The entire
lifecycle of the relationship
starts with the first interaction
Marketing exposes your business and your products or services to your prospective customers. Marketing activities are generally oriented towards the generation of leads – businesses or individuals from whom you may ultimately develop new business opportunities. Marketing campaigns often target large groups, with a goal of gaining the permission to engage in more focused, one-to-one sales activities. When a marketing initiative results in a direct response contact, a new sales lead has been generated.
A sales lead is a prospective or future customer. From the first contact to the conclusion of the first account sale, the story of interactions with this party tells the story of how you earn new business and how you create a business customer relationship. These interactions are they key to understanding how and where you are successful in earning new business. Successful interactions may be tracked historically, and often provide a pattern of activities that can be reproduced to generate recurring positive results. Unsuccessful attempts can also be tracked, providing insight for the refinement of the process and resulting in fewer wasted efforts.
A sales lead does not stop becoming a lead just because they buy from you. On an ongoing basis, every customer remains a prospect: a potential source of new business opportunity. The maximum benefit is gained when a business can understand not only when or why their customer buys, but under what circumstances the customer “wants more”. Through ongoing interactions – service and support events, billing and account management activities, sales or marketing impressions – the history of activity with the customer reflects the performance of the business and provides a means for measuring success. This becomes the basis for identifying areas for improvement across a variety of job functions and processes within the business.
The flow of information
The Always-ON CRM system is all about relationships. It not only helps you keep track of information about your business relationships and activities, but also helps you understand how that information relates back to your own organization. This understanding of the business comes from the basic structure of your organization – the roles people play and the processes they perform – and helps to govern the flow of information throughout the enterprise. By performing their daily tasks with the information presented, users throughout the organization are able to deliver significant business intelligence and develop new insight simply by applying the Always-ON CRM solution to their efforts.
Different bits of data are collected at various points throughout the business process. As this data is collected, it is related and stored in context. As relationships are created for new data, the entire history of interactions is created. Throughout the CRM system, data elements relate to other data elements to create a comprehensive total view of the lifecycle of interactions.
Marketing CAMPAIGNS are intended to generate sales leads. Marketing campaigns may take many forms, including the placement of print or electronic ads, sending direct mail or email, placing telesales calls, etc. The common aspect of any marketing initiative or campaign is the intended result – generate leads and create opportunity.
Sales LEADS which are generated become TARGETS for ongoing sales efforts. These efforts are the sales ACTIVITIES, including meetings, calls, emails, and other types of interactions. Whether or not the lead has ever done business with your company before, they may still be a target for new opportunity.
Leads which reveal ongoing potential opportunity are usually converted to CONTACTS (individual) and ACCOUNTS (company) records. This provides a means for managing ongoing communications and activities with various individuals within a company, but always connecting that history with the main company account.
Business OPPORTUNITIES are created for leads and contact/account records when there is a quantifiable business potential. Opportunities are frequently created based on information produced in a sales quotation, where certain products and/or services are offered for a price to the prospect. When sales quotations and other potential business is quantified in the form of sales opportunities, sales pipeline reporting and forecasting is generated automatically. Because this information relates to a specific lead, contact or account, the information is available not just for sales reporting but also as part of the total historic activity for the lead/contact/account.
When a contact or account becomes a business customer (e.g., they buy something), there is also likely an ongoing service or support requirement. A support event or issue, also known as a CASE, contains information about the contact and account, as well as the details of the issue and the related product. By storing information relating to support case activities, the company is able to not only understand the requirements to support existing accounts and contacts, but to also understand support requirements that relate to specific workgroups, products and/or services and to measure support performance in those areas.
By tracking the data – from marketing campaign through case management – the business can begin to measure performance in a wide variety of areas, tracking successes and failures alike, and ultimately creating the “formulas” that will equate to profitable business growth.
