Why CRM is the perfect choice for Marketing Automation?

Marketing is more than attracting people, it’s about creating value within your brand so they can relate to your offerings and approach you themselves. This way you can create long-lasting relationships with your customer and get returning business from them.

Needless it used to require a lot of effort from cross-functional teams to implement optimum marketing strategies. However, with recent technological advancements, it’s possible to automate the majority of your marketing campaigns, and one of the bests tools for marketing automation is a customer relationship platform (CRM).

In this article, we are going to discuss how the CRM platform help in streamlining your business’s automated marketing endeavours, so without further ado let’s get started.

What is customer relationship management software?

CRM is a marketing automation software, designed to take care of all your major customer relations needs, and automate crucial elements within your business. It plays the role of an ideal secretary. It is constantly working for the betterment of your marketing strategies, marketing designs, customer feedback loops, and more.

Some of its major functions include historically tracking historical customer data, including dates and notes of phone conversations, past purchase records, and email interactions as they proceed through the buyer’s journey. Using tagging logic the CRM applies tags on the users when they take certain actions such as adding items to their wishlist or filling out a form and launches email campaigns to direct the leads back into your sales funnel.

Why CRM is the best choice for marketing automation?

The CRM has a wide range of benefits that elevate your automated marketing capabilities such as:

Reduces chances of Human Error

When businesses have an outdated system or process in place for lead tracking, the probability of human error that comes with managing the shortcomings increases which might lead to prospects slipping through the cracks. CRMs marketing automation enables your sales team to have the right tools to close a deal.

Unify Your Database Management

The CRM provides all the user’s information in one place, Marketing teams don’t have to go out of their way to forage customer profile information and instead are able to prepare to approach leads and prospects based on unified data management.

Provide Consistent Messaging

The marketing communication that affects the customer’s experience can be aligned when engaging with the client. It’s not as much of a challenge to provide consistent messaging when you have all the contextual information available in CRM.

Lastly…

The CRM is truly a wonderful platform fully capable of automating all your marketing endeavours. However, to unlock its full potential, you need support from professional digital marketers like QL Tech having over a decade of experience in CRM implementation and customisation.

In case you need help in CRM customisation or have any questions regarding CRMs, please feel free to book a free 30 minutes session with us and we’ll try our best to help you out

Cheers!!

Converting Traffic into Leads Might be Harder Than you Think

Having a beautiful website with great content isn’t enough your website’s design should be in such a way that your leads get registered efficiently. The first step would be to start off with high-demand generation campaigns that generate leads.

The aim of the marketing team for the business is to procure as many leads as that successfully convert to loyal customers who bring repeated business. Any professional digital marketer knows that they need to set up effective lead nurturing campaigns to gather more and more leads for your brand, However, its easier said than done,

This is why in this article we’re to be discussing some of the most powerful lead nurturing campaigns that will capture your audience’s attention, increase their lead scores, and boost the selling potential of your website and your sales team. 

So let’s get cracking, shall we!

1) Segment leads for targetted messages

Your brand might be offering multiple products or services but not all your leads may be interested in everything you’ve got. This is why engaging with your leads through personalised messaging is necessary. When you communicate with your audience with contextual messaging, the success rates of conversion increase exponentially.

Your business should implement a system for grouping your leads into targeted segments. This would allow you to focus on specific challenges and solutions, which will enable you to form a relationship with your prospects on a more personal level.

You can segment your leads either based on their behaviour or demographics and some organisations use multiple buyer’s personas. Now the good news is you don’t have to do all this manually, There are tools like Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to automate your contextual messaging and make sure the right messages reach the right people at the right time.

2) Educate more, promote less

Most marketers are so eager to get business from their leads that they get overly promotional. What the need to be focused on empowering the audience with educational content so that the audience truly understands the challenge your brand can help them with.

People don’t want a sales pitch they need to feel enabled so that they can make a purchase decision on their own, If we keep ignoring what the leads really want there is a very high chance that we might lose them.

The main objective should be to provide meaningful and actionable information throughout your email campaign that follows a clear path through the marketing funnel.

3) The first impression has a massive impact

The first email that you sent to your audience becomes a deciding factor that whether your brand would be judged spammy or whether the recipient would look forward to further communications from your side.

It is crucial we always remember the value of a lead, don’t spoil the relationship before you give it a chance to blossom by failing to follow up on an engagement or spamming with too many messages in a short timespan.

In this regard a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help your business out greatly, they track the open rate of emails and follow what was the email about. Based on this your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can send relevant information to your leads and gently guide them through the funnel.

