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CRM’s final frontier

Customer relationship management as a technology and process has more than transformed how companies engage and manage prospective buyers and existing customers. You could argue that the majority of business process since the mid 90’s has been modeled in CRM systems. In the late 90’s and early part of this decade, CRM became an integral part of a company’s business processes. How salespeople worked their day, how managers tracked a pipeline, how client support ensured customers were happy, were all part and parcel to a well deployed CRM.

CRM has done a fantastic job of managing the sales to customer process. What it has not done particularly well, is manage the Lead to Sales process. In fact, the acronym (CRM) and name denote the assumption that someone is a “Customer”. In the grand scheme of CRM, someone forgot one of the single most important aspects to a company’s health and viability…the lead funnel, or marketing pipeline. What about leads and suspects? What about all of the vital branding, direct marketing, email marketing, online marketing, PPC……etc that goes into ensuring sales has a healthy pipeline of qualified leads to work towards the “Customer” status synonymous with CRM?

Was there some cadre of CRM wizards in a think-tank somewhere who forgot to plan and develop for the 3rd component of the CRM triumvirate? Few would argue that marketing is the beginning of the CRM process. So why has marketing played such a minor role in the developmental evolution of CRM?

Marketing has been largely forgotten or underdeveloped within existing CRM platforms to date. While some CRM systems have done a good job at building out CRM modules for marketing, the functional elements of marketing are simply not part of CRM….and likely will never be. The reasons go to the fundamental precept of how a CRM database is built.

Marketing is arguably the most

important part of CRM. Without

marketing, your lead pipeline cannot

sustain adequate growth. CRM has

not provided marketing with the

right tools to get their jobs done

efficiently and effectively

Marketing

Sales

Service

The database model of CRM versus the database model of marketing

Sales is built around a “one-to-many concept”; both philosophically and technically. Examples of this are seen in the way a typical CRM record presents itself. You have an “Account”. The account is the “one”. Underneath this account you have the “many”. Many contacts, divisions, documents, calls, sales activity, opportunities, service requests….etc. The basic concept of CRM is that you have a single account with many sub-components, sub-contacts and sub-activities that roll up to the parent record.

Marketing is a bit different. Marketing is based on the concept of many to many. Marketers typically engage in many activities to many people, segments, groups and subgroups.

This is not to say that marketing and sales, from a pure technology standpoint, can’t communicate well. In fact, they can integrate very efficiently and effectively when the right technology is deployed and integrated properly. There are just some functions within marketing that will likely never be part of a core CRM.

Email marketing is the perfect example. Email is a vital component to most b2b marketing campaigns. It is used in a variety of ways, from mass email to newsletters to more recent advances in nurture-based marketing. Regardless, while some CRMs enable the user to do a mass email blast from within the system, it’s simply not something that a CRM will do well.

Integrating Marketing and Sales – defining the available technology

Over the last several years, solutions like SalesFUSION have emerged to fill a large gap in CRM functionality. Broadly classified into 2 groups, ESP (email service provider) and Demand Generation solutions have come to market with the ultimate goal being to provide true integration between marketing campaigns and sales activity.

ESP solutions are specifically designed to enable email marketing. They vary in functionality from basic email blasting solutions to extremely robust and expensive email marketing applications.

Demand generation applications differ in that they consolidate the many disparate marketing point solutions that exist today and offer them in an integrated SaaS model. Core functionality found in demand generation applications is most typically:

Email marketing

Lead capture pages

Web analytics

Web visitor tracking

Lead scoring & lead routing

Throughout the last 3-5 years, a myriad of technology has come to market that supports a b2b company’s lead/demand generation efforts in an online, and automated, fashion.

The evolution of marketing tools for b2b, as presented by Aberdeen Group.

Source – Aberdeen Group, 2008

This graph represents a steady growth of campaign channels, and online tools that have become increasingly available and embedded in the b2b marketing mix. Like most technology development, solutions grow out of point solutions, in a somewhat disconnected fashion and this limits their adoption and success.

Email blasting tools are the perfect example. While CRM systems in general provide for basic email blasting capabilities, many 3rd party solutions have integrated their email marketing tools within popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics. This is an improvement because the solutions are specialized to email, hence providing more email functionality in the form of HTML email design and response tracking. The value of the email marketing tools however, are limited in that they stop short of enabling users to see the entire lead flow. This is due to the simple fact that these solutions do one thing well, rather than facilitate the entire lead to sales process.

