, pain points, and decision cycles. You can incorporate this information into segmented product marketing materials.

Create better segments with complete visibility

We all know digital marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s meant to be humanized. Our campaigns and programs work best when we tailor them to fit our customers’ needs. With a customer data platform, you can create more specific customer segments. With fewer assumptions, these segments are more accurate, measurable, and effective.

Conclusion

A customer data platform is a great tool to better understand your target audience. The insight into the entire business can be transformative for marketing success. If you are a marketer looking to better understand your customer, consider adding a CDP to your tech stack.

Interested in learning about Insightly’s unified platform for customer data management? Request a demo and see how you can better manage your customer data, align teams, and build stronger customer relationships.

Request a demo

Sources:
4 Types of Customer Data to Enhance Your Marketing Campaigns. Rob FitzGerald. ConnextDigital. June 20, 2019
8 Benefits of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Jan Hendrik Fleury & Clemens Niekler. Crystalloids. October 7, 2019
Customer Data Platform Basics. Customer Data Platform Institute. 2021

The post What is a customer data platform? appeared first on Insightly.

Demand generation therefore encompasses all activities that help attract, engage, and convert likely customers. Depending on your industry, ideal customer profile (ICP), and personas, this may include a combination of:

• Outbound sales
• Content marketing and SEO
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing
• Trade shows and virtual events
• Email marketing
• Direct mail
• Affiliate and referral programs
• Upselling or cross-selling to existing customers

Note that I bolded the phrase ‘likely customers’ in the previous paragraph. Why? Unlike traditional lead generation programs, which tend to focus on net-new emails or contacts, demand generation is focused on delivering net-new customers. Marketers, myself included, should pay special attention to this reality. Filling your CRM with 1,000 new email addresses that never convert is a waste of time and money. It pains me to say that, but it’s true.

So, what’s the best approach for implementing a scalable demand gen program that delivers results? Let’s take a closer look.

How to improve demand gen in 2021 & beyond

If demand generation is a multi-faceted endeavor that involves numerous disciplines, departments, and stakeholders, what can you do to maximize its impact for your company? Here are four steps to take in 2021.

1. Start with an objective view of your existing demand generation efforts

Whether you realize it or not, you already have programs in place that generate demand. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business!) To measure the impact of your existing demand gen efforts, jump into your CRM and pull a report of closed opportunities over the past year. Customize the report to include the originating source, such as outbound sales, existing customer upgrades, paid ads, social media, etc. Now analyze the data to understand where revenue is coming from. Visualizing your data as a pie chart can be a simple, yet effective way to understand what’s working—and what’s not. Here’s an example.

In the example above, it’s clear that outbound sales is the largest demand generator. That being said, this chart tells us nothing about how effective sales is at generating demand. If the company’s sales team consists of 25 account executives and 10 sales development representatives (SDRs), then the fully loaded cost of closing one sales deal may be exponentially greater than a self-service deal from organic search. Spend time analyzing historical deal data from a variety of vantage points.

2. Develop a plan for collecting better data

As you analyze historical data, you’ll likely identify gaps that make it difficult to answer all of your demand gen questions. After all, customer data is not limited to basic contact information, such as job title, revenue size, and related opportunities. To truly understand demand gen’s impact on the customer journey, you may need to go deeper and begin collecting the following data.

Interaction data

Trade shows are great for generating lots of business cards but not for closing deals. One lead from a trade show may require dozens of sales and marketing interactions before he or she has the desire and ability to buy. Collecting web and email interaction data in your CRM provides in-depth insight for understanding which demand gen channels, campaigns, messages, and content influence a customer’s buying decision.

Behavioral data

Behavioral data is particularly useful for understanding the impact of your cross-sell and up-sell demand gen activities. For example, if you’re a software company, you might collect clickstream data from your app to measure interest in gated features. Simple adjustments to your product interface could have a major impact on awareness for and, as a result, demand for premium plans.

