Dear 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.
Spoiling customers rotten is the new black, the new mantra, the new grail quest. Worst case: it seems out of reach, and you are toast.
We see it everywhere. We have come to expect each next interaction with our product and service providers to feel like progress, not another blind date. Is that too much to ask? It certainly has become a new watershed basis for satisfaction. Ask any Amazon customer. Examine your banking relationships.
As William Gibson famously said: “The future has arrived – it’s just not very evenly distributed”. It seems that every day we are yanked between extremes. At one moment we are marveling at modern convenience, and the next moment we are musing about its glitches and unmet expectations, as if somehow entitled. Maybe we are. Maybe your customers think so.
Measuring up
Some organizations are equipped, focused and successful at doting on their audiences and customers. Are you? If so, great. If not, why not; what’s keeping you from getting started? The answer: a lot less than you think. Of course you could cite the usual hindrances like people, time and resources, and yet today competing at selling, serving and pleasing customers is not an option or a choice, or even a competitive advantage. It’s a baseline expectation. Table stakes.
Right now, as you read this, your business is either delivering value before, during and after each transaction, or you risk being replaced by a phone app (yep, there’s an app for that). You can prevent ending up in that scrap heap by making up your mind to compete – affordably, and at scale. The tools are becoming easier to use and more sophisticated. You just have to be motivated to change.
Our inflated expectations
Before even getting into a discussion on Sales CRM or Marketing Automation software, let’s look at one simple example of how tech tools have changed our behavior: the lowly appointment calendar.
Today, you can easily set your calendar software to remind you ahead of each appointment and keep you punctual, reliable and prepared. In business, we use it to update meeting schedules, locations and agendas, synchronize participants, and keep progress on track. Without it, we risk gridlock, confusion, wasted time, missed opportunity, frustrated people, and lost money.
Getting and staying in calendar-sync, in some organizations, is a baseline expectation – not a choice. Indeed, for some, being on time is a core part of the business model. From Fedex to Comcast to Delta, we can now know precisely when the next step will occur, often within a time window measured in mere minutes.
Likewise, you can program your Sales CRM software and your Marketing ARM software to notify you when a potential buyer or customer is visiting your website, asking a question, mentioning your brand name in an online forum, or complaining. If you’re not listening and participating, that’s the same as ignoring a ringing phone. Is that the reputation you want? Wouldn’t you rather be as aware as everyone else when your customers praise or complain? Are you making it difficult for people to buy? Are you even listening? Isn’t ignoring a customer complaint posted on a social media channel the same as ignoring their emails and phone calls?
Expand your capacity
This seemingly new competitive edge – marketing and sales automation – has actually been going on for years in leading organizations. If you are not using CRM or ARM solutions, admit it: you are limited by human scale and fallibility. You have limited visibility, difficulty forecasting, an over-reliance on intuition, habit and guesswork, and are probably making costly but avoidable mistakes. What’s worse, you don’t even know the extent of your self-inflicted damage because you aren’t equipped to pay attention.
Conversations today are rife with examples of fumbled relationships and millions of dollars in lost deals that could have been prevented, if only the right hand had known what the left hand was doing. Has this ever happened to you? If you answered no, how can you be sure? Do I smell burning toast?
With a tuned, integrated “software layer” embedded in your business, you can:
create self-guided online experiences, complete with landing pages, call/response email exchanges, up-sell and cross-sell processes, social media engagement incentives, and other valuable interactions;
detect the faint signals of purchase intent or dissatisfaction, and intervene to influence outcomes;
enable your customers, prospects and suspects to research solutions, evaluate yours, and even whimsically waltz among various decision stages and feedback loops toward eventually deciding whether to inquire, pay, receive and use your offerings, all with minimal human intervention; of course you can program it to notify you at key junctures, so you can intervene and assist.
You might think this online commerce model only makes sense in big businesses, large catalogs, complex workflows or servicing a previous purchase, but not in yours. On the contrary; just about any organization can benefit from marketing and sales automation to help you scale up, optimize your business, and use the reports to discover ways to simplify, improve service, and get better results.
Put simply: there are 7 billion humans, and not enough time or resources to do each task by hand. It’s time to automate. Put differently: we are now all technology companies. From Amazon and Nordstrom to state and federal government services, we expect technology to facilitate everything from transactions to relationships. Right?
So, how big is it?
Virtually all the major business analyst firms, from Gleanster and Aberdeen Group to Gartner Group and Altimeter Group, report that top performing organizations are performing better partly as a result of adopting marketing and sales process automation solutions. Personally, having spent over 15 years programming these customer decision journeys for companies large and small, using a broad palette of tools (see right sidebar), I have engineered the transformation and witnessed the improvements firsthand: clients scaling up to cost effectively satisfy more people, to more cost-effectively and efficiently manage buyer, customer and user interactions, discover customer and buyer behaviors that indicate satisfaction or need, and more.
