B2B CRM: The Right Contact Mix for Your Customer Relationship Youve spent years gathering contacts

into your databases. Youve implemented a data quality practice that is now starting to give you a solid picture of your universe. It is now time to classify your contacts. Invariably, your database is more than just purchasing/decision maker contacts. All departments have gathered peoples information depending on the purpose. It offers a window into your business dealings. It also offers a window on your ability to market and sell. Just as you consider vehicles, content, and message to deliver to your database, you also think about who you are reaching and who can be converted. SOA and MDM initiatives are great because they bring together a full picture of interactions with the customer as well as who is part of those interactions. But, not all contacts are created equal. Just as not all customers or companies are created equal. It is the first thing that is considered when determining targeting strategies. The size of a database is typically determined based on the silo it is intended to help. Marketing wants decision makers, finance wants accounts payable, customer support wants end users, investor relations wants analysts and media. By themselves, these data silos serve a purpose. Together, they can show a picture of where your awareness, message and brand really are. A good test once consolidation of data bases is done, or even within your CRM system alone if it receives lists and feeds from other internal sources, is to classify contacts based on their primary interaction with your company. Everyone in your database has had a reason to connect. Bringing these reasons into a standardized category will help determine the value they bring to a marketing program, customer relationship, or evangelist role. Monitoring the ratios of these groups within a cusotmer relationship and firmographic data can give insight into the ability to grow a relationship, if it is at risk, or there is no relationship and the company serves another purpose. While as marketers we typically look at the entire size of our database to determine if we have enough contacts to convert to leads, if those leads are weighted towards a low number of companies, or they are not the right contacts, then our efforts can be wasted. With the cost to acquire customers and contacts expensive, having a mechanism to determine when to purchase lists and how much to purchase will refine the amount of resources and budget needed. In addition, messaging and engagement strategies can be modified to align to the type of relationship outcome you intend. So, rather than thinking about personas when you need to target, think about them strategically and as an indicator of the strength of relationship with your customer.

Entries Tagged as 'Customer relationship management'

Get in your prospects comfort zone: The right offer at the right time Will you marry me?

This offer will get you a chilly reception from someone youve just met. Youd sound half-crazy popping the question unless you nurture the relationship at the right pace and offer what the other person is looking for. Same thing goes for B2B marketing. Sure, a salesperson can get lucky with an occasional prospect, but counting on the magic happening instantly isnt the way to build a stream of salesready leads. Build trust by developing the relationship. Will you go out with me? Heres the first date of the sales cycle. Youve just identified a prospective customer and you need to provide background information and answer the questions that are important to that specific customer. Offer educational materials such as case studies, white papers, how-to articles and decision-maker kits until theyre ready to go to the next level. Heres what were really like. In this middle date stage, the interest has been shown and you can move into more details. A self-assessment tool, technical white papers and webinars require more participation from potential customers, but they also target the solutions to each prospects situation. Show youll be there for them to help build a sales-winning relationship. So how about it? When the prospect gets comfortable with your company, start to make more serious advances: offers or calls-to-action. Although its not time to pop the question, smaller commitments move prospects toward choosing your company. For instance:

Invite them to all-day seminars delving into implementation details. Offer demos or low-cost or free needs assessments. Ask whether your salespeople can meet with their decision makers to present customized proposals or quotations. Consider making buy now deals offering discounts or additional products or services bundled in for a lower cost.

What if you dont know where prospects are in their buying cycles? In that case, make offers appropriate for every stage and let people find their own comfort zone.

How to propose What makes a good offer or call-to-action?

They must be genuinely enticing. They must move the buying process forward. Satisfy prospects key concerns. They should be self-qualifying. Dont offer something anyone would want. Provide what a qualified prospect is looking for.

How do you put them together?

Repackage or update the information you already have. See if your suppliers have white papers, evaluation guides or other materials you may use. Join forces with your suppliers to provide combination sales pieces or newsletters.

Prospects must clearly understand what theyll gain from choosing your company and its products or services. They need to believe that what youre marketing will help them achieve their goals, and they must trust your company to deliver on its promises. Getting to that point requires making the right offers or calls-to-action for each stage of your prospects buying process, from awareness and inquiry to consideration to purchase. Youll build strong, valuable relationships with your customers that will last for many years to come. B2B marketing, marketing, lead nurturing, lead qualification, lead generation

December 11th, 2007 in Relationship marketing | Permalink | 3 Comments | Trackback

Great reasons to outsource inquiry/response handling

Todays lead management service companies assist business-tobusiness marketers by handling routine tasks and much more. If you and your staff are overloaded trying to keep in touch with interested prospects, you may end up missing revenue sources and slowing growth.