Marketing in the web 2.0 cloud

Marketing for B2B environments has dramatically changed in the last 5 years. The amount of tools available to the marketer dwarfs what was available less than a decade ago. This creates both opportunity and challenges for the B2B marketer. The opportunity is more leads for less money. The challenge is making sense of the new channels and properly managing the flow of less-than-qualified leads that make their way to your website. While marketers may differ on various strategies and channels, one thing does remain constant. The website is the primary destination for most of our marketing efforts.

Optimal Lead Flow (OLF)

Optimizing lead flow is a logical progression stemming from new b2b marketing tools and channels that have been developed over the last 5-7 years. As we move more and more towards online channels, the potential for “suspect noise” increases. Suspect Noise is when we generate a high volume of unqualified lead traffic and direct that traffic at our sales teams. In doing so, we frustrate sales and most certainly increase the risk of qualified lead leakage by attempting to manually qualify all of the leads that respond to our myriad of campaigns. Marketers must work towards a reasonable solution that manages the flow of unqualified leads into the top of the marketing & sales funnel. In doing so, the marketer must optimize this flow so that the best leads are worked by sales and the suspects are nurtured by marketing.

Before a marketing professional can begin to evaluate a specific technology for marketing to sales integration, they must first define their Optimal Lead Flow. OLF is the process by which you define how leads are captured, scored, routed and tracked. Defining your OLF means taking a vital first step and that is collaboration with sales. The marketing professional must work closely with sales to define the perfect lead. Once the definition of the perfect lead is understood and agreed upon, the OLF can be mapped.

OLF is built on the following four areas of concentration

Lead Capture – Lead Scoring – Lead Routing – Lead Analysis

Combined – these four areas represent the building blocks for closed loop marketing. We generate leads, ranking them, route them to sales and then measure the revenue per leads

Lead capture

We must first define the process of how inbound leads are physically captured. In most cases, B2B marketers use landing pages and/or web forms as a means for capturing basic information from campaign responses. The lead capture forms are typically used as the “call to action” in an advertisement, email campaign or static resource offer on the website.

What information you capture is somewhat dependent upon the campaign type. In OLF, you must capture enough information in the initial interaction to begin a digital dialog with the prospect.

For example, in a landing page that is tied to PPC, you would merely want to capture enough information to convert the click. Most important is capturing a valid email address. As such, in the lead capture phase, when defining processes, the marketer should fulfill all collateral via trigger-based email, hence forcing the campaign respondent to enter a valid email.

The standard logic applied to question type and number of questions is directly proportional to the perceived value of the asset being offered.

Marketing assets requiring form fulfillment for lead capture should follow a simple rule: The more “public” the asset, the less questions you ask. Also, the more you pay for a placement for a lead capture, the fewer questions you should ask (as is the case with Pay Per Click). The reasoning is that each additional question asked in a form increases the form abandonment rate by some incremental percentage. You can mix in required versus non-required fields, but it is often better to not do this because the mere presence of more questions can lead to increased form abandonment.

EXAMPLE 1

Website based form – associated with a static marketing asset (product data sheet) on the public website. Minimal questions are asked in this case because you will want, at

a bare minimum, to capture enough information to fulfill

the item

EXAMPLE 2

In this example, the form contains additional questions and the requirement for a business email and business phone. This form, unlike the first, is related to a higher-value asset (webinar) and the implicit agreement between lead and vendor is that it is OK to ask more questions, because I’m extracting more information (education from a webinar).

Practical application of Lead Capture Forms

Website-based forms – used to download marketing assets from the corporate website

Landing Pages for PPC – used as the click through page on any PPC ad

Online Event registration – used to pre-register for events such as webinars and tradeshows

Call to action – in any email campaign – a call to action should lead the recipient of the email campaign to a lead capture page before fulfilling the offer

Newsletter signup forms - typically static on the corporate website

Regardless of its application, lead capture is the first step in your lead flow process. Optimized lead capture forms are crucial in capturing the right information to being a b2b dialog with a prospect.

Integrating forms & field mapping for CRM

When utilizing advanced lead capture forms and landing pages from SalesFUSION, it is important to ensure that the fields in the lead capture form have placeholder fields in the CRM tables. Ideally, all fields captured in the form should go to one or all of the lead and contact tables in CRM. Furthermore, the system needs to enable the ability to take some form of automated marketing action against the lead in general, but more specifically, offer the ability to take automated action against leads based on question responses.