Attitudinal data

Customers can be an excellent source of new ideas, and demand generation is no exception. Why not ask your customers for demand-generating ideas? Survey your customers and ask them to share feedback on:

• Which industry websites, journals, and publications do you read?
• What type of content would you like to receive from us?
• What would make you more likely to tell a friend about our company’s solution?
• If you were the marketing manager for our company, where would you advertise?
• What trade shows or virtual events do you regularly attend?

3. Align your sales & marketing teams

Sales and marketing teams tend to be the largest generators of demand for companies. Unfortunately, they’re rarely in alignment with one another. Inconsistent terminology, competing objectives, and siloed systems are just a few of the reasons why organizations consistently struggle to align these two groups.

If you’ve struggled to align your sales and marketing teams in the past, fear not. A well-structured demand generation initiative can be the perfect opportunity to foster cross-departmental alignment and simultaneously drive enhanced top-line performance. Alignment usually starts at the top, so your first step should involve gaining buy-in from sales and marketing leaders on a shared set of objectives, methods, and metrics.

Once aligned on the big picture, leadership must continuously work together to operationalize the vision. Check out Insightly’s sales and marketing alignment series for tips on accomplishing that goal.

4. Unify your demand gen systems into one platform

As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a blurred line between sales, marketing, and other demand generating functions. Allowing sales to work in one siloed system and marketing to work in another is not a viable solution in today’s competitive landscape. In short, you need the right technology to help you collect the right data, align your people, and understand what’s working.

Revenue generating teams want fewer, better systems. Ideally, they want one system that empowers them to visualize the buyer journey, create segmented lists of likely customers, and automatically engage buyers in a personalized way.

Unifying your demand generating efforts into one platform, such as Insightly, is a smart first step toward enabling this reality. Your revenue teams will spend less time on time-consuming data integrations and imports and more time on what matters most: developing highly targeted campaigns, programs, and initiatives that increase demand for your products or services.

They’ll also have access to better data—and more of it—presented in a visually appealing way that simplifies decision-making and team alignment.

Maximize the impact of your future demand gen efforts

Customer behavior continues to change at a rapid pace. To compete, companies must view demand generation as a strategic initiative that requires buy-in from leadership, a commitment to cross-departmental alignment, and technology that supports data-driven demand generation.

Ready to see how a unified CRM for sales and marketing can help you take demand generation to the next level? Request a free demo with an Insightly representative. No commitment required.

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The post The future of demand generation appeared first on Insightly.

In today’s world, where everything you need is just a click away, customers value relationships over transactions. If you don’t treat customers as they expect, it is easier than ever before for them to leave you for one of your competitors. And in a precarious economic climate such as this one, the last thing anyone needs is to lose customers to something completely preventable. To treat your customers the way they’d like to be treated, you need to know them inside and out, and the only way to achieve this is to use data to create a high-def picture of them.

Your CRM solution must allow you to gather and use customer data at every point of their journey, so you can deliver consistent brand experiences to every one of your customers, from the first touch throughout the entire customer journey. To do this successfully, you need all of your customer data in one place. With a unified CRM, all your marketing, sales, delivery, and support applications sit on the same data platform, leaving less chance for customers’ data getting lost or corrupted, pixelating the hi-def picture of the customer and inhibiting your ability to build lasting relationships.

There are countless reasons why you need a unified CRM to build lasting customer relationships and compete in the digital age, but here are the top five.

1. Sales & marketing alignment

With a unified CRM, sales and marketing can collaborate in a closer, tighter way. From lead disposition to customer interactions, they are working in unison to drive leads through the funnel. They no longer work in silos with their own separate software systems or have to figure out ad hoc data syncing processes.

Alignment across teams is critical to closing more opportunities and growing a business. Automated workflows and real-time analytics—along with other system features and capabilities, including lead disposition—bridge the gap between the two teams. These features also lend accountability to each respective team, forcing them to collaborate in new and innovative ways.

