CRM Bytes

Social Lead Generation

Mike — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:35:12 +0000

One of the requirements of a true Social CRM system is the ability to do social lead generation. While traditional lead generation can take a variety of forms (marketing campaigns, purchasing lists, etc.), Social lead generation involves utilizing social networks to get better targeted leads. This can take many forms:

Targeted Facebook ads
Searching for users who trend in certain relevant Twitter hashtags to gain profile data
Automatically finding discussion forum threads that match specific keyword criteria

These are just a few. What do you see as the lead generation techniques of Social CRM? Post a comment or email me at crmbytes at gmail dot com. I’ll expound on some of the best answers in a future post.

Do You Know Your Customers?

Mike — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:46:11 +0000

The more often I travel to different companies as part of my normal 9 to 5 responsibilities, the more amazed that I am that most businesses do not understand who their customers are. When I ask the questions “who is your customer”, most people give answers that reflect their own biases or anecdotal knowledge about their customers, but very rarely any real insight. The truth is, most companies have a vast array of data about their customers that could be used to make decisions on, but that data is often disorganized and usually goes untapped. It is extremely valuable for a management team to be able to segment their data and determine exactly what types of people (or businesses) are buying their products or services. Factors such as industry, income range, personal demographics, geographic location, company size, average spend, churn rate, and other data points that every company has can be critical in making marketing and business development decisions. Building a business intelligence system around this area of customer demographics is a critical first step to knowing your customer.

Beyond the data points that a company already has (but may not be utilizing), capturing more data about customers is key for moving ahead of the pack. Profiling your customer’s interests and needs and coupling that with behaviors is a key component of marketing, sales, and understanding your own business. The key to successful business growth is gaining new customers and selling more to existing customers. The key to doing that effectively is knowing who your customers are and which customers are the most lucrative, and targeting like people with similar messages.

How much do you know your customers? Does your company have the means to analyze your customer data for purposes of profiling and decision making? Is the knowledge of your customers based on hard data or intuition? What would you do to improve the knowledge of your customers?

Discuss.

No related posts.

CRM and the Company IVR

Mike — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:04:16 +0000

Last month, I talked about how the corporate website strategy was an essential element of CRM implementation because it is a major touch point of interaction between a company and its customers. Today, I came across a post that triggered another important component to a company’s CRM implementation; that of the company IVR.

As CRM moves towards CEM (Customer Experience Management), all possible areas of customer interaction with a company need to be considered, and a company’s IVR is chief among those. The post I read this morning talks about using Caller ID as an IVR ‘cookie’, similar to the way we use web cookies to track customer visits to the website (the post talks about a specific piece of software, Angel.com, of which I have not used in the past, so I provide no review, endorsement, or criticism of Angel.com). Capturing a customer’s caller ID and linking it to their contact record in the CRM system can allow IVR interfaces to be created that are personalized to the caller, based on products purchased, interests, lead scores, etc.

The Caller ID, while not a foolproof method for tracking inbound calls (but then again, neither are web cookies) provides a good mechanism to identify the caller without asking for any identification, and can present a far better user experience than an endless phone tree. It is this full-circle touch point effort that is at the future of CRM, whether it be in communicating with customers using corporate assets such as a website or IVR, direct touch points such as email marketing, or expanding beyond corporate assets and initiatives to the social universe.

CRM and the Corporate Website

Marketing Is About Knowing Your Customer

Mike — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:56:55 +0000

According to a new report by Booz & Co., the next wave in marketing will be customer-preference driven targeted marketing, also known as “profiling”:

In a world overrun with marketing messages, the next wave of marketing technology will cut through the clutter, building automated marketing campaigns that address customers’ wants and needs individually. The result: greater customer intimacy, improved loyalty, and higher revenues. Moving quickly will gain real competitive advantage for organizations that start planning for the future, according to a new report by Booz & Company.

…

“Next-generation campaign systems will give marketers the ability to integrate data into their calculations from all touch points. Marketers can then design flexible, real-time “inbound” campaigns that listen actively and respond to customer behavior and preferences,” stated Chahine. This type of system maintains an ongoing conversation with customers, reacting to every customer action and learning more through each contact.

