Marketing and sales application choices...
Marketing and sales application choices are booming. New ones appear every day it seems, while existing ones get improved very frequently.
With so many marketing and sales applications all shouting for your attention there is also a lot of noise. They all seem to offer great benefits while sounding really easy to use. For many products their ticket price or cost is very low.
But the time involved to research the software market, work out what you want and need, select a product, understand it and use it effectively can be quite high. This can increase the cost to you and to your business considerably.
... for business owners, entrepreneurs, marketing and sales professionals
This site aims to help marketing and sales professionals, owner/managers and entrepreneurs in the B2B market gain a better understanding of what sales and marketing applications are available, what to look for, where you can find some useful additional information and sign-post some support sources too.
Within each category there is also commentary relating to entry level, intermediate and more advanced marketing and sales applications.
So, take a look around, and I hope we can connect soon.
Marketing and sales application categories
Social Media, Blog, Website, Contact Management, Email Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, Salesforce Automation, Marketing Automation, Social CRM and many more application categories are crowding the market.
Appreciating the application categories is a good place to start as it can help to eliminate some categories as either 'done that! or 'not relevant to our business' or 'not as high a priority as some other category'.
Marketing and sales processes - what do yours look like?
Marketing and sales processes are notoriously ill-defined. For example, could you define your 'ideal' lead, and would your sales or marketing counterpart come up with the same definition?
If you compared the marketing and sales process that your most recent 10 customers have been through how much consistency would there be?
Your processes really should be thought about before selecting or investing significant time and money into marketing and sales technology solutions.
B2B marketing and sales
If you are in the Business to Business (B2B) market with higher value but lower volume transactions and relationships then reputation and relationship management will be key. In which case the Activity Management side of CRM may be most important, supported by your website, email marketing and Social Media.
B2SME marketing and sales
If you sell to smaller businesses the chances are that you will have many lower value clients. Sure, you may have some key accounts that get your attention but the challenge is to grow the business by increasing the volume without increasing the cost. This is where technology for marketing and sales can make a significant contribution across the whole sales funnel.
B2C marketing and sales
If you are in the Business to Consumer (B2C) market with a higher volume of lower value transactions and relationships then driving traffic to your website that is e-commerce enabled may be the primary process and activities. In which case attracting traffic to your website and converting visitors into orders will be key. Encouraging repeat orders through follow-up campaigns will also feature.
Marketing and Sales technology adoption ladder
Depending where you are on the adoption and implementation ladder you may be wrestling with one on many issues that are holding you and your business back and costing you dearly. For example:
Entry level: Maybe you struggle with manual, ad-hoc activities; occasional random Social Media posts, one-off phone calls, one-off emails, unstructured meeting follow-up etc. and data in multiple places; in Outlook, Excel, paper records etc. Fire-fighting, lack of follow-up, no pipeline visibility and other issues may be affecting you as you work long hours to keep on-top of things.
Intermediate level: Maybe you have 2-3 applications in place (out of Social Media, Website, email newsletter, contact database) that help you manage data and undertake key processes. However you may have to perform a lot of manual work-arounds as, for example, contact information is fragmented or duplicated in different systems. If you have social media followers, an email broadcast system, an ad-hoc email system (ie. Outlook) and a contact management system, they may not be connected. Rationalising, integrating and adding to these systems may be a real benefit.
Advanced level: Maybe you have all the systems and data integrated and are now positioned to introduce automation to really turn up the tempo. There are various points at which repetitive activity can be automated, such as Twitter Marketing Automation, Article Marketing Automation, Video Marketing Automation, Email Marketing Automation and so on.
Integrated Marketing and Sales solutions
Moving into multi-touch, multi-channel and multi-media marketing and sales may be a long-term aspiration or goal for you. At this level improved conversion and optimisation now have great potential to improve your return on investment. However this does need the right systems building blocks to be in place.
A streamlined and automated marketing communications and customer relationship management process can dramatically improve your sales results, your customer service levels and saves you time and cost too.
The new category of Social CRM, or sCRM for short, holds out much promise as a way to unify all the various communications channels, allowing busy managers, business owners, entrepreneurs, marketing and sales professionals, customer services and others to work more effectively and deliver improved customer service.
Once key parts of your marketing and sales operation starts to operate on auto-pilot, under your control and alerting you to key events, then you'll have more time to initiate and monitor campaigns and spend quality time with qualified prospects and customers.
Next steps...
Let us help you develop that roadmap and choose the right marketing and sales application building blocks. Make contact if you would like to discuss further.