Overloaded, or just want to get more efficient? For starters, you may want to look into outsourcing for their typical functions such as

literature fulfillment, lead distribution, response handling, tracking, and reporting.

Beyond that, did you realize response handling services have become quite sophisticated and can help you

qualify prospects, get leads into the pipeline sooner, show prospects your company is timely and efficient, and provide the data you need to show marketing ROI?

Some examples that can help your group get ahead of the game

Publish different fax numbers or e-mail addresses in your ads. Route the responses to the inquiry handling service. Its fast and easy for both the prospect and your company. Set up phone response 24 hours a day or during U.S. coast-to-coast business hours. It serves the prospects, plus they also can provide immediate qualification of inquirers and first level technical support. Have the service handle website information forms and chat requests. Do periodic check-ins as a prospect to see what the experience is like. Most services can forward sales leads as email attachments that integrate with your salespeoples existing contact management software or corporate CRM or sales automation systems. Advanced sales lead distribution methods let you get leads to your salespeople, reps, dealers or distributors by email, fax and directly on the Web. Outbound telemarketers can generate sales leads, qualify prospects, perform Did you buy? studies, build relationships with longer-term prospects and invite them to seminars. Some can even sell your products or services, when appropriate. Sophisticated reporting capabilities let you measure lead follow-up, can link inquiries to sales and determine return on investment. Reporting can be prepared as statistical analysis or graphs and charts. Reports can be given to you as printed documents, as email file attachments you can view using common programs like Excel(r), or they can be viewed, downloaded or printed on demand on the Web. Does your marketing database need cleanup? These services can develop and manage your sales and marketing databases, clean them up and append data from postal and public databases, enhance them through feedback from salespeople and marketing response handling and direct mail and telemarketing efforts, and let you keep in touch with and convert more prospects to customers.

Ongoing broadcast e-mail, broadcast fax and e-mail programs can be implemented to keep in touch and build a sales-winning relationship with your prospects and existing customers.

Where do you find service companies to assist you with marketing response handling and sales lead management?

Ask your peers at other companies. Ask the folks at your advertising agency. Check the display and classified ads in industry publications like B2B, Direct, DM News, Sales & Marketing Management, Target Marketing and Exhibitor or the directories they publish. Do searches on the Internet using key words like response handling, inquiry handling, sales lead management, response management or literature fulfillment. Check with marketing associations like the Direct Marketing Association (www.thedma.org).

B2B marketing, marketing, response management, CRM, inquiry handling, sales leads

November 28th, 2007 in Customer relationship management | Permalink | No Comments. | Trackback

Remind Your Customers Youre Around

I had a client whose marketing was not delivering the same level of sales it had in the past. The company had no direct sales force and no distributors, so their prices were about half their competitors. It sounds like it would be easy to grow your customer base when you can quote such low prices. Even if your company has a sales team or distributors, what they learned can improve your marketing too. The problem was that their marketing was narrow. They would send out a catalog to anyone who inquired as a response to ads in trade magazines. After years of advertising, you reach a saturation point. The conversion rate was flat, as you can imagine. They started a new initiative to distribute products by other companies. But how to get their target customers, primarily small businesses, to notice? To improve their marketing, they didnt want to add cost or layers of labor. They were focused on effiency to keep their costs lower than competitors, after all.

Boost existing customer orders You can keep the direct-to-client approach simply by reminding customers that youre there for them. For example, expand existing accounts, do alternative mailings and schedule reminders about new products. It meets a customers needs better than just sending a catalog every year as well. And if you dont keep in touch, customers may go to someone else that does stay top-ofmind. These tactics can jump-start product sales that wouldve otherwise had to wait for new catalogs to get promoted:

Track existing customers for their product preferences Regularly remind them about new products that might interest them Send quarterly communications/newsletters How about periodic free samples of new products?

Whats in it for you?

Significantly increase your companys conversion of prospects to customers Increase sales from existing customers Save money in many areas Then re-invest in additional marketing, boosting results even further

April 26th, 2007 in Relationship marketing | Permalink | 1 Comment | Trackback

Gaps In Your Sales Lead Management Process?

IDC sent out a press release yesterday about its latest study, from its CMO Advisory Practice, of IT vendors best practices in sales lead management. Some key findings, summarized in the press release, include: - Fifty percent of these tech vendors marketing investment is allocated to demand generation and a third of that is targeted to directly support the sales force. - A majority of tech vendors fail to provide for even the most basic need of establishing a consistent global definition of a lead.

