How to leverage your CRM and attract new business buyers

Whether your CRM is home-grown or a name brand, your business likely has some sort of solution to capture customer and prospect information. Your CRM (customer relationship management) is home to your customer’s sales journey – before, during and after the sale. It’s where marketing gleams data necessary for lead-generating and brand-building campaigns – and where the handoff occurs between marketing-qualified (MQL) and sales-qualified (SQL) leads.

If you want your business to thrive, it’s important to embrace the role that data plays in the prospect to customer journey. The more you can manage the flow of information, and the more you can learn from the data, the more it can be leveraged to impact your bottom line.

Looking at the data through a variety of lenses, you can isolate the information that will help you embrace – and then entice – a new generation of buyers. Once you know what to look for, where to find it and how to use it, you have the power to:

• Convert prospects into customers more quickly
• Extend the lifetime value of your customer
• Reduce lead acquisition costs
• Deliver sales qualified leads

Where your data comes from

Today’s generation of print and business buyers consider your company’s website to be their primary source of information – long before they reach out to a salesperson – making it an ideal place to capture leads. It’s where orders are placed, content is downloaded, and questions are answered.

In addition to your website, there are other areas within an organization where data is captured, often in disparate databases not even tied to your CRM. For example, data captured by your finance department – like contracts, SLAs, current mailing address, etc. – is likely stored in your accounting system.

The data collected at the start of the customer journey typically comes from high-level, “short-form” sources (name, company name, email, etc.), whether it’s from your website, a trade show, or other lead-generating activity. As they spend more time learning about how you help them, their journey from prospect to customer evolves.

You can uncover other areas within your company where relevant customer and prospect insights are being gathered, if you think about the entire customer journey, and all the different touchpoints along the way including:

• Telemarketing/Inside Sales – These are your front-line folks
• Sales/Business Development – They’re the hunters – and business card hoarders
• Technical Pre-Sales – They speak feeds and speeds
• Customer Support – They get to know the customer post-purchase
• Finance – The corporate gatekeepers
• Marketing – They nurture MQLs into SQLs

How your data is used

Here’s where it’s important for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to lead scoring and definition – whether your goal is to maximize your trade show’s lead gen efforts or lower how much it costs to acquire leads – otherwise you will be forever trying to find round data for a square hole.

Whether your data comes from external sources – like Google Analytics or a purchased, 3rd-party list – or from various internal databases, the sheer volume of information available can be daunting. Respecting the powerful role that data plays in enticing a new generation of print buyers lets you test targeted marketing campaigns, offers and content across vertical market segments, geographies and personas – and find ways to fast-track the life cycle of a lead.

Find your single source of truth

Printer providers not only need to answer the growing demand for marketing services but must also adapt to the changes in print-buyer behaviour. Because managing not just your own data, but also your customers’ data, has taken on a whole new meaning with the demand for an omni-channel experience.

The data that you gather helps you build new buyer profiles that go beyond the company information, purchase history and contact information stored in your database. They become the single source of truth for how needs have changed, what current challenges they may be facing, and new ways you can help them – with print services and solutions that reinforce why they should keep doing business with you.

Think beyond CRM and finance. How many potential record sources exist for each prospect/customer? How many databases are you maintaining? Think about how many conversation-starting milestones – like customer birthdays, contract signing anniversaries and first orders shipped – are being lost in a sea of Outlook calendars and spreadsheets.

As you embrace all your data, consider how you will maintain that single source of truth – and draw upon it – to entice a new generation of customers.

#B2B #Marketing #Print #leadgen #CRM #CX #MQL #SQL #Data

Portions of this article were published with permission in Graphic Arts Magazine.
Image by W. v/d D. from Pixabay