Category: lead generation

CRM, lead generation, User Experience

CRM ROI: 6 Ways to Measure the Payoff

How do you know if your CRM investment is paying off? Whether you are currently enjoying a CRM system, or are thinking about investing in one, there are several ways to measure the impact on sales, customers and business operations. Maybe one or all of these measures is worth your consideration. If you haven’t yet done so, consider setting goals based on the desired benefits of your chosen CRM solution, then monitoring the impact over time, to get an idea of the time horizon and set your expectations on whether or when your CRM investment will eventually “pay off”. In our experience, it’s typically measured in months, not years.

1. Increased revenue

A well tuned CRM solution could help you increase the volume of qualified sales leads, which can enable you to increase sales. Connect your website’s leadgen forms, your social channel feeds and your website analytics and other data sources, so you can better identify ready buyers as well as potential future buyers, and serve up the type of nurturing each might require. Your CRM solution can also help you automate and accelerate responses in a content-relevant way. Today’s buyers expect a prompt, tailored response, as a gauge for deciding whether and where to buy. The impact of this Customer Experience factor is discussed in detail later.

2. Reduced Expenses

One byproduct of the improved lead qualification and improved follow-up involved in appropriately nurturing sales and future leads is that you can reduce wasted time and effort on low priority work, or on waiting for others to take action, or on the distraction of less important work. CRM helps you detect leaky business processes, fulfillment delays and other opportunities to speed up the business. Result: you can sell, serve and do more, without sacrificing quality.

3. Greater Efficiency

Is your CRM solution enabling you to get more done with less? Are Leads, Contacts and Clients receiving better self-service and faster response? Your CRM solution can be just the resource you need to help minimize errors, omissions and delays in getting the right response to the right person at the right time.

4. Happier People

Our motto: every user a power user. One of our clients completely transformed from being a notorious high-turnover operation into a talent magnet, simply by supporting their CRM users better. Today, there is no excuse for not tuning your CRM, training your people, and empowering them to make improvements to the CRM implementation so that everyone can benefit. Top talent today expects you to have a CRM solution in place, to help them be productive and demonstrate results. If you can’t do that, you face self-imposed headwinds in hiring, training and retaining talent.

A well tuned CRM can also help you stay focused on priorities, so you can better measure your own resource needs and plan to either hire, build or buy the resources to meet demand, and stimulate an increase in demand.

Morale is higher when your sales, service and marketing people can use CRM to alert one another to a customer need, then involve your best experts and resources in delivering the right response on the most appropriate channel, at the right time – without redundancy and guesswork. People who are effective in their work tend to be happier and more productive. So, use your CRM to set up some measures that help people find opportunities to deliver the best result.

5. Customer Experience (CX)

Much has been written about the Customer Experience as the competitive lever in building loyalty, referrals and repeat business. A well tuned CRM solution can help you anticipate and meet customer needs in two ways: overt needs (direct requests) and implied needs. Implied needs can be detected based on patterns of buyer behavior combined with rich data. In one client case, we found that buyers of product A were more likely to buy product B, but not product C; we helped the client tune the fulfillment process to automatically mention product B, and only mention product C if expressly requested. This help the client reduce the wasted time, expense and annoyance to buyers in inappropriately recommending product C, while improving follow-on sales of product B. Result: better customer retention, improved customer relations, happier staff, and more sales.

6. Loyalty

CRM can be the differentiator in helping you gain a deeper understanding of customers’ values, needs and priorities, so you can improve your dialogue with each customer based on a deeper understanding of that individual.  At one of our clients, some disparate departments were able to communicate better internally and coordinate to deliver the optimal result to a key customer. Where before some inbound inquiries from existing customers were being treated as unknown “first contact” conversations, the CRM helped improve visibility into the nature of each inquiry, by combining purchase records, IP address information, social signals and other data sources into a more comprehensive view of the inquiry and a more appropriate response.

A repeat customer does not usually with to be treated as a newbie, and a newbie probably shouldn’t receive a loyalty program until after the first purchase. CRM helps you straighten this out.

Over to You

What has your CRM implemention done for you lately? Have you set up measures to help you recognize the payoff? We’d love to hear about your experience and, of course, help you get those answers if you find them elusive. It’s all we do.

Contact us.

