Sales and Marketing Systems
In this chapter:
• Tools to automate marketing:
• Customer relations management (CRM)
• Marketing automation solutions
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Sales force automation
• Web analytics tools
• Bid management software
• Collaborating with and enabling sales staff
In the last chapter, we discussed how to track, grade, score, and nurture leads from your content marketing programs. Now we will turn to how to route leads effectively to sales teams. We’ll look at six types of tools, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing automation solutions, web analytics tools, and others. We’ll then discuss key sales enablement tactics.
Several tools are needed for a robust content, lead automation, and sales pipeline process. The key to getting the most benefit from these tools is linking multiple systems. It is imperative when selecting tools that each system integrates with the other. It takes a large chain of interconnected tools to achieve automation.
Six marketing and sales tools
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to managing a customer database. The database describes prospects and customers so that salespeople and support staff can create segments, identify prospects with various criteria, and update customer information as needed. In many companies, this tool is an archive for customer actions, so that client-facing employees can see account histories and make decisions on offers, messages, and service to clients.
There are two major types of CRM. One is an enterprise-wide solution such as SAP or Oracle PeopleSoft. These tend to be very extensive systems that underlie many departments’ infrastructures. The other is Software as a Service (SaaS) from on-demand vendors like Salesforce.com. The latter is where the industry is headed, due to its lower cost, easier implementation, greater mobile adaptability, and remote accessibility.
Marketing automation solutions
Like CRM, marketing automation solutions typically include a database of prospects but also offer advanced features for actually marketing to them, including email marketing, lead scoring, lead grading, tracking known and anonymous visitors, return-on-investment calculations, and rudimentary landing page building. Oracle’s Eloqua and Marketo are the current industry leaders.
Do you need both a CRM and a marketing automation solution? Yes and no. For a small business with a limited budget, a marketing automation tool may be sufficient. A larger company with a diverse global sales force usually needs a CRM to provide central access to detailed information about prospects.
If you use both a CRM and a marketing automation solution, it is crucial that they integrate with each other. Scores and grades that your marketing automation solution assigns to leads should be shared with your CRM and other sales tools. So if you buy only a marketing solution now but may want to buy a CRM down the road, you should choose a marketing solution that will integrate with your future CRM tool.
Content management systems
Content management systems (CMSs) are the backbone of content storage and organization. Before these systems became prominent, companies would often have to pay vendors to make relatively minor tweaks to content on their websites. Now, companies are maintaining content themselves, eliminating the cost and hassle of using an agency to manage their websites.
The CMS serves as the repository for all website or mobile data, including reports, press releases, white papers, product information, and much more. The key to using a CMS effectively is structuring the content in intuitive ways for internal users to manage. Often the CMS structure will parallel the categories of the website or mobile app. This way, a user can easily make any changes to the desired area.
Content management systems deploy campaigns across various channels, including print, email, retargeting, social media, and the web. Most can schedule campaigns and execute them, relieving much of the tedious labor involved. Importantly, a CMS stores content that you can mix and match to tailor marketing messaging. Advanced features include forms management, landing page building, and file hosting.
Sales force automation
Sales force automation (SFA) systems—usually included as part of the larger CRM system—organize and streamline the sales documenting process. Since keeping track of contacts with clients is the most important need of most salespeople, SFA systems track communications and follow-ups. Sales management software is notorious for duplicating data, owing to the same contact having several different addresses, emails, or companies associated with them. Duplication always gets worse over time, as different salespeople enter slightly different information for the same prospects. A good SFA system will automatically dedupe contacts.
Web analytics tools
Web analytics tools measure marketing activity, page traffic, and the effectiveness of campaigns across channels. They provide metrics such as the demographics of website visitors, pages viewed, sources of web traffic, time on site and on various pages, popular keywords, and much more. However, in order to protect privacy, these tools will provide only aggregated data, not data on individual users.
The most famous free web analytics tool is Google Analytics. The tool offers a bird’s-eye view into key web user groups’ demographics, actions, and more. Google also offers more advanced packages for fees. Other vendors include Omniture, Coremetrics, and Webtrends.
Bid management software
Bid management software is used for organizing and running paid searches across key search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. As we noted in chapter 16, “Pay-Per-Click Advertising,” in search engine marketing, there are two drivers of rankings: relevancy of keywords to text and bidding. Bid management software automates the bidding process. Bid management software can interface with the major search engines to determine keyword clicks, conversion points, costs per click, and more. Some examples of bid management systems are Kenshoo, Marin, Acquisio, and DoubleClick Search. These systems include such features as optimizing budgets into online ads, customer targeting, keyword selection, and campaign result reporting. The advantage of bid management systems is that they work with multiple search engines, unlike Google Ads, which is for Google only.