As a bonus, storing all data in one central database, which is easily accessible by all, helps drive CRM adoption among salespeople and creates transparency throughout the entire organization.

2. Data accessibility & reliability

When data collected by every team is entered into the same system, you eliminate data discrepancies that occur when different contact or other data is entered into two separate systems. Everyone works within the same data structure, exponentially increasing data integrity. When new data is entered into the system it is updated in real time for all to see.

A CRM that has everything sitting on one platform eliminates the need for additional integrations between systems and reduces the chance for customer data corruption. It also ensures that everyone who engages with customers has access to a complete customer profile and history of interactions, whether they work in marketing, sales, delivery, or support. And that’s great for your customers.

3. Stronger, more personal customer relationships

Unified CRMs store data about each customer and prospect—including demographic data, search and buying behavior, interactions with your brand, purchase history, challenges, and more. Quick and easy access to that data allows customer-facing teams to quickly gather insight into who the customer is, which products they own, and their product or service satisfaction levels. This gives customer support teams the ability to speak to customers on a more personal level. Your teams can form close customer relationships and personalize interactions to make customers feel more comfortable and build trust. Doing this sends the message that you’re invested in them and their personal success. That, in turn, fosters loyalty, generates brand advocates, reduces customer churn, and increases recurring revenue.

4. Better insights and analytics

Unified CRMs constantly collect data around a broad range of measurable metrics—from marketing campaign engagement to customer satisfaction and retention. You decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to use the reports. Tracking and analyzing metrics helps businesses identify which strategies and tactics are producing desired results and which are not. This allows you to focus attention on the tactics that are working and remove those that flop.

Moreover, some unified CRMs provide custom reporting that delivers insight into the metrics you need to see most. Normally, these can be automated and sent to you via email or displayed on a custom dashboard that you configure to meet your needs. Stay informed, test assumptions, and easily share results with other stakeholders to make data-driven decisions.

5. And perhaps most important… higher customer satisfaction

Experts suggested years ago that 2020 would be the year that customer experience would overtake price and product as the key differentiator in consumers’ purchasing decisions. We still believe this to be true. And to create and deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need a unified CRM. As a quick recap here, with a unified CRM you empower your teams with accurate data, deep understanding of your customers’ needs, efficiency, and ability to deliver personalized interactions throughout the entire customer journey. A great customer experience increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention, and it supercharges business growth.

In conclusion, unified CRM is the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way to gain visibility into every aspect of your customer relationships, make well-informed decisions, and create customer experiences that align with your brand vision. You’re not buying a CRM for the sake of a CRM—you have business goals to reach and a CRM is your means to an end. Choose your means well.

Read more like this:

• 4 key steps for sales and marketing integration
• From personalized to humanized marketing
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020
• What are different types of customer data?

The post Why your CRM should serve your whole organization, not just sales appeared first on Insightly.

Digital technology and access to customer data are constantly reshaping the role of marketing, and as more and more businesses are reorienting toward a customer-centric focus, this extremely valuable customer data becomes a big part of that shift. Marketing is now a research hub, a creative lab and a growth engine—all in one. Marketing’s ability to make data-driven investments and accurately measure and analyze the success of those investments in driving sales and revenue has earned marketers a strategic seat at the decision-making table.

Yet, so many businesses are still struggling to determine where exactly and how much to invest in marketing, and how to measure the success of those dollars. As the CEO of a tech startup, I have my own perspective, which considers three major forces that shape the role of marketing today: leadership, technology and strategy.

Leadership & team alignment

While technology allows us to constantly push marketing boundaries (marketing automation, customer and behavior analytics, social media, etc.), it can quickly become overwhelming and costly. On the flip side, the delayed adoption of marketing technology can cost you customers and revenue. That’s where leadership comes in. When you make marketing technology decisions, hire staff and set expectations, think about it as an investment in growth. With marketing automation, including built-in customer and behavior analytics tools, marketing now owns a significant part of the customer journey and can provide strategic insights, such as brand sentiment, buyer intent and customer satisfaction levels, to sales and customer service. So instead of treating your marketing as mainly a lead generation machine, use its insights and capabilities to amplify efforts, iterate and pivot when needed.