CRM and ARM software can make you more productive and competitive, freeing you to focus on the creative, intuitive and intellectual aspects of improving your business, and support you in making better-informed decisions. Marketing, sales and service organizations are doubling down on tech; indeed, analysts and industry forecasters expect Marketing and Sales technology budget growth to outpace Information Technology departments in coming years. This isn’t necessarily a replacement of the IT organization; rather, IT can be your closest ally when evaluating tech options. Knowing one another’s agendas can help you transition more effectively to a premises / cloud blend of agile business resources.
The choices
So, if you’re feeling bogged down in drudgery, overwhelmed by the escalating demands and expectations of your customers, outpaced by better performing competitors, working harder yet not gaining ground, or possibly even mystified about flattening or declining business, please know that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can enhance your chances of growth and success by having the right systems in place. Consider investing in Marketing ARM and sales CRM tools. Or not. The choice is yours. There’s that burned toast smell again.
Thanks to a rich online experience, buyers indeed have greater purchase influence these days, but where does the true power reside? It’s shared, really.
Marketers have made much of this “empowered customer” phenomenon. Online, you can research and get close to a buying decision – right down to vendor, product, price and feature selection – before the seller even becomes aware of your existence.
Salesreps, just a scant decade ago, guided purchases with probing inquiries about interest, budget and other decision factors. About 2/3 of buying and selling decisions today are salesrep-facilitated, but a full 1/3 of buying and selling is of the buyer-driven, “salesrep-lite” variety. We can expect to see considerable rebalancing from time to time, thanks to (a) recent advances in mobile digital profiling ; (b) a coming wave of marketing technology mergers, acquisitions and partnerships, and (c) a currently proposed standard for profile data interchange currently before the Worldwide Web Consortium – the W3C.
Profiling – It Really Is All About You
Today on the internet, so the updated joke goes, if you’re a dog everyone knows it – as well as your breed, age, gender and preferred kibble brand. Today, your online behavior – actions such as clicking “Like” buttons on Facebook pages you visit, for instance – helps marketers (interpretive algorithms, really) make inferences about your identity including gender, age, political and social tendencies, then use that info to tailor your online experience so you see ads and content that cater to your digitally harvested “buyer persona”. That preferences profile of you is continually enriched and refreshed based on your online and mobile behavior patterns.
Stated differently, “free” isn’t really “free”. It never really was. When you surf the web, you reveal (“lend”) bits of your identity to savvy marketers who trace your online behavior patterns to compile that rich profile of you that can be then used to tailor your online experience in such a way that your satisfaction from the online experience is improved and, of course, increases the likelihood you will buy from them.
Emerging Standards
Recently, a consortium of retail and insurance companies including Adobe, Google and BestBuy have proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) a set of standards for commerce data interchange that would make it easier for us all to do business online. Merchants, health care providers, finance firms, and consumers all stand to gain from this.
Who Goes There?
As long as you consent and your privacy is protected, all is well. Increasingly we have come to trust certain online identity repositories curated by the likes of Google Wallet, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. In the broader commerce world, however, small and midsized organizations have not built, bought or hired the depth of technical ability to make sense of all that data, let alone apply it to their business or curate it responsibly. The above-mentioned W3C Web data acquisition standard could really democratize things.
Leveling the commerce field
Larger organizations may seem more capable, but that isn’t always the case; they typically are running legacy apps (archaic programming and hardware) whose code is tough to maintain, let alone modify to take advantage of the proposed newer standards. Fortunately, companies like AppDirect, Apigee and Nexaweb Technologies – experts at modernizing all those legacy apps for large financial, trading, shipping and consumer facing companies – are hard at work on the challenge. (Disclosure: I own a smidgin of stock in Nexaweb).
We buyers can tell who is “with it” and who isn’t, based on whether the ads that get served to us, or our repeat visits to favorite sites, are tailored based on our browsing behavior or our location. For example, I recently visited a jewelry website, after which my visits to other websites, including Google Search, became peppered with jewelry, wedding and dating ads. With the recent accelerating consolidation among solution providers in the marketing automation, sales CRM, email marketing and web analytics space, those web commerce architecture elements are becoming knit more tightly. Expect the next few years to bring an expansion of already existing analytics, buyer profiling and content tailoring solutions, more broadly affordable to midmarket and smaller enterprises with whom you regularly do business.
Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
If you consider the ability to track user behavior narrowly through the buyer / seller lens, Consider the implications. Will buyers’ online preference profiles tailor each netizen’s digital experience so greatly that the reinforcing effect of a profile-driven, tailored on-the-fly web experience merely helps bring relevant online information conveniently into sharper focus, to your benefit? Or, could the online experience become so digitally mutated by profile-driven content tailoring that its “echo chamber” effect distorts your online experience in ways that prevent you from viewing alternative information to consider broader options and render well-informed decisions? Will the rich have a different web experience than the not-so-rich, based on their profiles, harvested data, and access to speed? In other words, how much is too much?