Table 20.1 below summarizes these six tools and their applications:
Tool |
Use |
Examples |
Customer relationship management |
Contains repository of customer and prospect profiles and account histories |
Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite |
Marketing automation |
Offers features to market to prospects, including email marketing, lead scoring, lead grading, and ROI calculations |
Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, ActiveCampaign, Adobe Campaign |
Content management system |
Enables users to change websites’ content robustly and often more cheaply than using an outside party to update the website |
Drupal, Magento, Joomla!, eZ Platform, Squarespace, WordPress |
Web analytics |
Measures page traffic, sources, campaign, user engagement and more |
Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends |
Bid management |
Manages paid search campaigns across search engines to determine and execute optimum bidding strategies |
Kenshoo, Marin, Acquisio, DoubleClick Search |
Table 20.1 Applications of marketing and sales tools.
Having the right tools, though, is only part of the equation. You also want to ensure the best working relationship between sales and marketing. This is crucial to make content and marketing automation work. Historically, there has been friction between these two groups. Marketing often feels underappreciated for its hard work in promoting the brand, designing the website, executing campaigns, and generating leads. For its part, sales often feels it is the revenue-generating arm of the company and therefore deserves more attention. For example, sales may want more high-quality leads, or sales may not see the impact of content on its sales process.
Demand generation through marketing automation carries the potential to improve this relationship. As a Forrester Research report puts it:
“Lead management automation lets marketers demonstrate their impact on sales pipelines.”
“Bickering between sales and marketing over lead quality and sales’ responsiveness to marketing-generated demand ends when firms implement LMA (lead management automation) technology. The routing, monitoring, and reporting features let marketers demonstrate the team’s impact on sales pipelines and show how marketing activity makes the sales process more efficient.”1
A productive collaboration exercise with sales and marketing is to build a marketing funnel with agreed-upon definitions. What defines a prospect versus a lead? When is a lead qualified? What are the stages of an opportunity?
As summarized in Table 20.2 on page 174, this discussion can be guided by the classic buyer’s funnel. Your inbound channels, like social media and events, and outbound marketing, like advertising and search efforts, will bring in both known and unknown users. These are general interest pursuers. Some will advance down the funnel; others will not. Your job at this collaboration meeting is to determine what qualifies someone to move down the funnel or who converted to a lead. It should be someone who has a reasonable chance of becoming a client. The subsequent stage of serious buyer indicates a more committed purchaser with a demonstrated interest. One criterion to define interest could be a prospect taking a defined action, like speaking with a salesperson or attending a pitch meeting. The final step is becoming a client. This criterion is more straightforward. It requires a commitment to purchase or an actual purchase.2
Qualifying Actions |
|
General-interest pursuers |
Converted on landing page (downloaded, gave contact information, etc.) |
Lead |
Completes another action like attending an event or webinar or revisiting site. Title, company, and industry of user indicates that the prospect may turn into a sale |
Serious buyer |
Takes an action signifying serious commitment such as meeting with salesperson, attending a pitch, etc. |
Paying client |
Commits to purchasing product or service |
Table 20.2 Defining prospects and leads.
Using sales funnel analysis to troubleshoot marketing problems
Once you have the definitions established, you should measure what percentage of your database is in which category. You should report on shifts between categories, on either a weekly or monthly basis. Note where most “leakage” is occurring—that is, at which stage are most users not advancing? This is an important question, because it can diagnose what may be wrong. If most are not advancing to the lead stage, this could mean your visitors are irrelevant to your product or solution. You may need to rework your targeting. If this is the case, you should do a root cause analysis to see which sources are bringing the best and worst leads and shift your budget accordingly. For example, certain content types may be garnering the wrong leads. You should share these findings with sales and invite its input.
Leads who don’t advance to become serious buyers can indicate a problem in nurture campaigns. If you are bringing in potentially interested buyers, but they are not staying, you may want to revisit your marketing campaigns to these segments. Are you contacting them enough? Is your marketing content personalized enough? How can you improve your approach to these leads?
If customers are not advancing from serious buyer to paying client, there may be an issue with the sales process, such as a lack of follow-up at the serious buyer stage. As stated previously, a common problem is for sales-people to ignore prospects with high potential but no short-term sales. They are working against their quotas and for their commissions. You may want to suggest a pipeline analysis to determine where additional sales efforts should be placed.
This funnel analysis can also help you determine your return on investment per channel. You can look at activity at each stage of the funnel by the source. You can then assign a cost per lead, cost per serious buyer, and cost per paying client by each channel. This will help you prioritize your marketing budget.
If you’re spending a small amount of money on certain channels, this detailed analysis may not be worth it. It is useful information, but you will need to trade off the resources spent in conducting the analysis versus value added. But if your marketing budget is sizable, a detailed analysis is essential.