Audaxium Blog

With the start of a new year you’ve likely made resolutions and established some goals for yourself. If you’re a Pardot user, I’m sure you have objectives to improve the way you use Pardot and to take better advantage of the advanced Marketing Automation capabilities available to you.

Inspiration for Your Objectives

You may have already finalized your list of 2013 objectives for Pardot, but if you’ve been procrastinating or looking for ideas for inspiration, what follows is an example list of projects that we’re working on with our Pardot customers…

• Drip Programs
  • Automated Sales Follow-Up – Setup Pardot to do the work for your Sales team in “Touching Base” occasionally
  • Database Re-Heat – All those dis-engaged cold Leads/Prospects?  Go after them and get them re-engaged!
  • Customer On-boarding – Set expectations, educate new customers, and secure their annual renewal automatically.
• Content Landing Pages – Most everyone can manage their Pardot Content a bit better in order to convert more leads.
• Better Email Preference Center – Many Pardot users don’t start by using this page well. Did you know you can have multiple preference centers for different purposes?
• Evaluate and Rebuild Scoring Criteria – Reviewing your scoring rules, and your database statistics is a useful yearly task.
• Implement Dynamic Content – This is a new Pardot feature that few people use yet. Dynamic content on landing pages lets you focus your message at your prospect.
• Content Re-Purposing – You’ve got good, but older content.  Make sure people know about it.
• Advanced Reporting – Need better reporting in NetSuite?  There’s an app for that.
• Responsive HTML5 – More and more people are reading their emails and converting on landing pages via mobile. We’re helping customers convert their marketing campaigns to HTML5 responsive templates so that they display properly, enhance the reader’s mobile experience, and convert more leads.

These are just a few examples.  Let us know if you want some assistance getting the job done.  Our job is to make you look like a hero.

This is Part 1 of a new 2-Part blog series entitled: “Sales & Marketing Alignment and the Role of Marketing Automation”

• Part 1: Sales & Marketing Alignment – What Is It, and Why Should I Care?
• Part 2: How Does Marketing Automation Help Achieve Sales & Marketing Alignment?

Part 1: Sales and Marketing Alignment – What Is It, and Why Should I Care?

If you're in B2B Marketing, have you ever thought to yourself, “Why doesn't Sales follow up on all the leads we're generating for them?”… chances are good.

On the flip-side, if you're in B2B Sales, have you ever thought to yourself, “Why are these leads Marketing is sending me so crappy? Most of them won't return my calls.”… chances are good.

This is what I call, “The Great Sales and Marketing Divide.”  I would bet you my next qualified lead that there isn't a single B2B company in the world that doesn't suffer from the same disconnect between Marketing and Sales. Maybe it's not the case ALL of the time, but there are certainly times of the year when stress levels are high and targets/quotas are looming large that the two teams complain about each other.

Conflicting Perspectives

It's actually quite natural for Marketing and Sales teams to have conflicting priorities and perspectives on lead generation. Sales is responsible for closing deals. To do that, they need qualified leads who are ready to look for a solution. From a salesperson's perspective, the best leads are those who already understand the cost of their problems, understand the value of the solution being proposed, and have buying power in an organization.

Marketing is responsible for many things, not the least of which is lead generation.  However, Marketers tend to have a longer term view on the challenge of lead generation. Marketers do indeed generate leads that are qualified and ready to buy, but a much larger percentage of the leads they generate are with prospects who are very early in their buying/research process and are not ready to talk with a salesperson. Marketing understands that demand generation requires a lot of effort to nurture and educate prospects over the course of months, or even years.

Ideal Client Profile

Every Marketing book on the shelf talks about how important it is for a company to identify its ideal client profile(s). They are the companies who are most likely to buy your product or service because it is the ideal fit in terms of functionality, solution, and price. Leads that fit the ideal client profile are obviously some of the best leads for Sales to pursue.

Some Marketing and Sales teams have come to an agreement on their ideal client profile. However, many companies have not done enough research and homework to even start this process.  Still other companies who have done their homework haven't had the internal meetings between Marketing and Sales to come to an agreement on this. They're simply throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

What is a Qualified Lead, and Who's Responsible?

There are as many definitions of the phrase “qualified lead” as there are stars in the sky. In many companies, what Marketing believes is a qualified lead is not the same as what Sales believes is a qualified lead. It's common to hear disagreement on the definition.

Also, who's responsible for generating qualified leads? Is it solely on the backs of Marketers, or should Salespeople also be responsible for generating qualified leads through their own prospecting efforts such as: cold calling, targeted direct emails, in-person networking, and being active on social media networks? I have my own opinion on that, but what really matters is for your Marketing and Sales teams to come to a clear agreement on the % of total qualified leads that each is responsible for generating.

buy cheap cigarettesxt-align: justify;”>Most importantly, they both need to completely buy in to that agreement, or there will always be a disconnect which can lead to a lack of credibility, respect, and trust.

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User adoption is key to ROI

CRM vendors all promise fantastic ROI by helping your company increase sales productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and enable marketing effectiveness.  However, those benefits only come to life if your employees actually use the system.