Customer Profiling and marketing based on that customer profilie is a topic that I long have been pushing, and have dealt with extensively in my series “Profiling the Customer“. This is a trend that is on the outskirts now, but will start to hit with marketers in a big way in 2010 and beyond.

H/T: CRM Masterye-Journal

CRM and the Corporate Website

Mike — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:44:02 +0000

A Company’s website is not often looked at when implementing a CRM solution or CRM processes, but it represents a major facet of the relationship that a company has with its customers. The website is the public face of every company, and represents a major entry point to customer communications and relationships. Yet the corporate website is often seen as separate entities from CRM, or at most, a gateway into CRM touch points (e.g. lead forms, support portals, etc.).

Yet the corporate website represents a major opportunity for companies to build those all-important customer relationships, and to gather information and behavioral patterns about their customers. How many companies, for example, prioritize their leads based on website activity? How many track what areas of interest on the corporate website a lead has visited and use that to shape their sales strategy to that customer? While it is not without its challenges, using website analytics to shape sales processes leads to more effective salespeople and in the end results in better qualified prospects and increased sales. Several companies offer these types of solutions, whether independently or integrated with a CRM such as Salesforce.com, but these tend to be expensive offerings that end up being geared to the high-end market, leaving the SMBs behind.

In any conversation on the future of CRM, it is tempting to get caught up in the hype of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. While the reaching out of the corporate ecosystem into the world of social media is a critical development path for CRM, the internal ecosystem of the website should not be ignored or left behind. It is an element of CRM that remains relatively untouched, yet it is the most common interaction point for many leads and customers.

CRM Verticalization

Mike — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:45:05 +0000

There is going to come a point (and we may already be seeing it) where there is no one-size-fits-all CRM solution. The trend of horizontal CRM companies creating CRM applications that are applicable across industries is never going to provide companies with the best-fit of software to match CRM processes. At the same time, CRM implementations that rely on the heavy use of customizations will deliver an end result that is a better fit for a company, but usually with an astronomically high price tag. At some point, when does the CRM industry decide to go vertical?

Sure, the big players have some vertical solutions, which are simply slightly modified or preconfigured versions of their applications created for specific verticals. There are few major CRM companies out there that have created a CRM solely targeted at a specific industry. Rather, there are a multitude of small companies that have created their own vertical CRM applications, but they don’t have the force of the marketing of a Salesforce.com or a Microsoft. These companies are usually focus on a single vertical, and have some expertise in that vertical, but don’t have the marketing and sales machine to make the product the CRM product for their industry.

Therin lies the perennial problem. To verticalize, one has to focus on a niche, and to focus on a niche in a horizontal industry means focusing on a small customer base. Yet at some point, verticalization must happen as companies strive towards greater process efficiencies and look for software that matches their own industry and internal process. The company that can capitalize on that, and do it across several industries will make a huge splash.

No related posts.

Using an IVR for Marketing

Mike — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:45:26 +0000

IVRs are an important part of any company’s CRM implementation. IVRs (when implemented correctly) are great for sales and customer service, routing calls to the appropriate individuals and gathering information to facilitate faster and better service. But rarely is it considered to use an inbound IVR for marketing purposes. Kelly Starzec at the IVR Blog talks about utilizing an IVR as a marketing strategy. She outlines the fact that customers who call into an IVR are a captive audience, marketing through an IVR is a passive form of marketing, and it is a relatively inexpensive way to market special offers and other such things. Starzec recommends utilizing IVR technology for:

Promotions
Upselling of upgrades/accessories/new services
Promoting Events
Selling/Redeeming Gift Cards

IVRs can be created specifically for these purposes, or existing IVRs can be used to market while the customer is on-hold. Either way, taking a customer touch point and turning it into a marketing campaign is a good strategy. It is important to make the most of any interaction that a company has with their customer, without seeming overbearing. The IVR is just one other tool that can be used in this manner.

No related posts.

CRM in the Cloud

Mike — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:07:56 +0000

Social CRM is all of the buzz right now, but an equal opportunity for CRM lies in the merging of two recent technology trends, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing. While numerous success stories exist for both SOA and cloud computing, no one has taken the concepts and realized them to their fullest potential in the realm of CRM. The key ingredient that is missing in most SOA and cloud computing CRM implementations is flexibility.