Take a CRM Needs Assessment

Additional Reading

Article: How Digital is Powering Growth in Key Account Management (McKinsey)

 

CRM, lead generation, sales training

CRM Pro Tips: Thinking about Linking


chain-linksDear CRM user: This is arguably the most important 5 minutes of CRM training you’ll ever need, if you want a CRM that is well-tuned, delivers on its promises, and gives you unbeatable competitive advantage.  ~Ed

Human intelligence is often described as sophisticated pattern-matching or linking concepts together. Example: you learn early in life not to touch that hot stove a second time. (“Thanks, brain!”)

Everything we do is linked to something else, somehow. Our “cause and effect” knowledgebase can be expressed as “If / Then”: If X happens, Y follows. We learn and improve by linking new ideas, events, data and relationships.

CRM, similarly, unlocks tremendous potential advantage, helping you to link activities, people and resources with deals, customers, relationships, and reliable dashboard reporting.  Done well, it helps you discover unique and repetitive link patterns and accelerate improvement in sales, service, revenue and innovation.  You can then detect patterns in buyer behavior, purchase process, dealflow and more, which in turn can improve your forecasting accuracy and your business intelligence advantage.

The reverse is also true:  done poorly, your CRM database becomes a useless mess of disjointed data, and your team coordination, customer satisfaction and data intelligence can suffer.

This 15 page playbook illustrates in just 5 minutes how CRM products are ready-built to help you leverage links and relationships among people, data, sales, products and more.  It all comes down to “thinking about linking”.

 

Have at it!  I welcome your reactions, comments and edits.  Help keep this crowdsourced tutorial fresh and improved.  Of course, I’ll credit you with any changes that are kept.  More CRM Pro Tip playbooks to come.  Subscribe! It’s all free.

Cheers,

Ed

content marketing, lead generation, User Experience

Why Blogging Works: Influence and Reciprocity

Once more, with feeling.  Blogging is just about the best way to influence buyers and build loyalty.  Here’s why.

Why blogging works - highfive for reciprocityIn re-reading the book “Webs of Influence” by Nathalie Nahai lately, just to refresh on some principles of User Experience, I am once again appreciating the depth to which she lays out the basic human principles behind online influence. Side note: I really like that Ms. Nahai highlights a “Make This Work for You” segment in each book section (multiples in each chapter) where she outlines a real world use case, bringing her writings beyond the realm of theory and science and into the world of practical use for you and me.

Triggering Social Obligations

In her book, Ms. Nahai quotes social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s statement “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay” in human society,  explaining that the easiest way to initiate reciprocity is to begin by offering a gift.  At any dance party, are you waiting for someone else to make that first move?   Be that first mover.  Your gift can, of course, be a blog article, where you offer free advice to your audience.  Importantly, Ms. Nahai mentions that the gift you offer must actually be something of value. Upshot: skip the listicle theme and the pleas to “like” your content, and just offer authoritative, helpful content.

Gift Ideas that Build Reciprocity

If you’re not yet an active blogger, other gift ideas might include a free Skype session or Webinar, a free eBook or PDF, a special Subscriber benefit such as access to exclusive premium-value content, or a concession or compromise such as a discount on published prices in exchange for deeper insight or other value.

Online Presence Establishes Credibility

By now you probably know that diligent people check out your online presence (LinkedIn, website, social media accounts) before they decide to send work your way.  By offering a free Resources page on this blog, as well as making blog articles searchable by topic, we establish credibility and facilitate the reference check process, building confidence in our clients’ decision to select us to help them.

All of this may sound obvious, but bear in mind that closing the loop of reciprocity begins and ends with you.  It begins with acknowledging when a prospect or customer has visited your blog, downloaded free content or some such action.  It continues when you thank them personally – not just an auto-reply.  It continues in the dialogue toward helping them solve their challenge, whether or not they buy.  If they buy, good; if they don’t, they still may become a referral source, a colleague, and perhaps even a friend.

Case in Point: Closing the Sale

We recently were hired by a financial services firm to help with a combined website content refresh, social channel buildout, and CRM transformation project. Closing the sale was easier because they acknowledged they had received substantial value just from our blog articles and from a handful of conversations where we discussed the practical application of our knowledge to their set of challenges. In essence, the Discovery phase of the engagement, for which we typically charge a fee, had already been substantially accomplished through that preliminary dialogue and resource exchange.  When we pointed out this concession, the Prospect agreed about the value they had already received, as well as their comfort with the progress of that dialogue and their assurance that we present a wise choice. Reference check: done. Confidence: assured. Deal: done. Bam.

