Where and How to Keep Relationship Data

CRM by Sean MacEntee

Marketing and sales have a very close relationship and are vital for the growth and profitability of your organization. Customer relationship data should be available to both these departments so marketing and sales campaigns can be monitored to determine what is successful. This data is also crucial for organizing leads that can be converted into customers. If you haven't already implemented an automated marketing tool, this post will highlight the advantages of using an automated marketing system integrated with a CRM system.

Publishing Channel

An integrated CRM and marketing automation system is a very effective and valuable tool when creating a promotional content campaign. Data in these two systems can be combined to create and publish meaningful and relevant content on blog feeds, social media or emails directed to your targeted leads.

Capturing Data

Meaningful data can be captured:

• Demographic and social data can be captured from social media platforms and landing pages that your prospects visit. This information can then be downloaded into your CRM system. Your sales force can leverage this date to help them close deals.
• Whenever a prospect visits your site and other platforms and takes action, you can receive real-time alerts and your sales team can communicate in a timely manner resulting in possible sales.

Marketing Campaigns

• Multiple campaigns can be launched at the same time with less time, effort and errors. High quality and accurate reports can be generated for campaigns running in parallel and can keep track of which campaigns resulted in closed deals.
• Create drip campaigns via emails or newsletters using the call-to-actions that your prospects have initiated. For example, if a prospect downloads a white paper, a follow up email can be sent at some later time. This one to one communication is a very effective marketing strategy.
• Video broadcasts can be pushed out to prospects at the right point in the sales process using the data captured in the CRM system.
• Create contests on Facebook and other social media to attract likes and turn them into leads in your CRM system.

Conclusion

Having a strong integration between marketing and sales is a must for any organization. Set up training sessions with the sales team and convey the importance of updating the CRM system with relevant and up-to-date information. Keep in mind that sales people do not have a lot of spare time so ensure that relevant content is easy to update.