- Other failure points include data collection, lead qualification, sales hand-off, lead nurturing, and performance measurement. - Only a few of the companies surveyed were able to demonstrate their impact on the sales pipeline. None of this surprises me. Why? Because business-to-business sales leads are my consulting speciality. So Im wrestling with these issues on behalf of my clients every day. But as competitive as the IT industry is, and with half of their marketing investments focused on demand generation, wouldnt you think that these tech vendors would have addressed these problems and have them licked by now? And these sales lead problems arent limited to IT vendors. Far too many companies in the B2B space do a poor job of generating, nurturing, qualifying and converting leads into sales-ready opportunities and closed sales. I guess Ill stay busy for a while, helping all these companies to fix their sales lead programs! If your company: doesnt have a clear, agreed-to definition of a lead needs a better way to qualify leads has a gap handing off leads to sales for follow up cant show how sales leads affect the sales pipeline - is not doing a good job nurturing leads, collecting data or measuring performance How Long Should You Keep People In Your Marketing Database?

Tis the season to send out holiday cards to relatives, friends, and business contacts. Maybe you have some friends on your list that you havent spoken to or heard from in ages. How long do you keep sending them cards at holidays? The practical folks would probably cut them off after a year or two of no contact or response. Some of us probably cant bear to ever drop people off our listjust in case A similar thought occurs to us marketers when we think of doing a direct mail or other marketing campaign. One important difference, though, is that were spending money out of our precious marketing budget. We expect not only a response, but also sales and revenue far and above what we spent. So lets cut these slackers off our list, shall we?

Hold on a minute. Ive found that companies often remove people from their databases far too soonespecially considering the potential lifetime value of the prospect and her company. Sure, if they can only buy your product once, take them out when they do. But for the rest, consider keeping contacts in your database forever, or at least as long as its still cost-effective to contact them. My clients frequently tell me they are closing sales from prospects that have been in their database for two, three, four or more years. How about running some numbers? If it costs $250 to get a new inquiry and $25 to keep in touch with a prospect, you can afford to keep a prospect for up to 10 years at the same cost. If you do want to trim your lists, ask the contacts if theyre still interested in hearing from you. Keep the yeses, and I recommend keeping the rest in the database but flagging them so they are not included in campaigns. That way you can still use the information for later analysis. And how about those friends you dont keep up with? You may get a warm response from a hand-written personal note instead of the cookie-cutter photo greeting card. Or keep in touch online through one of the new social networking websites like LinkedIn. Or just keep doing the same thingjust in case.

Persona-Based Marketing: Getting Started Persona-based marketing goes beyond simple demographic data

Persona-based marketing describes who a prospect or customer is, by also answering questions about their behavior such as: what keeps this person awake at night? How does he spend his time? How does she like to be sold to? This concept can help you, as a business-to-business marketer, by creating a vivid, tangible picture of your best prospects or customers, and then sculpting a marketing message thats pertinent to their concerns, and move them to inquire and buy. How to get started: 1. Convene a group of employees who interact with your customers and prospects. Bring in lunch and a white board and ask them to help you build a persona for each of your target customers. 2. Start by describing the customers role in their company: CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, sales manager, purchasing agent, user, and any other important influencers.

3. Next describe the kind of company they work for. What industry is it in? How big is it? How up-to-date is it? Does it have a lot of competition? 4. Then describe the person and their behavior: Give each persona a name, a title, an age, and describe how he or she looks. How does he dress? What kind of car does she drive? What does he do in his free time? What kind of educational background does she have? 5. Flesh out as many attributes as you need to give a full, rounded picture of who this person is. Then, turn to your personas problems and goals. 6. Think about what does this persons daily calendar look like? What are his or her most pressing concerns? What product or service attributes would be most helpful in solving this persons problems? Is he or she looking to roll up 20 databases into one, getting ready for an IPO, dealing with a new competitor who has just entered the market? 7. Then, when formulating your marketing messages, think about what path this prospect or customer might pursue to solve this problem. Will he or she turn to white papers or articles in trade publications or Web sites? Would this customer or prospect seek input from a speaker at a networking group of their peers? Let the personas steer the route, which you can pave with information that can help your prospect and customers move forward in their consideration and buying process Database Management Division The database management division delivers marketing database, automation and integration solutions for targeting new clients as well as sophisticated interactive communications platforms for existing clients. TMone provides targeted databases, database processing and database appends to companies executing direct marketing campaigns such as direct mail and telesales. By aggregating, overlaying and sourcing new lists and databases the division supports clientele globally of all sizes and in every industry. TMone takes time to understand objectives and develop solutions that directly address the goals and expectations of its clients. From concept to execution, TMones analytical CRM and database management division supports its clients efforts by providing targeted direct marketing lists and associated ancillary services such as database profiling, analysis, creative services and the execution of campaigns. TMone also develops large strategic highly targeted prospect databases using a variety of proven proprietary methods to aggregate marketing intelligence for mass marketers. TMone is a PCI compliant company.