Your customers see you as one brand: whether they get a marketing newsletter or talk to a customer support rep, they might form an opinion on your entire business based on one interaction at any point in their journey. Align your teams around the customer journey and your brand to ensure your marketing investments pay off. Just one bad customer experience or off-brand communication can ruin a brand image much faster than your team can build it.

It’s easy to spend money on marketing, but today you have the ability to plan, track and measure marketing’s contribution to revenue. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs), which can cover everything from email click rate to cost per lead to conversion rate (the ultimate performance indicator). Monitor results and use data to make decisions.

Marketing automation technology

It seems like every day there’s a new marketing tool or platform that promises to engage your customers like never before and set you apart from your competitors. Stay focused. Broadly speaking, your marketing technology should help you to address two needs: customer acquisition and marketing performance measurement. Customer acquisition encompasses everything from email marketing to advertising to content marketing, social media and more. In order to know what works and what doesn’t, you need to be able to track and measure the performance of each channel and individual campaign. The right marketing automation tool can help you to do that.

There are a number of modern marketing automation tools that are easy to use and more affordable than legacy systems. When evaluating a marketing automation system, make sure it addresses all your key requirements and easily integrates with sales and other business tools you use. Remember, you can’t unify your teams without the technology that allows them to coordinate activities, centralize and share customer data, and track performance. At the heart of your marketing and sales integration is lead disposition, or the process of moving a sales qualified lead (SQL) to an opportunity, disqualifying it as inappropriate or returning it to marketing for further nurture. Use marketing technology that allows you to set up a proper lead disposition process. This way, you can make the most out of your marketing dollars spent on lead acquisition and accurately measure marketing’s contribution to revenue.

Go-to-market strategy

With the ability to measure everything from customer sentiment to revenue contribution, marketing is no longer a creative function or an expense. Marketing is now your growth engine, with a goal to attract the right customers through the right channels at the right time with the right message. To make sure marketing serves its purpose, create a go-to-market strategy. Your strategy should define your target audiences, problem-solution fit and messaging. It should also outline channels and tactics you’ll use to reach your buyers and align sales and marketing around your business goals.

The strength and success of your strategy depend on the data you use and your ability to execute as a team. It all comes together here—team alignment, technology and leadership. A go-to-market strategy is your map and framework to address all the moving pieces, including your marketing investments. There’s a lot more to developing an effective go-to-market strategy, but the key point here is to show the extent to which marketing today can inform, guide and help execute your business goals.

Marketing technology can help collect data to build a picture of each customer and their interactions with your brand, allowing you to become a far more customer-centric company. Modern marketing is a lot more than a lead generation machine; it is now a more holistic revenue growth driver across the entire customer life cycle. I hope this article provided you with a renewed perspective on marketing and how it can best contribute to your business success.

Read more like this:

• How to approach digital transformation in the new normal
• What is disruptive marketing? Why is it so important today?
• From recession to growth: a historical perspective
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics

The post Marketing’s role in building a customer-centric company appeared first on Insightly.

Unlike multi-channel campaigns, which typically focus on pushing a common message across multiple marketing channels, integrated campaigns have a broader scope and integrate the talents of a wider spectrum of people. Sales, sales development, product, IT, leadership, and, of course, marketing all play an important role.

Here are a few best practices for planning and running an integrated B2B campaign.

Benefits of integrated campaigns

Before we get into the “how” of running integrated campaigns, let’s examine the “why.” After all, your people are already busy enough. The last thing they want is another project without understanding the potential rewards.

Here are three major reasons why integrated campaigns—when done the right way—can help your company and your people become more successful.

1. Maximize your reach

As a marketer, I’m a big proponent of inbound marketing. Creating compelling content helps potential clients solve their immediate challenges and, simultaneously, become familiar with your brand. That being said, content cannot be your only source of new business—especially if you sell to mid-market and enterprise customers.