WII-FM:  What’s In It – For Me?

To maximize user adoption, you need to figure out the answer to this question: “How can we make them WANT to use, or even depend on, CRM, even though it might require more discipline on their part?”

Generally speaking, people resist change, they already have too much on their plate, and some even struggle to learn new software.  The last thing you want to do is give them a system that gets in their way, rather than making their life easier and more productive.

WII-FM:  Questions to ask yourself

• What dashboards will help my employees make better decisions with their time?
• What reports do they need quick access to?
• What information are they searching for frequently?
• What tools will help them get more work done in the same amount of time?
• What reminders will help them get better organized?
• What real-time performance metrics will help keep themselves on track?
• How do I make it easy and fast for salespeople to keep their forecast up-to-date?

How to answer the Questions

Many people make the mistake of simply asking a few trusted people in each functional area what they want/need, and then turn that into a requirements list.  Observation and measurement are better tools.  Talking to existing CRM reference customers about these questions is another way to find out what works, and what doesn’t.  Watch how your most effective employees get things done.  Replicate some of their methods, and remove obstacles from their path.

What to expect if you don’t consider user needs

There’s no question that a modern CRM system is a wonderful tool for managers and executives.  You get better visibility into the key metrics in your business, you get real-time reports that allow you to make quicker decisions, and you get tools to manage employee performance.

This only works if your whole team uses the system. For example, if only 60% of your salespeople enter their leads, log their phone calls, and manage their sales pipeline, your dashboard is only 60% accurate, at best. Your visibility becomes more than a little foggy.

The Bottom Line

When planning an implementation of a CRM system, put yourself in your employees’ shoes and you’ll make better decisions that will maximize user adoption and accelerate your ROI.

Questions?

Audaxium consultants are former employees of companies who have implemented new CRM systems.  We’ve been through the learning curve and can provide you with some ideas to accelerate user adoption and reduce the impact of change.  Contact us for more ideas.

It was only a few years ago that your home page would be where most visitors would begin their experience with your website, but now Google and the other search engines rank your internal pages much more effectively and visitors often ‘land’ on an internal page before reaching the desired start point of your site. So you need to convert these internal web pages into more effective landing pages and get the most leads/sales that you can from them. Here are four simple steps to help you achieve that goal:

Read More »

Recently I gave a webinar to about 30 companies who are getting into e-commerce.  They have a large, established customer base but more and more are seeing value from offering many of their products online, as opposed from buying from a Sales Rep.

The real goal is to get the reps more efficient by putting lower margin items online, and have reps spend their time on the larger, more consultative, opportunities.

Here’s a few of the tips I gave them during my presentation on how to properly market their webstores.

Read More »

Now, before you go off making an acronym and plastering it all over the place, consider this.  Do customers want to have their “lifecycle” “planned”?

I say no.  After all, you have many types of customers, and while some may want a lot of attention and service.  Many may just wish to purchase, or browse, and be left alone.

The important thing of this exercise is to consider just what different types of customers want, and expect, from your company.

I feel that this type of analysis should drive your selection of a CRM or business system. Not doing the work to figure out what customers actually want will drive you in the wrong direction in marketing, sales, and service delivery.  Essentially you need to map out just what is expected in the relationship between you and your customer, and then figure out how to manage that relationship.

Lets assume for a moment that we’ve taken care of customer segmentation.  We are focused on a particular group with common interests and desires. Now consider the following categories and the questions therein.

Information Gathering

What types of things are people looking for?  Map how this changes over time, before they are a customer, after, and way after etc.

Wait, Stop. It’s not what you want them to know.  Erase the whiteboard and write on it what they actually want.  If you don’t know.  Go figure it out.

Do they want features, use cases, testimonials? What about pricing?  Options available? Comparisons with competitive products. If it’s comparisons you’d better know where those conversations are happening online.

Maybe they are looking for downloads? Updates?  Oh, and if you just decided to put up a FAQ.  Make it good.  99% of the FAQ’s out there are really quite useless.

Knowing what information your consumer needs over time, combined with how they consume that information should direct a lot of your CRM/Businses system strategy.  You simply need to be organized enough to put the right information in their hands at the right time.

Purchase Options

Your CRM strategy should be determined, in part, by what your customer could possibly buy from you.  Depending on complexity, product and pricing management could be key. If you sell 400 different items that are often bundled together in different ways, are fairly pricey, or can be confusing then you may want to ensure that you have a great quoting system in place as opposed to a generic webstore.

A nice question to ask yourself is; “How hard is it to buy from us?”  Pro Tip: It shouldn’t be hard.

Service Options

What kind of service do people expect before and after the sale?  Have you asked them?

What kind of service are people willing to pay for?

Do you need some ability to manage the delivery of those services?

Social Interaction

If you customer is my wife then she doesn’t want to talk to you.  Just send the product.  But if your customer is me then you’ll want to call me up and chat pre and post sale.  Regularly.  But you don’t want to sell to me because I’m cheap.