3 Common ways to integrate lead capture forms data with CRM

1. Email Alerts

When a form is completed, the marketing system can first look to see if a record exists and then alert an assigned sales person that a form has been completed by this person at this company. The alerts are sent to sales or a queue instantly. This ensures that high-value leads are immediately “touched” by sales. This can be triggered based on specific responses in the form or by other attributes captured and/or associated with the lead record.

2. Forms information appending in CRM

When a sales person accesses a lead or contact record in CRM, they should be able to view the form information captured and be aware that a form has been completed and on what date.

There are two options for appending forms summary data in your CRM. The administrator may choose to populate a field in the lead/contact/account tables and this is typically done in the history tab. Additionally, an iFrame may be used to summarize data from the marketing platform in the lead/contact/account records. Both options offer the sales user and CRM administrators value in that you can query/report on values placed in a field (benefit to the CRM admin) or view the raw detail (benefit to sales).

EXAMPLE – In this screenshot the information on the name of the form, the answers, date submitted, etc. are summarized ad the lead record level. This summary level view allows sales users to quickly see, read and react to activity such as form submissions. iFrames allow you to provide this view of information but the CRM administrator should also populate database fields for reporting/advanced find purposes. Both methodologies are available in SalesFUSION.

3. Triggering Sales Emails

When a form is submitted, the information can auto-generate a single response trigger email or series of response trigger emails that are formatted to come from an assigned sales user.

Once information has been gathered from a form submission, the marketing automation system can take some tangible and automated next steps based on its internal lead scoring models.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the second functional component of OLF. In simple terms, lead scoring is the process of ranking the value of suspects based on a combination of demographics and behavioral data.

In years past, any and all leads captured, in any manner, went into your CRM, designated as a “lead” record. Sales were responsible for calling and qualifying leads to a point at which they were marked as “unqualified” or moved to contact/opportunity stage. This manual, error-prone and human-capital intensive process has gone the way of the dinosaur for many reasons. Firstly, many companies no longer employ a large internal sales/telesales staff. The inside sales costs (training, salary, benefit) add significantly to the COGS. The economic environment, coupled with the new generation of marketing platforms like SalesFUSION, has changed the way companies manage the flow of leads. Companies have adopted lead scoring as a viable and necessary tool that adds logical processing to the front-end emarketing efforts that are being employed by so many b2b marketers today.

Lead scoring is an algorithm that assigns a relative value to a lead based on one or all of four types of data gathered during the marketing process. This value is numeric and arbitrary. The numeric value is then translated into some range class that has a simple value indicator. The most commonly used indicators are [A, B, C; High; Medium; Low]. Lead scoring can be applied as a global rule or it can be broken down into discrete scoring groups and applied to things such as campaigns, regions, verticals and products. Lead scoring is the precursor to lead routing. When integrating marketing to sales, it is important that the CRM administrator creates a field value in both lead and contact tables. When leads are routed to sales, the lead score indicator field needs to follow. This will help sales by ensuring they know the relative value of the lead. This helps marketing by providing a basis for reporting on the progress of leads in CRM by their scoring group.

Lead Routing

Once the lead scoring rules have been configured and set, the next step in the OLF process is lead routing. Lead scoring and Lead Routing go hand in hand in a demand generation application. Relative to CRM, it is critical that you plan for and implement a standardized program for ranking inbound leads and then developing rules for how, when and to who leads will be routed.

When implementing lead routing for in a 3rd party solution like SalesFUSION that will manage lead flow into CRM, some basic questions must be answered.

1. Do leads get created in CRM as “Leads” or “Contacts”?

2. If assigned to a queue, who on the CRM team will be responsible for managing a queue?

SalesFUSION provides for a host of basic routing functions that are “check-a-box” formatted. The administrator can select when to route a lead to sales and what subsequent actions may be taken against a lead (email alerting, task assignment, nurture campaign…etc)

To be successful with lead routing, companies who have not actively engaged in automated lead scoring and routing process must take small steps. The strong recommendation is to begin with a global model, based on the most commonsense rules and create 2 or 3 scoring tiers (A, B, C; Gold Silver…etc). The lead scoring model should be “aged” for a period of time, meaning, the scoring model should run live for a period of time with regular evaluation of the flow of leads into CRM. Adjustments to the model or expansion of the model should only occur after a baseline has been established. Once a company has been using a basic model for a period of time (3-6 months), they can then begin to adjust, expand and segment the model based on their unique volume and type of inbound lead traffic.

