CRM and Marketing Measurement to Drive Sales

How do you drive the Sales team to follow up on all those leads you’ve provided? And how do you get your marketing team to provide qualified leads instead of rows of uninteresting data? The answer is to measure both and use the resulting reporting and analysis to find gaps in your marketing and sales processes.

Your marketing and sales systems do what they are supposed to. They keep track of your interaction with customers (CRM) and help your Sales force plan to sell (SFA). They also keep you in touch with your customers through some combination of inbound, outbound, email, direct mail, and other marketing services your company provides. You may have even integrated your social media, web analytics, and online media, but chances are that you have not.

So what’s next? Convergence time.

Let’s start with a basic CRM program and build on valuable layers of information along the way. My company sends out lots of email marketing, so that’s what I talk about more than anything else. Once I’ve executed an email campaign, the first thing I want to look at is the result of any of my tests. Did recipients open emails more frequently when I did A vs. B. Next I want to know whether people clicked through the action buttons I provided them. These first two points are marketing centric, but next comes the fun part.

Once I know who clicked through the email, I have a new segment of interested parties. This segment can be divided up into customers and prospects (based on data available in your CRM system). As a next step, what did those people do when they clicked through to your landing page or site? Did they look at one page and leave? Or follow a path toward a product that you advertised? Or follow a path to a different product? We have now added another level of advanced segmentation from your Web Analytics platform. From a marketing perspective, you can now define lead nurturing programs.

And from a Sales perspective, we have defined richly qualified CRM and Web segments. So what happens when you add a note to your SFA system letting the rep know that a contact or a prospect account has clicked through an email and pursued a specific product? If your marketing team has built credibility with sales reps and management, you can be sure that the rep will trust this information and follow up to drive a sale. If you haven’t built credibility (or communicated this new approach), then the rep will see another bad lead and do nothing.

Either way, you need to report on these cross functional results. When presented Marketing qualified leads rather than bulk leads, what was the action taken by each sales rep. How much revenue was generated for each lead delivered? What about for each lead worked by a rep? If you are able to, you should test delivering different segments to different sales teams to determine which teams are best able to drive results. Maybe inside sales has a better chance to make a qualified lead sale since they are available to follow up immediately when provided a triggered lead. Alternatively, the product path followed online may define the sales rep that should get the lead. Or it could come down to rules of engagement on who gets what.

Once you are able to present segmented results showing which teams follow up on leads and drive sales and which teams let leads sit, you can have better conversations with Sales and Marketing management. This will expose issues with both your Sales and Marketing departments, but can lead to conversations that help both organizations mature. Are your marketing teams communicating well and enabling the sales with the appropriate collateral to sell to these leads? Are your sales reps following the playbook and working the leads the way management thinks they are? Show the results and let the conversation lead to change at your company.