White Paper: How to Skyrocket Your Sales in the Current Economy by Simply Using the Marketing Automation Functions of CRM Software
As a VP of marketing, Director of marketing, or sales executive you are well aware that even the best-planned marketing efforts can fail, and thorny economic times have only compounded the aggravation. You’ve been strained to cut your marketing expenditures significantly at the same time you’re expected to accomplish more.
This white paper introduces the fundamentals of running best marketing programs efficiently and with the highest possible ROI, using not only a creative, but also an analytical approach to direct response marketing that is impossible without marketing automation — a primary support system for any successful marketing campaign. The technology-driven process, in conjunction with a preferred-by-marketers intuitive process, will enable you to tightly interweave your marketing and sales programs and, as a result, realize a positive return from your limited marketing resources.
Nurturing customer loyalty
Your current customers can be your best future customers, as well as your best sales reps. Satisfied customers will bring you many referrals, and as you might well know, a lead that comes from a customer referral is the one that your sales team will close faster and with higher a rate of probability, because your customer already made a great deal of effort to pre-sell the referred prospects.
Growing through referrals
If you have not developed a well-managed referral program for your customers — and any other partners that want do get into business with you and become a free agent that is paid commissions for referrals — you are losing a great opportunity for organic growth.
Consider this example:
Company ABC is a B2B service company with about 500 current customers, and the average annual sales per customer is ,000, which generates ,000,000 in annual sales.
Your annual advertising budget is 1% of the revenue (0,000). As we all know, the majority of it is usually spent on campaigns that bring modest results, in the hope of discovering winning advertising venues — which become even harder with competition trying to get over the hump in this economical downturn.
Your company has been growing at a 10% rate annually, slowly but surely, but now the growth starts declining, and it is forecasted to be down 5% this year, with the same marketing expenditure (and even more hassling that your marketing and sales team has to get through).
Now imagine that you decided to monetize the connections of your customers. You can ask for a favor and a few will return. But you don’t want random single referrals — you want to get bombarded with pre-sold prospects who will take less than average time to close. Wouldn’t that be a marketing and sales paradise?
Welcome to paradise
Let’s imagine that you designed a customer referral program and offered a 10% commission to be paid as a result of each referral that converted into a paid customer.
Let’s assume that 50% of your customers signed up for your referral program, but only 50% of those customers actually refer paying prospects on a regular basis — that brings you 125 new sales a month.
Now do the math:
500 customers x 50% x50% = 125 customer referrals per month
125 referrals/month x 12 months x ,000 per sale = ,000,000/yr
M – 10% commission = M in new business
As you can see, your next year’s revenue will be ,000,000 instead of ,000,000, and your company growth rate now is 370% versus the forecasted -5%.
Developing the strategy and the process management system
You liked the math, and now you are ready to jump in and get it done, right?
Do you have a system to manage hundreds of referral partners? You probably don’t have the tools in place for a successful execution of the program. Are you planning to do it intuitively and manually? Unless you have a proper structure, along with the necessary processes and technology to measure your success, you cannot execute your partnership programs properly.
That’s why you need to automate your marketing processes, and ideally you need to hire a professional marketing company that that will design, automate, and market the program for you – and charge affordable rates.
Costs of marketing automation and campaign execution
How much do you think it would cost you to invest in a program that brings you millions of dollars of additional sales? Would 0,000 be the right number? Maybe, but it drastically exceeds the limits of your existing marketing budget.
But the good news is that right now a direct response marketing company with established processes, a proven framework, and the right automation tools can get it all done for you in few weeks — for ,000, or less.
Integrated marketing versus task-based marketing
Prior to using our solutions, for many of our clients, “marketing” was a series of isolated tasks — but from a sales point of view, selling is a coherent process. Task-based marketing can often fail because, at its core, it doesn’t help to commence a dialogue that a salesperson can bring to closure.
Test before investing
With the proper tools in place, now you can conduct formal tests of each marketing idea, collateral piece, and message to get the best performing tactics. No tests should be done manually because the necessary sampling size is prohibitively large.
The numbers game
Without proper metrics, marketers that rely blindly on an intuitive approach don’t have the tools to measure their success, and duplicate it in other programs.
Creativity and analysis have to go hand in hand. But proper analysis of a number of variables cannot be done manually. Tracking systems for both success and failure, and easy tools to analyze the elements that affected the result, have to be integrated and reflect the company’s objectives. Therefore few out-of-the box software packages for different purposes (such as campaign management, affiliate scripts, Google Adwords integration, and others) might not necessarily be the best solution for your company because it will require quite a bit of integration effort and maintenance resources.
A credible sales marketing & advertising firm will not only be able to consult with you on the most suitable solution, but also implement it and run the campaigns on your behalf, during the learning phase while your marketing team is getting familiarized with the program.
The benefits of overall marketing automation
Through the use of a database, marketing automation enables you to learn — in depth – about your prospects’ and partners’ behavior, along with the decision making process and variables that influence it. It allows you to automate communication processes and maintain relationships electronically.
The results:
Better-organized sales and marketing processes.
Superior customer retention.
A consolidated view of your customer and lead base.
Better lead qualification and retention.
Higher return on sales force and customer support technology investment.
Higher marketing ROI.
Better tracking capability.
A better platform for making marketing and sales decisions.
Which translates to:
Reduced operational costs.
Reduced marketing expenditure.
Increased revenue.
Marketing automation doesn’t just link marketing with sales — it helps marketing drive sales.
What you can achieve with the right marketing automation technology
SalesAnual will help you to improve your response rates and boost the revenues from your marketing efforts. We offer you the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalized customer communication strategies. Built specifically to meet the needs of key members of the marketing process, our product will provide comprehensive data management, campaign management, and advanced customer analytics in one integrated, easy-to-use solution.
Marketing campaign management
Marketing campaign management is easy with with our product. Through a single application, you can effectively plan your marketing spend, manage all your initiatives and campaigns, and analyze performance and results.
Market segmentation
Our product helps you create targeted campaigns by segmenting your audience based on attributes such as demographics or product interest, and then send specific messages and offers for each group. You will have the ability to easily add contacts and leads to lists right from within campaigns.
Campaign analysis
Our system is designed to simplify ABC (split) testing. You can track, analyze, and optimize multiple campaigns such as on-line marketing and telemarketing. It will also allow you to analyze and optimize other campaigns such as trade shows, direct mail, advertising, and promotions, so that all marketing efforts are focused on the most effective campaigns.
Campaign testing
ABC tests are typically conducted to determine which version or elements of advertising materials are helping the performance of the campaign. ABC tests dramatically challenge the assumptions that marketers and company executives may have about the best way to design a campaign or collateral piece. The automated functionality also enables you to solve conflicts between marketing and management.
While ABC testing typically applies to
Related posts:
You can subscribe by e-mail to receive news updates and breaking stories.