If you broaden your focus beyond commerce and consider the ability to track population behavior to detect and help resolve anything from traffic congestion (like, say, Waze) to disease spread, then the benefits become more clear.
Shut it down if you want to
Do you know how to “shut down” your behavioral profile and surf the Web anonymously to obtain a more random, unfiltered experience? It’s possible, you know, without a lot of geekery. Tools abound, such as Google’s InPrivate Browsing feature and other tools that let you assume a random IP address (Google that boldface phrase to see some options) when surfing. Your mobile experience can also be made private if you know how to turn off geo-location, but you’re still registered on a network when your phone is on.
This delicate balance of individual privacy, public disclosure, information gathering and sharing between big firms, security agencies and other firms is now being played out in the world headlines. The NSA and other entities regularly approach Google, Facebook and Microsoft, as well as telecommunications companies, to obtain customer activity information for the purposes of national security and law enforcement.
Our Best Behavior
If we marketers hew to the goal of providing a more useful, satisfying experience to you while keeping your privacy sacrosanct, that’s all to the good. As tools become more broadly available and powerful to enable deep customer profiling and tailored online experience, you may come to expect a more gratifying relationship with your favorite brands. After all, consumers already have heightened expectations. They don’t want every interaction with the same business to feel like the first date.
How do you feel about the coming boom in digital profiling and data exchange? Comments welcome here.
Higher email conversion rates are “found money”, so why should you accept mediocre results from your email marketing? At a time when email inboxes, while still hugely relevant, are increasingly locked down by users to ward off irrelevant content, the ability to get improved email results is a complex and coveted skillset – part brand journalism, part technology, part consigliere. Our ability to repeatedly outperform marketplace benchmarks for our clients – and our own audience – underscores our expertise at leveraging that skillset.
Crushed It Again This Year; You Can, Too
In reviewing our portfolio of client sales and marketing campaigns related to events, new products, brand building, sales expansion, environmental and business development, we repeatedly find our results to be at or above “best in class” benchmarks as reported by Eloqua, a category-leading CRM software solution provider.
The free, downloadable presentation below offers a simple cheat sheet to help you monetize your email marketing, meet or beat “Best in Class” benchmarks, and turn your organization into a Fan Foundry.
Why your open rate may seem low
Like most email marketers, you are probably haunted by the question: what about the 3/4 of our list members who did not appear to “open” our emails? Bear in mind, the vast majority of people preview email. This doesn’t create a “hit” in the “Opens” bucket, but they still consume the first visible screen of your email.
Your results may vary from ours also based on what you measure. The “Best in Class” numbers pictured in the presentation above represent a combination of all email list activity across many campaigns; naturally, “raving fan” lists far outperform other general interest lists and content. Our Fan lists generally see an open rate north of 60%.
Note, too, that this article isolates email marketing from all other digital marketing we do (mobile, websites, etc.), which we measure separately. For a sampling of some of the CRM, email marketing, Sales and marketing automation solutions we support for our clients, see this site’s right sidebar.
Dollars and Cents, Illustrated
Using the “Email click rate” data in the table on slide #2 above, you might reasonably assume that if you are among those “best in class” companies and attaining a 5% Click rate, and your annual click-through sales are $5M, then just by being our client last year you might instead have enjoyed our benchmark-beating 7.37% click-through (average) results, thereby attaining $7.37M in revenue. Who couldn’t use that additional $2.7M? In fairness, there are many success factors involved and your own results may vary. Here’s how.
This is How We Do It – Year after Year (not a fluke!)
That answer to this headline is multi-faceted, but the key factors we found (see slide #4 above) were:
Put simply, you give get. Lead with a relevant offer, and follow up by exceeding expectations. In practice, we found it even more effective to give, give, and – oh yes – give again, without expecting anything in return. As one example, our success in producing the sales, marketing and digital media event series “North by North Shore” illustrates how treating even unknown remote prospects to a “friends and family” plan resulted in a tripling of the audience size and a corresponding lift in attendance. To read more about that case, click here.
Obligatory Disclaimer
We report only aggregated results. While our total activity reflects messaging in the hundreds of thousands, and the Eloqua study covers millions of messaging units, nonetheless we are encouraged by both the consistency of our year-over-year results and our painstaking methodology in capturing, measuring, reporting and verifying those results for our clients so that we can confidently report them here – and, incidentally, win some repeat business.
Learn More about the “How”
Subsequent blog posts (and some previous ones – see Related Articles below) will cover the other “How We Did It” success factors in greater detail. Use the “Keep in Touch” button (above, right) to get those updates. Meanwhile, if you have a question, or would like to have us present our case to your organization, or to explore ways we might help you succeed, feel free to contact us.
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
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.
Dear 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
