More than just printing…

In many small to medium sized business there seems to be little if any direct connection between marketing programs and sales teams. This is reflected in the lack of impact of marketing programs. Last week I was speaking with one of my customers who is totally revamping their marketing efforts, slowly bringing marketing expertise in-house in an effort to align their out of house marketing services and their  in house sales teams which are often not synchronized in their processes and goals. But I wonder if that will create the synergy that they are looking to achieve. They are finding that the great creative programs that they have implemented in the past has not been enough to keep the sales pipeline full. Or rather they aren’t sure exactly what has been contributing to the sales pipeline. Is it the inadequate marketing  that they suspect they are getting on the outside, or deficient lead management practices internally that  keep getting in the way? It is easier to blame someone else but is it the right decision?

Business-to-business marketing has been utilizing  leads from an ever-expanding array of channels in a complex purchase-decision process. Direct response, social media, print, mass market broadcast, outdoor, mobile, the list of channels that are employed are dizzying. Not everyone is using the power of integrated marketing  to improve sales. And yet all these media channels often employed with competing messages  are supposed to contribute to lead generation and sales, yet many marketers in and out of house have none or  inefficient processes and a lack of knowledge of what moves their customer-prospect base to making a purchasing decision.  Often times this information can be gained from the sales staff and implemented as a part of the marketing process but the 2 teams need to work together in harmony to achieve this end.

Marketing needs  to fill the sales pipeline on a continuous basis new leads, customer acquisitions, sales, and revenue growth. Leads need to be acquired, ranked, passed on to sales and the outcomes monitored. Marketing and sales departments often tangle over the old arguments where sales contends that marketing doesn’t generate good leads and marketing claims that sales doesn’t follow up on all the leads. Good processes and procedures can help break down this divide by establishing sales processes that avoid contacting the most promising leads and ignoring others thereby  avoiding missing opportunities that are often less than obvious,  in leads that are never contacted or contacted too late to make them viable. Evaluating leads in a more systematic way and tracking leads throughout the purchase-decision process of lead acquisition, customer acquisition, sales, and revenue growth.

Marketing automation can help but aligning the sale and marketing departments with common goals will help complete the sales life cycle. Synchronize the efforts of cross-functional teams  from sales and marketing,  evaluate your systems and procedures against industry best practices, make sure sufficient qualified personnel are assigned to these marketing tasks and that they have sufficient time and authority to accomplish their mission. Utilize analytics with tools like web dashboards and make sure initial data is sound and hopefully the ROI of your marketing programs will soar.

Listening to all the excitement today about Facebook’s IPO I was reminded that what people are probably buying is not Facebook as it stands today but rather what it may become and do with the data that it has collected in the last 8 years. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all directly involved in building sizable customer profiles from data that they have gleaned from customers using their site.

These “free” search engines and free social media platforms are charging a price for their services in information gathered and information used to direct advertising to a highly selective targeted audience and soon to become a financial intermediary like the credit card companies for mobile devices with services like Google Wallet that provides instant access to credit through a mobile device. What these companies are peddling is influence.

They have the ability first to make very likely prospects aware or a product, brand or service then to influence these very likely prospects to consider the value proposition and hopefully make the sale. The information that companies like these are amassing is well beyond the name, phone number, address etc that most company CRMs collect. They know brand preferences (haven’t you liked something on Facebook recently?), your online habits, how long you visited various types of sites, and more. Demographic, sociographic, psychographic, geographic details have all been collected over the years and are stored at these and other companies. Huge amounts of money are being offered today to own a share of this information as Facebook goes on the block.

All this begs the question “Shouldn’t you be doing this with your customer base?” Highly engaged customers offer the chance to improve ROI for every marketing campaign, greater relationship growth and a close up look at who your market really is, not just who you think it might be. Capturing this data will help management, product development, sales, customer service and marketing alike. Consider building an on line network for your customers; capture the data so you are not at the mercy of the giants of social media.

When you begin to construct your next integrated marketing campaign consider adding a survey of other instrument to capture data and reward your customers for participation. And then capture and analyze the data and incorporate it into your CRM. If it is good enough for Apple, Microsoft Google and Facebook it might just have value for your company as well.