Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing my thoughts and experiences on how a marketing person or team could benefit by using a centralized online Marketing CRM. We will start to explore a few topics from the Marketing standpoint and how to integrate your marketing plans into a traditional sales based CRM.

•Data Segmentation – Week 1

•Lead Nurturing – Week 2

•Email Marketing – Week 3

•Reporting – Week 4

Data Segmentation and Marketing CRM

All the fundamental marketing tasks I have to deal with day-to-day have one thing in common – data. I can’t structure marketing strategies without information on lead engagement. I can’t send out an email without email addresses. I can’t run a report for the CEO without sales numbers. What do all these have in common? Data.

What is a Marketing CRM?

The basic definition of a CRM is a customer relationship management system used to hold and collect information about leads, prospects, customers, etc. All data. So, to think you do not need a CRM in your business is essentially saying that you don’t need or care about the data. Let’s explore how a Marketing CRM can help manage your Marketing world and more importantly improve the processes and end results for your sales team.

As, a professional Internet Marketer and with my Masters in Internet Marketing, my goal is clear. To increase revenue by filling a sales funnel full of quality leads and prospects for a sales team to close. In order for me to do this and convey the correct information to my sales team I must collect data. And the data needs to be accessible to everyone, anywhere, at anytime. This allows sales people to use the data to assist in their pitch, proposal or close. Likewise, if they collect new information (data) in the process, I want to know about it as well.

Data Segmentation and Marketing CRM

This leads us to data segmentation using a marketing CRM for your business. If we are collecting all the data about a potential lead then we can start to learn from it and advance our marketing strategies to specific segments and data points.

•Who is the lead?

•Where did the lead come from?

•What stage is the lead?

•Who is touched (worked) the lead? and what was the outcome?

•How has the lead interacted with my company?

•Is the lead going to become a customer? When? How much is the Opportunity?

By collecting all this marketing and sales data, I can know run a report for a specific trend and take action to correct or close those opportunities. Fumbling between multiple marketing CRMs and sales CRMs and other systems is a waste of time and a major loss in data integrity and revenue opportunity.

As we move to next week and talk about lead nurturing, think about where all your data is located that you would like to access. Is it easily accessible? Is it complete? My guess is, no. It’s now time to look at what you need from a marketing professional standpoint and start collecting data in a way where you can start to segment out all of the gold nuggets that might be floating down the “sales river”.
Till next week… Lead Nurturing and Marketing CRM.