Accelerating Sales through Reciprocity

In preparing for the coming year, our team reviewed our own CRM reports, looking at the Sources of client revenue, analyzing the specific events that helped advance dealflow to successful sales.  We found a high correspondence between deal closure and the Reciprocity loop that involved prospects accessing our online content, combined with our follow-through in highlighting value already delivered before asking for the sale.  In situations where the reciprocity relationship was rather more tenuous, the client interactions seemed marked by more tentative, hard negotiations.  In deals where the Reciprocity was high, we also saw a greater incidence of multi-year client relationships.  This is the year we build on making Reciprocity a standard, repeatable process.

Over to You

As fellow humans, how can we build better reciprocity into relationships to help one another discover and solve challenges?  Can we improve on the habit of acknowledging others’ contributions to our relationships?  As sales professionals, can you use your online presence to establish credibility, begin the Reciprocity loop, and close it with your own follow-through? Love to hear your comments and stories.

Cheers, ~Ed

content marketing, Event Management, lead generation, User Experience

Content and Event Marketing that Fills the Room

It’s all about the Value Exchange

In 2012 I co-developed and produced the North by North Shore (#NXNS) digital media event series, and proved a few content marketing concepts along the way.  Starting from zero in April, the program attracted a capacity, on-target audience in June – just 90 days – and attained an over 90% program satisfaction index, based on survey responses.   We repeated the event in September, with a few audience driven improvements, and again achieved that result.  Another success indicator: two-thirds of all event attendees paid less than full price to attend, driven by an assortment of social promotional programs that let each attendee run their own “friends and family” plan.  Anyone who says you can’t prove the ROI of social media…well, have them call.

How did I target various micro-audiences to get these results?  We could talk about the usual suspects like speakers, topics and location, but, speaking more broadly, I attribute the success of NXNS to the use of Choice Architecture and a Value Exchange framework  in guiding program and content development.  Now with two successful events in tow, we continue to engage our audiences to tune the program further to better address their challenges and learning needs:

  • SBO – small business owner
  • PRO – career professional, practitioner, specialist or solo-preneur
  • MSO – marketing services organization or consulting firm
  • CXO – senior executive

Understanding Motivation

We Content Marketers talk a lot about the buyer’s decision journey, the buyer persona, landing page optimization, and the like.  All of this seems to assume we are adept at understanding motivation and that we use this knowledge when we develop content. Frankly, considering the repeated high demand for relevant content, I thought it would be nice just to ask the question:  how good are you at building motivation into content?  Often a simple “buy” button just doesn’t cut it.   We’ve all felt a bit pushed at times by out-of-synch content.  Here’s how to fix it.

The Value Exchange Continuum

Value Exchange Continuum
The Value Exchange Continuum

I created this graphic to help decide what type of voice to use to appeal to different target audiences.  Executives, for example, act, think and decide differently than other audiences.  If you’ve developed a buyer persona or two to help you think about the frame of reference your micro-audiences are using when they encounter your content, then you are probably somewhat familiar with these concepts.

 Keeping it Real

It’s helpful from time to time to ask: What do you want?  What do you seek? What does any of us want out of life?  If you think those questions are unnecessarily broad or existential, consider this:  Neuromarketing experts suggest that up to 90% of decisions are made unconsciously, guided by our value frameworks.

This is a job for the Choice Architect, the User Experience (UX) practitioner.  These are great people to have on your team when you are designing a website, a sign, an event, a white paper, a presentation, or just about any type of audience-focused content.

Next up (You In?)

If you like the NXNS concept and want to participate, by all means use the handy links at the NXNS site to get started as a speaker, sponsor, media partner, attendee or content contributor.  Let me know some specific event or other opportunity you might have in mind.  And if you are interested in Sustainability topics, consider attending the Sustainable Network Summit, another new event series I am co-producing.

Your Take

Do you have a content development framework that guides your content creation?  Do you have an experienced Editor on your team who is tasked with hewing to a particular point of view or tone of voice that personifies your brand?   Love to hear your stories.  If you’d like to have this case study presented to your audience, contact us.

Cheers,

Ed

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content marketing, demand management, inbound marketing, lead generation, sales forecasting

How Lead Nurturing Improves Sales

In your quest for sales, do you leverage the value of lead nurturing?

Sales leaders know that in the process of converting a raw Lead to a Prospect, and then to a real Opportunity, and ultimately to a Customer, there are often many nuances and inflection points in the conversation, with the result that the sales process is almost never linear.  Those nuances can include shifts in the Prospect’s priorities, needs, and role in the buying process.  These things must be verified repeatedly to detect changes in Prospect status and respond accordingly.  If you don’t frequently check them, your sales forecast becomes a fairy tale, and you won’t know where your next meal is coming from.   You could be ignoring imminent buyers or focusing too much on long-shot prospects, and not even know it.  Either way, you lose.  Lead Nurturing helps you keep on top of the changes.

