You’re missing a piece of the puzzle here, once you’ve dropped a customer through the funnel and made a sale your marketing needs to start again and begin to influence their buying decisions so that they buy more things from you. Thus with the correct CRM setup you start with everyone in the system and continually filter them into more and more tight definitions, do they like blue widgets or red ones? is tuesday the correct day to get their attention with an email or do they prefer wednesdays? do you need a hard call to action or are they more more open to suggestive actions? 

Sites like edocr and other viral tools are great at drawing people towards your site but thats only the first step in a long process of repeated conversion as you slowly take each dollar from their wallet. You need to both market and to sell your products otherwise you are missing out on the combined synergy of complimentary messages. If you want to see it in action go to a buy street market, the successful stalls have their produce well laid out ready to be sold and they draw people in with their marketing, the best will remember their customers and next time will start the conversation “Apples again today Mrs Smith?”

Very valid comment James. Many thanks. The point I am trying to raise here is all about the initial list of contacts you have. Would you add them all into your CRM or use other tools including spreadsheet to select who is worthy of adding to CRM? What’s the procedure you follow within your company?

Adding everyone will result in thousands and thousands of contacts to sort within the CRM, especially if you have limited sales resources.

Let’s say you have 10,000 contacts, but sales resources can handle only 100 in any given moment in time. Would you still add the 10,000?

Interesting article Manoj, it’s definitely a problem we have faced as a new business…you can devote so much time to marketing and telling people about your services that you neglect the sales and conversion part of the business, going through and adding all those people you have spoken to into a CRM system is time consuming and so you can often lose track of that potential business.

Thanks @shaping-Cloud. Would be interesting to learn more about how you tackle this. Just looking at your twitter profile alone, you have 419 followers and 624 following with 843 twitter conversations (tweets). Of course, you can use cotweet.com as well as plethora of others including nimble.com to make more sense of your interactions. But twitter is one channel. Assume you have already collected many business cards during physical interactions. Unlike many others, as a new business, you have a great opportunity to develop a dynamic procedure to handle this effectively.

Yes, every contact needs to go into your CRM. You then need the intelligence to process them based on your BI, i.e. go hunting for deer, when you’ve run out of deer pick off a few rabbits and see if there is an elephant that isn’t too big. If you’re getting more contacts than you can deal with then either your marketing is failing to target the right sectors by being too wide or you need some more resources.

Assuming you start with 10,000 contacts of those 9,000 will be rabbits, 900 will be deer and 100 will be elephants. Step one would be to sort them and concentrate on those 900. 

Of those 900, some will be stale (i.e. moved on, changed business model) so the first thing to do with you shiny new CRM is clean against contact quality, offer them something for a few moments of their time (and I mean a few moments) if they are engaged with you still then they’re likely to respond. That should give you a target group to engage with and develop.

Once you’ve processed them then you can repeat the process with the rabbits and elephants (some of these will have changed category since your last contact no doubt and you are looking for deer in disguise) and then start looking for more deer.

Thanks James So all the contacts goes into CRM without any validation. Whose role is it then to validate? Marketing or Sales?

Depends on structure of the organisation, some people use an external agency (like http://www.callingcrew.co.uk/? ) to validate and classify, others have in house staff who do it, the brave let sales do it on their own and other assume marketing know the market and potential of a suspect (much arguing could be had on that subject). A good CRM will do some classification but there isn’t a ‘right’ answer for everyone.

Hi James, thanks for the heads up on CallingCrew. I’m keen to understand what process your organisation follow. Wouldn’t mind an email if you do not like to speak publicly.

I think I’d start even earlier. The classic definition of marketing is the four Ps – product, price, place, promotion. But too often people think it’s just about the last P – promotion. Part of the challenge of linking marketing to sales is creating the correct product and just as importantly defining it. What you think is great about the product might be different to how your customers see it, even how you use a product and what for might be different. Getting the definition part right means that it becomes easier to ensure that the marketing funnels the right type of prospects into the sales funnel.

In my experience, the marketing and sales functions should run in very close partnership. In order to survive a company needs to sell their product or service. To do so they need to reach the correct decision makers and influencers within companies that fall into their target market(s). This should be done with the input of both teams. Sales need to clarify which sector they sell most to, and when, and how, and what the common factors within the exisiting client base are. Marketing then need to look at who to target with their message based on that intelligence, and who best within those organisations to begin dialogue with.

To identify the right people to speak to then some profiling needs to be done. Databases with basic contact details and company data can be purchased, but the right decision maker will vary in every company. In one company the buyer of the A4 copier paper may be the receptionist, in another smaller comapny it may be the CEO. The decision maker for software may well be the CIO in some organisations, but would be within the remit of the IT Manager or a procurement department elsewhere. This is information that needs to be found and updated on a regular basis to keep the data in your CRM vital and useful. If the data is treated as a living breathing thing and is nurtured regularly, this data can be the single most valuable asset within a business. It’s not difficult to do, it just requires time, organisation and tenacity.