There are much bigger decisions being made out there that are not influenced by online search, which is why smart companies develop processes for identifying and intercepting those deals through integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: You’re missing out on deals if you’re relying too heavily on inbound. Integrated campaigns help you reach more high-value leads and, ultimately, close more deals.

2. Foster cross-functional alignment

Creating cross-functional alignment has never been more challenging than in today’s prolonged virtual work environment, especially for teams that used to work exclusively in a physical office environment.

Integrated campaigns, by their very nature, foster elevated levels of alignment. For example, let’s assume your goal is to increase customer upgrade revenue by 25% within the next six months. To achieve this goal, marketing must work with customer success (CS) to build segmented lists of customers who are likely to engage. CS and sales must align around a process for flagging and following up with customers who express interest. Sales needs to provide continuous feedback so marketing can track campaign effectiveness and respond to ongoing collateral needs.

Takeaway: If you’re seeking a better way to encourage cross-departmental alignment, look no further than an integrated campaign.

3. Elevate the quality of output

Aligning teams and campaigns around a data-driven view of success leads to meaningful conversations that yield ever-improving results. Sales begins to rely even more on marketing to produce higher impact landing pages, case studies, remarketing ads, emails, and collateral. Marketing becomes accustomed to receiving first-hand feedback as to why customers engage (or fail to engage) with messaging. CS gains new insights to improve the quality of support documentation and agent interactions.

Rather than operating in silos and taking educated guesses, campaign data serves as the foundation for enhanced decision-making across multiple teams—and, in some cases, sparks ideas for new integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: Alignment around a shared campaign can unleash the creative genius of your teams.

Ask these questions to form an effective strategy for your integrated campaign

So, what’s the first step in implementing an integrated campaign?

Before you have your marketing team create a bunch of banner ads and email blasts, ask yourself the following questions to form a comprehensive campaign strategy.

Consider where your business has been and where it is going. Use a central message or narrative to align the right mix of people, processes and channels.

What is your primary revenue objective?

Aiming to simply “increase sales” is too broad of an objective. Does the lowest hanging fruit come from new customer acquisition or a “land and expand” approach? Use your own data to understand which revenue sources have been reliable in the past and where the greatest opportunity lies.

How will this campaign align with your ICP and related personas?

Integrated campaigns should focus on one type of customer—typically your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you’ve never formalized your ICP and personas, now is the right time. Creating high-impact content, ads, and outreach programs requires an in-depth understanding of the targeted customer. Simply blasting a common message to everyone will result in de minimis returns.

How are competitors leveraging integrated campaigns?

Ask your sales team to share any first-hand knowledge they have about successful integrated campaigns run by competitors. What types of emails, ads, or outreach programs did the competitor(s) use to target customers? What can you learn from competitors to make your integrated campaigns more effective?

What is the best method for reaching your targeted audience?

Make a list of all the ways that you could deliver your message to the intended audience. Depending on the target market and industry, your list might include: sales calls, automated emails, LinkedIn ads, online search ads, in-app product banners, and retargeted display ads. Get specific. Then, begin the process of elimination to identify the tactics for each channel and set goals.

Do we have the right mix of tools and data?

Sharing timely campaign data between sales, marketing, CS, and other teams is difficult—if not impossible—when you lack a unified CRM. Likewise, coordinating collateral and content is challenging when each department uses its own project management system. Set the stage for a successful campaign by aligning around a common source of truth.

Stay tuned for tips to launch your integrated campaign

So far, we’ve defined what an integrated campaign is, why it’s beneficial, and how to develop a successful strategy. In my next post, we’ll explore best practices for launching an integrated campaign.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Insightly’s five-part series on how to encourage greater alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Ready to explore a unified CRM? Request a free CRM needs assessment and a demo.

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The post What is an integrated campaign? appeared first on Insightly.