Click here for a free, crowdsourced process guide to help improve your forecasting.

Recent Experience

A recent project we performed for Pluris Marketing, provider of OCDP (omni-channel dynamic profiling) solutions for large consumer marketing organizations, transformed from simply securing executive appointments to also nurturing leads, and illustrates how lead nurturing contributes value to the sales pipeline.

Not part of the original project scope, Lead Nurturing quickly grew in importance, for three reasons:

  • Establishing a dialogue with as many prospects as possible enabled us to train our ears to the “Voice of the Customer” so we could determine what value people derive from Puris’ solutions – in their own words – and tweak our campaign messaging to improve relevance.  In short, what you call yourself is often not as important as what your customer calls you.  Example: the phrase “Dynamic Profiling” is a term borrowed from a Prospect – not something Pluris dreamed up.
  • Nurturing leads enables us to captivate and sustain a broader, interested audience, improving our place in each prospect’s “Initial Consideration Set” of potential options when they decide they need a relevant solution.
  • The sheer number of “nurturables” far exceeded the number of immediate sales appointments generated under this project.  The number of nurturables alone caused our client to take notice of the opportunity.

Why Nurture Now

Certain human behavioral tendencies make it difficult to convert a new Lead to a current Prospect, let alone a sale:

1) Relevance – People typically perceive immediate needs as more relevant and more urgent than future problems.  No matter how relevant you think your offering is, your Lead’s opinion matters more.  You stand a far greater chance of converting a Lead to a Prospect if they view your solution as currently relevant.

2) Consequences – People tend to discount the importance and consequences of future events.  A distant goal or pain is less motivational than a current one, even if delay portends grave consequences.   Moreover, people tend to see future consequences – even grave ones – as less important with every year such action is delayed.  The farther into the future a need is projected, the less likely it will be perceived today as ever becoming important.

Surprise! Researchers Find Humans Illogical

Illustrating the Relevance and Consequences phenomena, Columbia University researchers found that the average person finds little difference between getting $250 now or $350 a year from now.   Imagine that!  You could opt to wait a year and earn 40% on a surefire outcome, or you could take the money now and forego the potential 40% greater financial benefit.  You don’t need to be Warren Buffet to know that no investment vehicle can guarantee you a 40% one-year return on principle just by delaying receipt, and yet most people queried would rather have the money now, consequences be damned.

Heavily discounting future benefits or consequences can greatly distort corporate thinking, behavior and beliefs.  As maddeningly illogical as human nature may it may seem, your appreciation of this phenomenon actually becomes your competitive advantage if you have a Lead Nurturing program that helps prospects learn, appreciate and promote the importance of your solution.

Lead Nurturing Includes Content Marketing

An effective Lead Nurturing program, including content marketing mapped to each prospect’s unique persona and information needs, enables you and your prospects to keep the discussion channel open and lively.  Rather than attempt to drive each prospect toward near-term action, you instead conduct periodic relevant communication, build productive relations, and assist prospects in evaluating your offerings, so that they can intelligently shift priorities toward considering and adopting your solution – perhaps even sooner than they expected, but in any case, willingly.  If done well, you can identify the “hand raisers” worthy of greater attention and likely to buy, and even determine their decision time frame.

Driving toward a sale too hard or too soon can be viewed by the Lead as pushy, inattentive and ignorant, and typically leads to a fall-off in response, inattention to your future communication attempts or, worse, unsubscribing from your feeds and possibly treating your ill-timed, irrelevant communication as unwanted spam.   We’d all like to believe that prospects discount our pushy, sales-y human failings and focus instead on the merits of our offering, but you are more likely to hold one another’s attention over the long term if you actually listen, check for understanding and nuanced changes, and respond accordingly with relevant information.

Patience Pays

In your eagerness to bring in more sales this calendar quarter, don’t risk alienating a next-quarter sale. The Leads you start to nurture today rarely move as quickly as you’d like, but a constructive, open dialogue helps you understand your relevance in the Prospect’s view so you can tune your messaging to match, while also giving them something to share within their own circles of influence to build consensus toward adopting your  solutions.

Patience and persistence pay, and lead nurturing is the currency.

 

 

 

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