CRM For Dummies. Helgeson Lars

the suburbs and drives a minivan. If you’re targeting tall people who might want to buy the pants you’re importing, you could create Tom, a 25-year-old, single professional who plays basketball on the weekends. This generalized, stereotypical person is meant to help put context around how customers would use your product or service. If you think about how Sally would react to your marketing message, it’s easier to put yourself in her shoes when you can picture an actual person responding to you.

Buyer personas are useful in helping you set up your market segments and personalize messages sent through your CRM. Figure 1-6 shows a template to set up a buyer persona. Your sales and marketing teams can think about how to divide their efforts and resources to sell to the personas you create. Chapter 4 covers how to create buyer personas in your CRM.

       FIGURE 1-6: Set up a template for your buyer personas.

       Inbound marketing

      Inbound marketing means taking care of leads when they make the effort to contact you. Lead nurturing is another phrase you’ll hear in marketing circles. When someone reaches out to you, she may have clicked an advertisement you placed, or she may have visited your website. Inbound marketing is about setting up processes to capture those leads and follow them all the way to conversion (the point where they do something you want them to do, like buy your product or service).

      Complete CRM focuses on having a process and measuring everything you can about your leads as they learn about your brand and eventually convert into customers. Your CRM collects the behavioral and demographic data throughout the inbound marketing and lead nurturing process and uses automation to help your team communicate with your leads and clients efficiently.

       Customer lifecycle/journey

Customer lifecycle is a term that encapsulates the journey people take from the time when they first hear about you, through their decision to purchase from you, to their consuming your product or service and becoming an advocate for your brand; see Figure 1-7. Often this progression isn’t linear, as people tend to show varying levels of interest and usage of your product or service. A good manager of this lifecycle can track where people are in various phases of engagement and can set up marketing and automation to encourage movement toward conversion and advocacy.

       FIGURE 1-7: The customer lifecycle.

      CRM platforms help you measure this lifecycle. (See Chapter 4.) Knowing how long people spend in various phases and what moves them along the customer journey is critical to improving how you do business. Your team uses your CRM to keep track of who is where in this journey, helping each person effectively reach each individual contact with the right message.

       Sales pipeline/funnel

When your potential customers move through the process of buying something from you, you can place them into categories along their journey. Often these categories are descriptively named like “lead,” “qualified lead,” “reviewing proposal,” and hopefully “customer.” It’s called a pipeline because usually people go through a standardized process from stage to stage. Pipelines are often drawn horizontally; see Figure 1-8. Funnels, on the other hand, tend to be drawn vertically, with the neck of the funnel getting smaller to represent the exit of potential buyers as they go from stage to stage. For example, you may start with 100 leads, but only 80 of them qualify to move closer to becoming a customer after they have a conversation with a salesperson.

       FIGURE 1-8: A sales pipeline.

Your CRM allows you to view your various funnels, along with drilling down into the charts to see who is in which stages, as shown in Figure 1-9. Good CRM platforms also provide analytics, showing you how long people are spending in each stage and the percentage of people who successfully move from stage to stage in a given time period.

       FIGURE 1-9: Different types of sales funnels.

       Opportunities

      Opportunities have a special meaning when it comes to your CRM. Each opportunity represents a chance for a lead to become a client. Because opportunities generally have a longer sales cycle and more interaction with your team, they’re typically used for selling high-value products or services.

      Each opportunity has characteristics you can use to categorize it. The quality of the opportunity, source, products, and/or services involved, the value of those products and services, date of expected close, and manager of the opportunity are aspects attached to it and can be used for categorizing and segmentation.

      Your CRM stores everything about an opportunity in a convenient, easy-to-access place. Contacts and companies associated with the opportunity make it easy to track who the key players are; when you target resources to close that opportunity, you know what to say, and whom to say it to.

Using Strategies and Tactics

      Many people use strategies and tactics interchangeably, but anyone with military experience can tell you they’re different. Senior management usually define strategies, while middle managers and those who execute employ tactics. This section covers how to distinguish between strategies and tactics in the design and implementation of your CRM.

      It’s important to understand how both strategies and tactics work together to build a solid company with principles of Complete CRM. Your leadership guides high-level strategy to unify your team, while knowledge of effective tactics to reach your goals make that happen.

       Coming up with effective strategies

      Strategies are high-level, macroeconomic ways of looking at how to keep your business competitive. They take larger forces into consideration, and tend to focus on the “why” of the business.

      Before you embark on your journey to build a CRM, you must have a solid strategy in place. Part of that strategy is answering these questions:

      ❯❯ Market forces: Are competitors in your industry emerging? Are they a threat? Are they targeting your customer base?

      ❯❯ Resources: Do you have enough employees? Are they getting enough education and training? Is their morale high? Are they sharing information with each other, guarding it for control over others, or fear for their livelihoods?

      ❯❯ Investment: Are your people equipped with the right tools? Are they comfortable where they work? Do they have access to the training materials they need? Are they compensated when they complete training?

      ❯❯ Brand: Does your brand convey what you do? Does it have a personality? Is it a personality that helps or hinders sales?

      If you’re unable to answer these questions, or feel as though the answers don’t give you confidence in your organization, focus your CRM on addressing these issues.

       Using effective tactics

      Tactics, on the other hand, are about what happens every day at your business. They involve the tools people use, and how they use them. Usually they are more about the “how.”

      These questions focus on the day-to-day operations, and you want to have good answers for them.

      ❯❯ Customer