Do your customers expect meetings and visits?  Calls?  Regular email?

Do they want a dedicated sales rep?  

Do they expect you to have an online presence beyond your website?  Live chat?  Service via Twitter?

The level of engagement your customers want should drive you to a CRM tool that can manage and automate, if required, the appropriate level of interaction.

Problem Resolution

In my personal opinion, handling customer issues is where you build customer advocacy.  If your CRM system handles support in isolation from the rest of the customer information you’ll see a disconnect between sales and tech support.

But, how much support does your customer need?

Is it involved and detailed? Or simple questions?

Does your customer expect you to track issues?

Do they expect to be able to manage their cases and submit new ones online, via email, phone, in store?

Education

Here’s where we ask, what do you want customers to learn?

Just what is that information?

Where is the value in that information for the consumer?

How do they want to consume that information?  Have you asked? Do you have metrics?

Do your systems allow you to segment your customer base to provide the right information at the right time to the right person?

Just how often do customers want to be bombarded?

Should you be pursuing an opt in strategy? (There is only one answer to this question)

Subsequent Offerings

Does previous purchasing history predict future purchases?  Really?

How often to customers actually repeat purchase?  Do you really know?

Should your CRM system be able to give you this information?

Do you actively market to existing and prospective customers differently?

Customer Growth

Does your customer grow with you? 

How long, normally, does this relationship last? 

How far back in the relationship do you need to look to have a meaningful conversation should one be required?

Customer Complexity

Just how do you go about defining the customer?  Is it a company?  A person? Who do you actually sell to?

Your CRM system selection should ensure that you can, with reasonable accuracy, capture the reality of your customer.  Sometimes you don’t need much, and just need a name, email, and credit card, but you might need to track multiple divisions, different currencies, many contacts, and other relationships.

In Conclusion

As you answer these questions and think about your business, you should ask yourself, would it be useful to have a system that can track all this in one place?  The answer may in fact be no.  Seriously.  But in some cases it will be yes, in which case, you’re at the right blog.

Today I went for a excellent run.  And during that run I had one of those moments where you achieve perfect clarity, vision, and visualise an entire blog post in an instant.

This is not that post, because, of course, the next thought through my head was “That’s obvious, now keep up the pace.”

This post formed from the kernel I remember from that thought.

The Question

Essentially what ran through my mind was the following.  Does your company aim to be a high touch, customer responsive, and customer aware organization?  Or, and it’s not better or worse, is your company well positioned to be a low cost provider?

For small and medium businesses it is very easy to get caught in the middle.  Heck, I’ve had years of experience getting smashed by a boulder and some other really hard thing.  All to often there is a desire to over service customers, or, lose business based on dated views on pricing, either discount too much, or not enough.

Now, as times are tough.  Figuring out your strategy becomes increasingly important. Both in the short term, and long term.  There are probably several exceptions out there, where companies can be successful doing both.  But I’d venture to say it’s rare.   And, of course, I neglect all those companies who really compete with their product functionality and placement in the market.

One System

So what you ask?  Well, my endorphin induced thought was that Netsuite, being the awesome system that it is, can really be used by companies employing either strategy, but will implement each slightly differently.

NetSuite of course, can both help get a much better picture of customer habits, information, and profile while at the same time giving tremendous visibility into the profitability of the business, each transaction, and each customer.  What you chose to focus on will drive how you approach your implementation.

If you’re a high touch, customer centric organization you’ll focus much more on a few different areas.  You’ll start with marketing and the customer record.  You’ll track more custom information and have more reports written to drive the behaviours of your sales team. You’ll have a more detailed review of the sales force automation tools.  There will be more focus on the commission tools.  And, of course, you’ll want to nail the customer support end of NetSuite and give your customers the attention they deserve.

If you’re a cost and volume focused company you may in fact implement the above areas of NetSuite but they may be less critical.  Or you’ll give them a pass altogether.  NetSuite will provide you with detailed financial reporting and real time updates of the trends.  You’ll focus more on inventory management, perhaps time and expense billing, or maybe even project management if you’re a services team. Your dashboards will be chalk full of custom key performance indicators driven by the numbers.

Homework

So if you’re about to implement NetSuite here’s some homework.  You might want to do this with a whiteboard.  And, if you’re really inspired give me a call and I’ll stand beside that whiteboard and wave my arms and talk a lot, stoking the fires.

What, today, really causes people to argue in management meetings?  Usually in those debates 1 or 2 areas of information are at the root.  What are they and where would that information come from in NetSuite?

In the cost/customer matrix where do you sit as compared to your competitors?  Where do you want to go? Do you have the information to manage that shift day to day?

Write your vision at the bottom of the board.  Write some behaviours you need your team to exhibit at the top.  Leave lots of room.  Now fill in the following from the bottom up to connect the two.  Strategies, Processes, KPI/Metrics.  

Do you have the system to get you there?  What is the area you need to improve the most?

Figure that out and you’ll be well on your way to getting out of the mushy middle and implementing a system that keeps you laser focused on your goals.