Marketing, one of CRM's squishier functions, is an entirely different animal in this fragile
economy. Marketers in companies with longer sales cycles must put their brand-building dreams aside
for the moment and focus on their "other job" - supporting their sales forces. Marketers need to be
getting down and dirty launching marketing campaigns, generating sales leads and priming those
leads for closure. Fortunately, the same technologies that automate marketing processes, generate
leads, cut costs and close sales also build satisfying customer relationships.
Consider the customer visiting a national financial planner's Web site. The visitor - let's say a
Kentucky resident - fills out a Web form expressing interest in life insurance. She gets a call two
hours later from a qualified agent 10 miles away. That's great marketing, great lead generation and
great CRM.
This is just one way marketers are beginning to understand that these days the race does go
to the swiftest. Companies with long sales cycles don't have the luxury of strategic marketing
initiatives that produce results nine months from now. Whoever masters the emerging science of
immediate, or "just-in-time" marketing will be a big winner in this recession.
Principles of success include:
1. Automation: It's the only way to do more high-touch, guerilla-style marketing with a smaller
workforce.
2. Tracking: As marketing campaigns become
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more targeted, the sales leads they generate become
fewer but of higher quality. Successful companies will manage and track every last one.3. Measurement: Companies need to constantly measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns so they can continually refine messages and decide what programs to add or cut.
CRM software must invoke these principles to help companies generate every dime of potential revenue from every sales opportunity and every bit of performance from available personnel while generating good will with customers. In managing sales leads, most companies with long sales cycles have no idea whether their sales force pursues every opportunity. There's often a chasm between sales and marketing, and leads fall into the cracks. Even in this economy, sales leads still go missing, still go stale and still go to salespersons who can't close the deal. This means lost revenue and unhappy (potential) customers - or worse, customers happy with someone else.
The problem is most companies lack automated tools for precise lead monitoring and follow up to yield results similar to the Kentucky life insurance example. Companies need automated leading capture, distribution and management - a way to track and analyze every single opportunity and drive it hard to closure, then measure the effectiveness of every campaign and salesperson.
These lead management systems are must-haves in this economy. They pay for themselves after two or three sales. A growing number of companies - including time-tested stalwarts like Allstate, Dun & Bradstreet, and Mass Mutual - are using them to succeed during tough times.
In addition to tracking leads, these systems also help marketers deal with another new mandate - calculating a hard return on investment. These systems analyze and report which initiatives are generating the most leads, which are generating the most closures, and which are netting the highest return on investment based on the cost of each initiative. The best marketing measurement technologies also feature trend spotters that notify managers if, for example, a certain salesperson is closing 75 percent of his leads. This is automation, tracking and measurement in action.
Doing more with less
Leads are just one example of just-in-time marketing. Marketing execs are feeling intense, general pressure to do more with less. And what used to be "nuisance" parts of their job now stand in sharp relief as critical problems. For example, marketers are burdened with low response rates to their campaigns. Disparate, uncoordinated marketing activities chew up resources. There's no centralized planning. Marketing is pressured to execute in increasingly complex environments with multiple sales channels. As a result, mixed, confusing and sometimes conflicting messages go out. Marketing activities are inconsistent with corporate strategy. Costs are unnecessarily high. Inefficiency abounds. Customers and potential customers are confused and underserved.
What companies need, pardon the acronyms, is another brand of automation, tracking and measurement. Call it ERP for CRM, or at least the marketing piece of CRM. Companies can actually automate every important facet of the marketing practice - strategic planning, execution and measurement. This new technology category is called "marketing resource management (MRM)."
MRM technology standardizes and automates a breathtaking range of marketing functions, including competitive analysis, program development, workflow management, scheduling, asset management, knowledge management and more. MRM will give companies a 50,000-foot view of their marketing programs in addition to the 360-degree view of the customer they should already have in place. By 2005, more than 30 percent of Global 1000 organizations will have implemented MRM at least at the business unit or geographic level, according to Gartner.
All of these technologies together defy the ancient business axiom that there's an inevitable trade-off between revenue generation and managing expenses - in other words, that it costs money to make money. Lead closure systems, with marketing measurement technology and MRM for the first time let companies do both, and survive a tough economy without abandoning their customer relationships. Then, with any luck, marketers will be able to return to the fun stuff.
Greg Erman is president and chief executive officer at MarketSoft, a company helping businesses maximize every revenue-generation opportunity a company encounters, starting with automated lead management.
This was first published in November 2001
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