As much as CRM processes are easily defined, very few companies end up using out-of-the-box functionality for any CRM without customizations. Usually, this takes the form of add-ons (Salesforce.com has done a good job in this regard with its Force platform) or custom programming. Yet neither of these solutions is complete or ideal. Add-ons are still rather rigid in their function, and don’t offer the end user the flexibility to tailor the software to their workflow processes and unique data elements. Custom programming and integration, while often achieving the goal of implementing a company’s process into the software, is often cost-prohibitive and introduces risk of future compatibility.

The answer lies in a metadata-based CRM platform, building on the strengths of SOA and utilizing a cloud infrastructure to deliver CRM services to customers that can be easily customized and are flexible enough for the end user. Such a platform would allow a user to take out-of-the-box CRM functionality and modify it to their heart’s content, integrating it to legacy systems across the enterprise and drawing on data from multiple stores. The end game should be a user platform that offers out-of-the-box functionality, but allows an end-user to customize it to their heart’s content. Programmers should only need to be engaged for real complex business logic requirements that go well beyond the norm. A configurable PaaS (platform as a service) CRM solution will lower the cost of CRM, allow for flexibility and scalability in growth and changing of processes, and allow businesses to focus on what they do best, without having to worry about fitting their process into a canned CRM package.

The Role of Data in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Certified Organic Opportunity Management

Mike — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:18:59 +0000

The sales process from lead generation to opportunity management has always been a difficult one to enforce, as sales reps are not people who tend to be process-oriented. Thus, many reps do not bother to do more with a CRM system than to use it as a digital Rolodex – schedule activities, write notes about meetings, and maybe once in a while, update a status. Getting a rep to fill out opportunity information and supply probabilities is like pulling teeth. In many organizations, the practice falls into disuse after an initial enthusiastic surge. In others, the rep will fill in the information immediately before a sales meeting when those numbers are due. Thus, the opportunity data becomes either meaningless or inflated. Sales numbers rarely match opportunity expectations, and the whole CRM process from the Sales point of view becomes suspect.

Making the opportunity process flow more organic is one way to tackle this problem. Rather than having reps fill in opportunity data, the opportunity data and weightings should be based on objective criteria on what the Rep actually fills in. Since activities are a highly-used portion of the CRM system, it makes a lot of sense to use activities to drive opportunities.

Using this approach, activities should contain an enforced categorization to identify the stage of the sales process that a user is in. They should also contain a rating system, in which the rep will give his or her personal feeling on the outcome of the activity just completed. The opportunity is then generated as the aggregate result of the rep’s ratings over various stages of the sales cycle, with different weights being applied to different stages. Over time, the weightings can be tweaked based on the experience of the organization (or the rep in general with a rep confidence rating), giving the sales manager and upper management a good forecast of the sales pipeline. Although not perfect for all organizations and certainly not the only viable opportunity management solution, an organic approach should be considered by every sales organization when implementing a new CRM system.

The Problem With Twitter

Mike — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:54:01 +0000

Twitter has a problem. Over the past week, it has been highly unavailable. It is reaching a point where Twitter is not able to scale up to the demand that is out there. With Twitter growing by leaps and bounds in terms of users and daily tweets, it will eventually reach a point of critical mass. As it becomes a major means of communications, especially for the enterprise, downtime is going to become a major consideration. Twitter as structured today is not equipped to handle it.

I’ve always felt that Twitter would need to distribute its model more. Twitter needs to become less of a service and more of a protocol or an application, and this could be a way as well for Twitter to actually start making revenue. Creating a Twitter Server product (think a Twitter Exchange type server) would help alleviate some of the load, allow IT organizations to secure and manage how their organization interacts with Twitter, and provide a source of revenue for Twitter. It would also begin to distribute the load and provide failover beyond Twitter’s current capability.

Of course, Twitter could eventually sell to a higher-end organization such as Google or Microsoft which would give it the ability to scale on existing infrastructures. However it decides to look at it, Twitter needs to figure out how to scale to avoid the constant overloads and frequent downtime it is now experiencing.