Routing leads into CRM can be as simple as creating a lead. Routing and the value of the marketing campaigns are greatly enhanced when relevant marketing history is carried through to the CRM.

Marketing History in CRM

Once we have generated and captured leads, we then decide which leads are scored and subsequently routed into CRM. The basic premise is that Sales will “pick the lead up” and being to work it towards conversion to opportunity and ultimately, closed revenue.

As marketers, we can help our sales team perform better by attaching relevant marketing history to the lead that will provide a basis for the context of the salesperson’s first and most vital interactions. Marketing history is used by marketing personnel and systems to determine what campaigns people should be enrolled in and how we communicate with a lead. Sales can benefit from marketing history as well.

Marketing history can show in your CRM in one of two ways; through field level history (activities logged in tasks or other areas) or via summary data provided in an iFrame. Below is an example of how email, website visits, form completions and list membership is shown at the lead level in Microsoft CRM – using the iFrame approach.

In this example, a lead record shows the complete email marketing history, all website visits and results of any forms they have filled out. The iFrame enables a quick view of activity and contextual history. This aids the sales team by helping them match the messaging in their initial phone call with the information presented in the marketing materials.

Another example of web interaction history showing in the CRM record is showing in Salesforce.com.

Here the web interactions tied to a lead or contact and are placed in database fields created from a pre-built integration. The CRM administrator receives some additional benefit from this approach in that they can query and report on data from Marketing in the CRM system. Both database field and iFrame approaches offer benefits in and of themselves. In most cases a combination of the two may be used in a single integration.

A good example of this relative to Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM is showing web interaction history at the lead, contact and account levels in database fields but offering an active email send to the lead contact record via iFrame.

In both Microsoft and Salesforce, this works well and bypasses the internal email functionality of the respective CRM and leverages the ESP platform from SalesFUSION. This enables tagging and encoding, white listing, throttling…etc. The example below shows an iFrame launched email to a lead record in Salesforce.com.

Types of Marketing History – Web Visit History

Web visitor activity is one of the best indicators of leads propensity to buy. The frequency and depth of visits to your website by a lead is a key indicator of their interest level in your solution and their time frame to purchase. As most marketing today is focused around driving leads to the website, it stands to reason that having the ability to track lead behavior on the site is critical. For sales, having web activity history appended to the lead/contact/account tables in CRM will help them frame the context of their crucial first call.

A good web activity tracking solution, like SalesFUSION’s Web Forensics, provides a wealth of information for the marketer to use in various ways. Critical components to web activity tracking include the following:

IP Address – with location mapping

Session detail – Time in/Time out

Page View History – number of pages, what pages, time on page

Demographic information (if applicable) – company and individual levels

Referring domain

Keyword and/or query string

Below – Web interaction history shown via iFrame in Dynamics CRM – Lead Level

Closing the Loop

The fourth and final component of optimal lead flow is the metrics. Many marketing tools, email in particular, are good at showing marketers the responses to a campaign. Typically marketing metrics include responses, email opens/clicks, page impressions…etc. In order to achieve implement OLF for your CRM and marketing to sales processes, you must go deeper than simple response metrics and begin to tie in the lead to sales metrics.

It is also vitally important the marketing have visibility in CRM at the opportunity level. Opportunity level data tied to lead and lead source are the components used in closed loop marketing analytics.

Two types of metrics commonly tracked from CRM to marketing are:

1. Leads by Lead status – this metric is key in that it shows the leads generated by campaigns that have been routed to CRM. The metric then shows the status of the leads generated. This is a critical metric because if we have a lead scoring model set to move “A” leads into CRM, but a large percentage of the lead status’ in CRM are showing “disqualified”, then the model may be off and further adjustment is needed.

2. Campaign to Opportunity tracking – various reports exist that assist both marketing and sales by showing the number of leads generated by campaign that ultimately convert to sales opportunities. Variations of this metric look at leads by campaign by score by opportunity. For CRM users, the key to generating this type of closed loop reporting is to ensure the opportunity table matches with the opportunity table in SalesFUSION. Lead sources are assigned in the campaign table for SalesFUSION and carried through to the opportunity. SalesFUSION then pulls back the opportunity level data for reporting purposes.

Gaining insight into the performance of marketing campaigns relative to their sales opportunity value is the essence of closed loop marketing. SalesFUSION has made these processes relatively simple and straightforward in the marketing accelerator, which is the pre-built integration between marketing and sales for SalesFUSION.