Final words…

Lead nurturing is one of the most crucial activities of digital marketing and if done correctly it can do wonders for your business’s growth. However, it is not as easy as it seems, it is advised you consider consulting with a professional digital marketer if you wish to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) for your business.

In case you have any questions or need more advice on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Customer Data Platform (CDP) implementation feel free to contact us and we would be happy to help you out.

Cheers!!

How to Optimise your sales process with 4 practices?

Should a sales process be dynamic or well-defined?

There are two trains of thoughts regarding this, while some sales professionals strongly believe that every sale requires a different approach. The other side advocates in favour of an elaborate sales process.

From our experience in sales & marketing for numerous partners and of course ourselves as well. We’ve come to the conclusion that every business must have both of these aspects in order to maintain a competitive edge in the market.

While being readily adaptable to change, your sales teams need to follow a sales process to align themselves with the larger organisational goals. Businesses with a robust sales process experience a 28% higher revenue growth than their counterparts, as it ensures their leads don’t fall out of the funnel or go cold before any action is taken on them.

If your business doesn’t have a sales process or you wish to strengthen the one you have in your company.

Then please have a look at the below-mentioned sales process practices.

1) Leak-Proof your Sales funnel

Yes, your business is getting leads, conversions and sales, and you might be thinking that everything is hunky-dory, but sadly that might not be enough. What you need to ask your self is whether you’re getting the maximum output from your sales process?

If the answer is no and you see that although you’re receiving enough leads and conversions, the number of successful sales is not up to the mark. This means there are leaks in your funnels and your leads are falling out of it. In this case, you need to get on top of things and start working on ensuring that your sales pipeline is leak-proof and streamlined.

Sales funnel

To do that you need to determine the stage in your sales process through which your leads are falling out of and then start fixing the cracks.

For instance, if you have high conversions but the final sales are low that means there might be a challenge with lead prospecting which requires a revisit to the buyer’s persona. So that the right prospects are targeted by the sales team.

In the case of high customer churn, there might be an issue with customer support, leading to customer dissatisfaction. You need to double-down on customer support ASAP.

2) Unclog your sales bottlenecks

Having a sales bottleneck is annoying mainly due to the fact that it can be easily identified and hence easy to avoid. When your sales pipeline has a bottleneck, your leads do not move past a certain stage. The sales process gets clogged and leads lay dormant with no movement.

Once you identify the stage with the bottleneck, you can determine the best way to unclog the pipeline.

sales bottlenecks

Your business might have a lot of leads entering the sales funnel, but become redundant if they don’t get qualified. Not all leads that you reach out to would be willing to purchase your product or services right away. The best way is to set up a  lead nurturing campaigns that nurture these leads over time so. That when they’re ready, they will bring their business to you.

In some cases, your sales reps may also forget to touch-base with a warm lead, making them go cold. This is unacceptable because that lead might have been your ideal customer. Reduce the load from your sales teams by automating your email communication with a CRM tool. This will ensure that all your emails are always delivered at the right time.

3. Keep updating your sales process

As your business expands it is bound to be dealing with different industries and territories. With this transformation, your sales process will have to adapt accordingly. The Growth requirement for a small business is very different from an enterprise company. And your sales process plays a crucial role in that. 

One of the biggest change would by the variance of the sales cycle which depend on the industry you are selling to. To deal with this can, you might have to radically change your sales process starting with creating new buyer’s persons as per the new industries.

updating sales process

You need to constantly analyse the results of the selling efforts in the new territories. Some of the key element to analyse would be the conversion rates from cold email prospecting. Cold emails might od the tricks in some regions, however, in some cases, you might have to tweak your approach. An alternative, to reach out to your prospects is by applying Account-Based Selling (ABS) methodology.

Account-Based Selling is a highly personalized technique for targeting high-value companies. In this sales process, the sales team will reach out to multiple decision-makers within an enterprise.

Although the number of emails sent out using the ABS method will be less. But this lack of quantity is compensated with quality. Each & Every touchpoint that your sales reps perform will be highly personalized, with the aim of establishing a relationship with the prospects.

4. Measure the KPIs of the new sales process

Once you’ve reconfigured your sales process. You need to make sure that all the changes are implemented throughout the team and everyone understands the process flow.

Keep an eye on the key metrics to determine what changes are working best and what did not. Set quantifiable goals that will help achieve your sales targets. 

KPI Sales process

Determination of a broken sales process and optimisation is quite tedious. You have a lot on your plate, with all the metrics that need to be tracked and deals to be closed. To take care of all these tasks your business must have an effective CRM in place.

Yes, the initial setup might seem complex but the long term benefits are immense!! In case you need more information on Freshsales CRMs or you need help in getting the most out of your CRM please feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you in no time.

Cheers!!