SYSTEMS
By using a Sales System (CRM), Customer Mirroring and Marketing Automation you will be able to reach out to your existing customers, new prospects and partners at the right time – when their needs are the highest.
Directive Actions instruct your Sales and Marketing teams to perform the correct action at the right time.
Your Sales and Marketing Systems should connect to fulfillment, billing and customer service systems. Whether you deliver, install, consult, manufacture, assemble or build - the systems that help you deliver and service your solutions should be integrated with your Sales and Marketing Systems.
SYSTEMS
By integrating your Sales and Marketing Systems (your Tech Stacks), you will be able to engineer success by processes such as Directive Actions driven by Customer-Mirror and other available data.
Even the best CRM and Marketing systems such as Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, DiscoverOrg, Datanyze and Pardot (and others) will not drive daily actions to sales reps based on available data.
The reason for this is that data in your systems has different meaning at different companies.
If you have not set up Directive Actions and Customer-Mirror processes, you are not getting what you need from your Sales and Marketing technology investments.
CRM
Sales Systems have traditionally been used to report on Sales Team Activities.
Sales Managers could review Activities, Pipelines and Forecasts and help Sales reps focus on their new month based on the reports.
That is no longer a viable option. At the speed decisions are being made in a technology-enabled world, and with most buyers being able to access solutions on their cell-phones, a historical view is just not good enough.
Today's Sales Systems need to be directive in real time - "these are actions you need to complete with these contacts today."
CRM systems need to deliver
Collaboration across the entire business should be in realtime and driven by real-world actions. Such as customer inquiries, notifications of products that just got delivered, changes in titles at customers and so on.
Dashboards and automated workflow should help leaders channel their energies to help the Sales Team. After all, if Sales is the most important element to grow a business, should you not have a great Sales System?
MARKETING SYSTEMS
Marketing Automation is the ability to engage with your Customers, Prospect and Partners through automated processes.
From a systems point of view, Marketing Automation should be on the same platform as the Sales System.
Marketing Automation should also be connected to your website, social media and any marketing or advertising programs you may have.
Your Marketing Automation System will rely heavily on the New Prospect database you acquired from the Internet and other sources as described in customer mirroring.
As your New Prospect database grows and as you convert these prospects into customers, your customer mirroring rules will continue to be refined. For example, if your latest converted customer allows you deeper segmentation insights than you had before, the new criteria should automatically be incorporated into your customer mirroring to help identify similar prospects.
You need a way to continuously “ask” your Customers, Prospects and Partners whether they are ready to engage with you.
Marketing Automation Systems help you parade your offerings in front of your Customers, Prospects and Partners at exactly the right time - when they are ready to buy.
INTEGRATION
Most growing businesses do not have the luxury of a software development team helping them build, implement or integrate Sales and Marketing Systems. In fact, even large businesses rely on “off-the-shelf” software such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM and may or may not tailor these systems to deliver their specific Strategies.
Systems as it relates to Sales and Marketing should have one goal: Help companies execute their Sales Strategy.
That may seem like an obvious statement, but most systems are merely used to record what is going on in Sales and Marketing.
You may be recording bad processes, strategies and ultimately bad results as opposed to have systems tied to your winning strategies.
7SalesSteps and COMPRSA combine to deliver cost effective and efficient Integration and Development Solutions.
*Marius Swart is President of COMPRSA (USA).