Conclusion

Optimal Lead Flow is both strategy and a technology process. By strategy, we mean that the best technology in the world is rendered useless without the proper planning and buy in from the key stakeholders in the organization. Marketing and Sales must collaborate and communicate to ensure the flow of leads is practical and adheres to the company’s core sales principles.

CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft offer a strong CRM solution with excellent marketing to sales integration capabilities. SalesFUSION has taken full advantage of these capabilities with its Marketing Accelerators for CRM.

About SalesFUSION’s CRM Accelerators

SalesFUSION has built robust and supported integrations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Companies can take advantage of the host of marketing features and best-practice workflow and directly integrate email marketing, web analytics, lead scoring, pay-per-click and other online/offline marketing channels. Because of SalesFUSION's unique internal CRM Accelerator, we can push/pull data at many levels between SalesFUSION360 and your CRM. While many companies provide for simple email integration, SalesFUSION opens the entire suite of eMarketing to the CRM user.

What are the key processes enabled by the CRM Accelerator?

Campaign integration - All campaign and campaign response activity is tracked to the lead, contact and account records in CRM.

Email integration - Rich html emails may be launched in SalesFUSION and tracked in CRM. Going far beyond simple email blasting, SalesFUSION also enables more robust drip marketing and trigger marketing with its email platform giving Dynamics users more flexibility in creating long-term conversational marketing campaigns. Anyone can integrate simple email blasts into CRM....SalesFUSION goes much further beyond this to offer true Nurture Marketing.

View marketing analytics and marketing dashboards in CRM.

View website visitor activity to the lead and account record in CRM.

Track ROI of campaigns - SalesFUSION will pull opportunity data into its campaign tracking tool and auto-calculate campaign ROI based on forecast & closed revenue information from the CRM opportunities

Because SalesFUSION is the ONLY marketing automation solution built on top of a CRM Database, we can integrate marketing with sales at a deeper level. The tables in the SalesFUSION database match up equally with the tables in your CRM database. This is a critical differentiator because it enables SalesFUSION to auto-discover your CRM data at the lead, contact, account and opportunity levels. Because of our unique CRM-backend, our clients realize the following benefits...

Integrate at a deeper level - data is exchanged between the marketing and sales system of record at the Lead, Contact, Account, Activity and Opportunity Levels.

A Mirrored Database Approach - the CRM Accelerator is facilitated by a web service API between CRM and SalesFUSION. Data is auto-discovered and passed from Sales.

No consulting or integration fees - SalesFUSION includes all aspects of its integration at no cost to our customers. If you make changes to field names/values in CRM, the

information is "Auto-Discovered" in SalesFUSION. If you create custom-fields in CRM, there is no cost or programming required to make this information available in SalesFUSION.

Intelligent Lead Routing - with the CRM Accelerator you can set rules that trigger follow up calls to leads that are interacting with you on the website, responding to campaigns or requesting information. A robust lead scoring solution in SalesFUSION enables you to properly manage the flow of leads from marketing to sales and eliminates the concern that leads are being "dropped."

SalesFUSION is designed to dramatically enhance both Salesforce and Dynamics CRM by adding robust demand generation features and workflow out of the box. This provides users with the opportunity to achieve the following results.

Improve the flow of leads to sales

Increase lead conversion

Reduce marketing spend

Reduce telesales expenditure

Generate more leads for less money

Increase product awareness

Improve PPC and online advertising conversions

Track and manage the ROI of campaigns

Leverage emerging marketing technologies (social media)

Automate campaigns and expand the reach of campaigns

Automatically nurture leads

Get marketing and sales on the same page!

About SalesFUSION

SalesFUSION 360 empowers marketers with the technology needed in today's fast-past web 2.0 business world. The only marketing automation platform built on a true CRM Database, SalesFUSION takes eMarketing to the next level by integrating disparate marketing cloud technologies into a single unified structure.

SalesFUSION 360 provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. This is made possible through the SalesFusion 360™ suite, which complements Sales Force Automation applications by adding an on-demand enterprise lead management service. SalesFUSION 360 increases lead quantity, lead quality and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process. In short, we enable companies to implement true b2b demand generation

Learn more about us at www.salesfusion.com

Toll-free number is 1-800-558-1760 Atlanta, Georgia number is 770-217-1228 Philadelphia Sales Office 1-866-317-4316