I agree with James, put absolutely everything into your CRM. Market Intelligence is power. A good database will have not only contact details for the business, it’s decision makers and their influncers, but also key facts about them as an organisation. What solution do they currently use? What’s their budget and buying pattern? When does that subscription expire? What about their current solution to they like least? What are their points of pain?

If the responses to these questions mean that the company you’re speaking to is no no longer in your target market, that’s fine, because now you know not to waste time contacting them again until you have a product or service that will meet their requirements based on the intelligence you’ve gathered. “We spoke six months ago about the Doo-Dah? You said at that time that you didn’t need a new Doo-Dah, but that you have problems with your Thingumy supplier. We’ve just launched a new Thingumy and wondered if you’d like us to come and talk to you about it?”.

In opinion it is the job of the marketeer to identify the market, address that market with an idea and then ensure that all intelligence gained in that market is qualified and documented. Then the sales process can begin, taking an interested party from being a lead to a client, effectively ‘closing’ the sale. If your product or service is good qualify and good vaue for money, then the key to sales is all in the market intelligence.

Valid point @stuartbruce:disqus perhaps it’s a topic for a discussion at a later date. I’m trying to understand: do you add contacts collected straight into a CRM, or do you validate them before adding? If so, what tools do you use?

I would suggest adding everything to the CRM, and then editing the record in the CRM as more information is gained. That way you can always report on the results, or even see which records have data that needs updating.

Similar to Stuarts point, our marketing starts very early on and we work alongside our sales team to analyse the markets and segments where we can break into with new products or existing products into new markets.  One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is keeping sales & marketing separate both need to work hand in hand. 

As for sourcing leads we use a variety of tools from old school knocking on doors, to modern arenas like Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. However  this is only the first step, we have a custom built system which assigns reps to the ‘prospects’ who will then contact then and find out more about them and their needs.  Working alongside myself we put together bespoke packages/presentations to introduce ourselves and the products/services we offer, helping the customer get to know us and us to get to know them.

On the funnel I’d perhaps add a loop back to the start, even after a sale has been completed you still need your sales and marketing to keep engaged with the customer, we work very close with our customers and that has led to many new leads & opportunities within a company, which has arisen from getting to know them and engaging with them. Marketing and sales is a continuous circle if you don’t continue the process you will more than likely lose a customer rather than getting repeat business from a customer.

The convergence of sales and maketing, even direct marketing, is happening right in front of our eyes. It’s called social commerce. This is mostly Facebook commerce at the moment, but that will develop.

Building engaged social communities is pure marketing. Your list of fans is data capture. Putting a shop inside the community is selling. And the cycle continues. More sales = more recommendations or reviews = more marketing = more fans = more sales. And so on.

An over-simplification I know – but it’s not my blog!

I don’t think marketing is about promotion. For us at Adaptavist, marketing is all about understanding the market so that we can deliver what it needs when and where it needs it.

Advertising is about promotion, and you can’t do a successful advertising campaign until you’ve gone through the marketing piece.

What most organisations call “viral marketing”, we call “viral advertising” – because unless it’s giving you insight in to the market, it’s just advertising (like Cadbury’s gorilla) and not marketing.

As for what to do with raw contact details, you first need to identify if they are a “suspect” – specifically do they have any interest whatsoever in what you offer, or can what you offer help them in some way. If the answer to both of those questions is “No” then the contact should never enter your CRM.

Once you’ve got a list of suspects, you need to determine which of them are prospects – those that are likely to buy something from you if you play your cards right.

Advertising primarily delivers you a list of raw contact details, some of which may be suspects. Marketing, on the other hand, tends to deliver mostly suspects and prospects. By getting clever with your marketing, you can have it result in a list that consists almost entirely of prospects.

Guy thanks very much for sharing your thoughts. What tools do you use to identify whether raw contact details are suspects?

Hi Steve. Thanks for highlighting the subject of “social commerce”. Do you add facebook fans into your CRM?

Hi @sdx_creative:disqus, good to here marketing is not working in isolation with sales. Do you add all your raw contacts into your custom built CRM? Who undertakes the first level of validation, before contacts are elevated to prospects? Is this the role of marketing or sales?

Hi @31d7b2a98f8de97df047261865f992a9:disqus Do you add raw contacts sourced from social media into CRM without first level of validation? How do you deal with non-business folks?

Everything is put onto the HMG System by our Sales Managers PA, who also assists the sales rep, she will then confirm details via looking on a website or other methods. Once its a confirmed company she will  then decide which industry area/geographical area the contact belongs in which will determine which of our sales team will make initial contact. The reps will then be notified via email and on their own page within the HMG system that a new prospect has been added.

It’s hard to comment intelligently here because of the breadth of ground that has been covered. I have been in marketing of one form or another for twelve years and if nothing else have learned that the customer journey is always more complicated than you think. To try and sum the whole field of marketing and sales theory up like this seems a little pointless to me (sorry Manoj), and I’m afraid most of the debate that has followed has been as confused as the original post.

As marketers we have done a terrible job of professionalising what we do (sorry CIM/CIPR) and the result is that everyone thinks they understand it. I blame us as marketers for that but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating to see the practices and processes that I have worked hard to understand presented in such a confused manner.

