Use Your Online CRM to Get Out of Line

by | Sep 11, 2013

Talk to many sales organizations about the sales process and they will refer to the “sales funnel” and sometimes how they try to track it in their online CRM.  The process described as the sales funnel has never been linear and today’s customers are bending the process in every way.  In a socially connected environment, the buying process is a series of customer experiences that are completely controlled by the consumer.

In both the B2B and B2C environment, people gather information about future purchases from an ever increasing number of sources.  The journey may include conversations with friends, a visit to an online forum, downloaded reports from your competitors, or comments in social media.

The New Customer Engagement Model

In an effort to describe the buyer journey, CMB (Chadwick Martin Bailey) research led to describing the process as a customer relationship corridor.  Although the corridor model does not pin down the multi-channel buying activity completely, the research comes to the indisputable conclusion that your company needs to “treat different customers differently by knowing what makes them tick”.  It is virtually impossible to gather this type of intelligence data without implementing systems in your online CRM.

Ardath Albee talks about new marketing strategies in her book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale”. She touts the benefits of taming the wild beast of buyer behavior with marketing automation.  She says, “Marketers now can drive the lead-generation initiative with their ability to attract online seekers, provide them with high-quality information that addressed the challenges they were facing, and nurture the customer relationship until the prospects were ready to meet with a sales person.”

Measure What Works

Measurement systems within your online CRM enable you to track the effectiveness in reaching the decision makers.  Define the different stages of the buying cycle and measure track the numbers for each stage.  Gather the number of sales leads that enter the sales process, quickly qualify which sales leads are ready for contact from sales people and measure each step of turning the sales lead into a closed sale.  Set up reports in the CRM software to help your awareness about what works.

In an article in the Social Marketing Forum, J-P De Clerck’s title is “Optimizing the Digital and Social Customer Experience”.  He wrote about the 2009 article by McKinsey that talked about buyers “…moving outside the purchasing funnel.”  He advises that optimizing that customer journey means putting the customer at the center and finding the windows of opportunity open to alignment with their goals.  This is the direct opposite of approaching the customer and using that moment to persuade the buyer.

Listen and Respond

Instead of a funnel, he sees the customer experience to be the sum of all touch points a business has with the customer.  You can track those touch points with the sales lead and define triggers that move them toward a closed sale by watching the data in your online CRM.  You may find that the approach that seemed perfectly logical gets no response from the average consumer – or – the best path to closed sales depends on a marketing channel that is totally counterintuitive.

Sales success in today’s world is data-driven.  They have no interest in what you think or the effort you have made to reach them.  Today’s buyer is self-educated and the sales process has become more of a facilitator of the sale.  Your online CRM allows you to deliver a consistent message and listen for the customer response.  Notice what works and redesign your sales process to fit what the buyer demands.

Remember that marketing automation is a step-by-step process and takes time to get set up and implement.  With an online CRM that is fully integrated with your email program, responding to the customer actions becomes easy and effective.  The effort you make in the set up comes around full circle for increased revenue.