That’s a question I hear many times. Usually the owner thinks all they need to do is send emails out of Microsoft Outlook. Marketing’s main purpose is to get the company’s message out to the targeted groups of potential leads. It can involve monthly newsletter emails, sales promotions, posting to groups and other resources to encourage potential leads to fill in a landing pages.
When marketing is working outside the CRM system they may not respond quickly to new lead inquiries and worse lose new leads. The sales team has no idea what they are doing to generate new leads and until someone tells them there is a new lead they are losing valuable time to follow up and engage the new lead and close a sale.
Envision if you will an example of how they can work with the sales team in a CRM together.
A business sells red, blue and green widgets. The business owner asks marketing to put together a new promotion next month of 10% off green widgets for new customer only pricing. They open up the CRM’s integrated email campaign and marketing module to create an email campaign along with web forms for a new landing page promoting the new customer offer.
A landing page is created and the web form from the CRM is inserted. They promote the landing page through Google Ad and keywords. When a lead that fills out the web form they are automatically created in the CRM and a sales person is automatically assigned a task to follow up. The new lead also gets a follow up email thanking them for their interest and additional information about the green widget product and the new customer offer.
Existing leads in the CRM system are assigned to a weekly email campaign for the month with the 10% off offer for new customers. If a leads clicks on a link (call to action) then a sales person is immediately assigned a tack to call and they follow up to closed the new customer sale.
Based on the response rate to the landing page and emails sent they can generate a report to review with the owner and the sales team the new lead response rate and the increase percentage of new deals form the promotion.
Since the sales team and marketing are interacting in the CRM they can coordinate the responsiveness to the new leads together.
The sales team is expecting new leads to take advantage of the offer and are immediately responsive to the CRM system notifying them of the new leads.
The results are a higher return obtaining new customers than compared to separate systems that ae now working together. Marketing and sales will be less frustrated with each other because the new leads didn’t fall thru the cracks of depending on human involvement to notify sales.
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In upcoming articles, we’ll help you understand more about a CRM, see if it’s right for you, and know what to look for in one. You’ll also learn what to expect and plan for if you decide to implement a CRM.