Rant over, to the point. Is there a gap between sales and marketing? Yes. But the gap is different in every organisation. To use an analogy, in some companies marketing decides that horses are the customer, finds the horses, and leads them all the way to the water. They even write the script for the sales people to help them convince the horses to drink. In others, marketing just makes the surroundings of the water as pretty as possible and hopes that will attract a few horses while the salespeople do the wrangling.

Understanding where your organisation fits on this scale – and where you want it to fit – is probably not a bad start to addressing the problem. The answer will depend on your culture today, your product, your price, your industry sector, your competition and many other factors.

It’s hard to comment intelligently here because of the breadth of ground that has been covered. I have been in marketing of one form or another for twelve years and if nothing else have learned that the customer journey is always more complicated than you think. To try and sum the whole field of marketing and sales theory up like this seems a little pointless to me (sorry Manoj), and I’m afraid most of the debate that has followed has been as confused as the original post.

As marketers we have done a terrible job of professionalising what we do (sorry CIM/CIPR) and the result is that everyone thinks they understand it. I blame us as marketers for that but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating to see the practices and processes that I have worked hard to understand presented in such a confused manner.

Rant over, to the point. Is there a gap between sales and marketing? Yes. But the gap is different in every organisation. To use an analogy, in some companies marketing decides that horses are the customer, finds the horses, and leads them all the way to the water. They even write the script for the sales people to help them convince the horses to drink. In others, marketing just makes the surroundings of the water as pretty as possible and hopes that will attract a few horses while the salespeople do the wrangling.

Understanding where your organisation fits on this scale – and where you want it to fit – is probably not a bad start to addressing the problem. The answer will depend on your culture today, your product, your price, your industry sector, your competition and many other factors.

I like the concept as we are in this void with the furst AssuredSale campaign. There may also be another cone layer above ‘Hot Leads’….i.e. how and where do y ou go to build up the leads and network

Hi @twitter-102395670:disqus I used the most simplest funnel I could find – you could extend this to many layers, and get yourself lost in the process. Yes, would be interesting to discuss the best places for sourcing raw contacts

Hi @twitter-21282443:disqus if you are at TechCentreMCR today, love to grab a coffee. I will be there by noon

Add a field/column in your CRM/spreadsheet where you can specify what kind of contact they are: friend, prospect, supplier, client etc etc. That way you can filter on who you want to contact.

Well, that’s kind of my point – we don’t get raw contact details. We design our marketing efforts to only get suspects or prospects.

Example: We give away loads of free plugins, licensing over 15,000 per month. But in order to get that free license user has to fill in a survey = we already know they are a suspect (they wouldn’t want the plugins if they weren’t using tech we work with) and based on the survey it’s immediately apparent which responses are prospects.

By marketing this way, we are getting hundreds of new people opting in to our mailing lists, hundreds of surveys (properly filled in) giving us lots of information about the market, and a whole bunch of sales leads.

@facebook-742538828:disqus Wow! that is clever marketing. Do you not bother with collecting raw contacts from social networks, etc based on your interactions? Do you have enough solid leads not to bother with noise coming from social media?

So, we’ve never considered getting raw contacts as it seems like a lot of hard work for little gain. As the company grows it might be something we do in the future but over the past 6 years we’ve only ever dealt with confirmed leads. Until 2 months ago, we didn’t even have anyone in sales or marketing.

The best sales leaders are those who have marketing sometime in their background. I think that marketing should be about managing the pipeline one quarter out and sales focuses on the closing of the pipeline as well as progressing.  Progressing to me should be a joint responsibility.  

@30c4b7f757016b654f2e5fde7040a7ff:disqus interesting way to look at the problem. Thanks for sharing your thoughts

In typical terms marketing are responsible for the PR and campaigns that will hopefully generate leads.  Leads are then qualified by criteria determined by the sales team.  Once qualified the sales team will begin their process.  What I think you are attempting to create is a lead capture/qualification tool.  Let’s talk soon as I think we share some similar ideas.

Typically lists are loaded into CRM systems as leads, which are then qualified by sales users or a dedicated team (depending on volume and/or business). Prior to loading the lists a basic level of deduplication / spam removal should be carried out however this is often overlooked.

Once a sales opportunity has been identified, leads can be converted into contacts (and accounts in the case of salesforce) – at this point it’s worth automatically search for existing contact records to avoid creating a duplicate. In addition leads and contacts can be related to a specific campaign or multiple campaigns to track the influence and revenue generated from marketing activities.

@twitter-228653266:disqus many thanks for your comment. What tools do you use to filter your list before importing to CRM? Who undertakes this function, marketing or sales?

@twitter-19524627:disqus Thanks for your contribution. In your experience, are leads exported directly to CRM or filtered (first line of filtration to remove non business users) before importing?

If you want to see the mind blowing article with real facts and figures, this has really tremendous impacts on readers. 

Hi,

As the famous saying goes like this there is a very fine line between Friendship and Love…We can rephrase it for sales and marketing….Since we all know that marketing leads to sales…and with sales the brand name gets build up which means marketing. So its a vicious cycle in a good way.
Cheers