How CRM and web data can bring sales and marketing together

I’m always disappointed when I find sales and marketing departments at loggerheads, blaming each other for various failings. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, this stems from a lack of top-down strategy, and the problem is only exacerbated when parallel tactics are brought closer together, resulting in friction. To bring sales and marketing together at this late, tactical stage, is a failing in itself. The two have to invest equally, from the beginning, in a top-down data strategy that feeds resulting tactics. This is one way – and it doesn’t cost the earth – and I’ve seen it work when you bing you crm and web data together.

If your business website is producing leads, great. It could be producing more, but let’s leave that for now. You may have a conversion rate of 1%, which in the B2B world is adequate. You will therefore have 99% of visitors not making an enquiry – the key is to understand who they are, and what they are doing, because this is data worth mining. Web tracking software is easy to commission, and easy to set up. This will give you a list of businesses who have been on your website, and can help you filter them according, well, anything you want. For example:

- organisation status: are they a customer, a prospect or a suspect?

- enhanced organisation status: if they are a customer, are they at risk?

- engagement metrics: did they stay for a long time? Is it their first or their fifth visit?

- intent: what did they search for? What did they look at?

When you can tag, filter and slice your data accordingly, you automatically enrich your prospect database with some fantastic intelligence. Imagine knowing that a business you’ve had your eye on for a long time has just been on your website, having searched for a service you provide. Imagine then that they’ve spent twenty minutes looking at every page, and have downloaded your product brochure. Imagine then that they’ve come back the next day, having searched for your brand name.

If they haven’t contacted you by this stage, it’s worth a phone call isn’t it?

There’s no point in having good data if your CRM isn’t ready for it. This data is coming from an external source, and in order to cross-match it against customers, prospects and suspects, you’re going to have to put some CRM data into the external system first.

The key, when getting it back into the CRM, is ensuring that you have the data fields, and the capability to set triggers, alerts and workflows around those data fields.

Perhaps even more crucially, you need to ensure that both marketing and sales are working together on how this data is going to be interpreted. The value of it is clear – how it’s going to work is another thing. If you’re using Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, or indeed any other leading CRM system, then you’re going to have a 360 degree dashboard. Get this web data recorded as an event, and work together to design triggers that say “hey, this organisation is really interested, let’s give them a call”.

Decide together how this information is going to be presented, and how it is going to be acted upon as a consequence. This is the art of the CRM. For many, a CRM is technology and technology alone, but it’s nothing without the culture and processes that feed into it.

That leads me to…

You only get out what you put in. So define what you’re going to put into this workflow process. What, from a sales perspective, is a lead here? Is it when someone has visited the website five times and visited at least three pages? Is it when someone has browsed at least twenty pages on your site? You’ll need the flexibility to bespoke this workflow as you go along, as you develop a greater understanding of sale-readiness.

From a marketing point of view, a model will start to develop that was not previously visible, and that’s the process that gets an organisation from “first touch” on the website to “contact” – and it’s never quite as simple as you thought. First-time visitors rarely enquire on any website that I’ve seen, and it’s a case of finding the point at which a business “should” enquire – and then feeding that organisational and contact data into your marketing mix. Do you call them with a tailored message dependent on their search keywords? Or do you push them into a soft e-mail marketing campaign with a tailored download?

Define what you want to get out of the process, with combined goals – and one ultimate combined goal – how is this going to help us grow the business?

The data that marketing holds does not belong to marketing alone, and should not be guarded or held up as some kind of differentiator between marketing and the rest of the business. It should be harnessed by the whole business, and if sales and marketing can come together to design a process through which this data can be channeled into leads, then everyone wins. And no one’s at loggerheads.

About the author:

Gareth Cartman is a business blogger interested in marketing, HR and technology, and works alongside MS Dynamics partner Preact (www.preact.co.uk) in the UK, who have recently been named one of Microsoft’s top partners.