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Does Your Small Business Need to Change Its CRM?

27 Jun 2013
Image credit: 99designs.com

Image credit: 99designs.com

In my previous role at Spoonfed Media Ltd, I undertook a project to migrate the team one CRM to another, administer the system and train the team on the new system. I learned a ton about how the right or wrong CRM can make a big difference in a small company and wanted to share a couple of comments.

Our team made the decision to migrate from Zoho CRM to Salesforce for three primary reasons. Important metrics were inaccessible to key decision makers, our talented top-performers were doing repetitive tasks and we were missing out on sales opportunities because customers did not get responses quickly enough.

In a small company, there may not be a specialized data analysis team so the CRM needs to make it easy and quick to view key metrics. Fewer people means that the more automated processes, the better, otherwise top staff might end up doing data entry or data cleansing. Finally, limited man hours in the day means that without powerful tools in the CRM to either auto-respond to customers, auto-assign leads or quickly qualify sales opportunities will mean missed sales opportunities or time spent on the wrong opportunities.

The impact of switching to Salesforce was dramatic. Reporting tools allowed us to determine critical metrics including total revenue, customer lifetime value and churn rate, making us more efficient in our spending. Talented recruits who previously focused on data maintenance spent more time analysis, a more satisfying and productive role. And automated processes improved our response time for new prospects from days to minutes, significantly increasing the likelihood of a sale.

For your small business, consider the following when deciding on a CRM:
– How accessible is your data
– How robust are the data management tools, and can they reduce man-hours spent in the system
– Can marketing be automated to improve response times and sales

If your CRM isn’t checking out against those three points, it might be time to consider a switch.

Monday Mobile Marketing Tips

15 Jun 2013

App-Store-SEO-596x335

When I first started working at 23snaps, I was a bit apprehensive about the shift from web marketing to mobile marketing. I had much less experience in acquiring mobile app users, and it seemed like a daunting task.

Online, there are literally billions of channels through which to acquire new users – as every other page on the web is a potential direct marketing channel to send people to your site. Mobile, however, has relatively few direct paths to get the app to a user’s phone. In nearly all cases, users need to go through one of the top app stores – either Apple or Google. Sure, you can drive them to the app page in either store, but it seemed to me when I started at 23snaps that was a much less effective way to gain new users.

So, as I tend to do when faced with a new challenge, I turned to the internet, blogs and books. Someone, I figured, must be writing clear, simple and actionable guidelines for mobile marketers to help them acquire new users cost effectively and keep them around. After all, there were nearly 1 billion apps in the App Store – that’s a lot of companies, developers and mobile marketers who have had plenty of time to figure out mobile user acquisition.

But the resources available were meager and vague – or expensive and vague. Mobile marketing, it seemed, was not a particularly well documented area. Whether it was because those who were successful didn’t want to give away the trade secrets, or there was a perception that acquiring mobile users required a huge budget or simply there wasn’t enough collective knowledge yet, even in this fast-growing industry, it seemed I was pretty much on my own.

For nearly a year now, I have been working at 23snaps and experimenting with a huge range of the obvious, and less obvious mobile app marketing channels and I think I’m starting to get some ideas about what’s working and what’s not. Most tellingly, since I started, 23snaps has steadily grown in user numbers, used and loved by hundreds of thousands of parents and their families. But in that last year, I haven’t really noticed any significant developments in the quality of online resources for mobile marketers.

So from Monday, I’m going to be starting a new series of posts called Monday Mobile Marketing Tips. I’ll describe one thing that worked particularly well (or didn’t) in helping 23snaps grow so significantly. The idea is that someone could try to incorporate these marketing tips quickly, easily and cheaply each week, as part of their ongoing business activities, to see if it works for their app.

I’m really excited to start, as this will also be a record of some of the things I’ve tried at 23snaps. I’m also looking forward to feedback from other mobile app developers and marketers to  find out what works for them – and hopefully build a more useful and actionable guide to launching and marketing a mobile app for others going forward.

What Makes a Great Software Buying Experience?

18 Jan 2012

Over the last few months I’ve been responsible for researching and the eventual purchase of a number of new software services for our company as part of a migration from our old CRM (Customer Relationship Manager – in its most basic form it’s an online rolodex) to a new one – Salesforce.

I’ve spoken to some truly excellent account managers working at companies that make some truly excellent products and as I’ve gone through the process, I began to wonder what I might be able to take from these positive sales experiences back to our SaaS sales team. Here are a couple of takeaways:

1)      A sales reps was only speaking to me after I was ready to buy

In every just about every case, I had pretty much already decided that I was going to buy the product they offered, or a product that offered a similar service, thanks to the preparation and research I was putting into our Salesforce migration. I knew we wanted a marketing automation system and an electronic signature collection software, even if I didn’t know exactly which ones.

By waiting for me to fill out a form on their website requesting more information, or looking for triggers such as multiple site visits in one day or downloads of their installation materials, these companies could call me at a point where I was ready to discuss their product in detail, already knowing the basics of what they do. On the calls, the great reps took notes on what would form the basis of my buying lifecycle – such as when we would first start using our new CRM (a dependency for using their service) and who would be setting it up so they could reach the right people at the right time to move the sale forward.

Although this might sound obvious – wait until the customer is ready to buy before calling them and they will be more likely to buy – there were two key points to this take away.

Firstly, finding that stage of readiness is tough. In some cases early in my preliminary research, I would get a string of emails and calls from the services whose websites I was visiting when I was definitely not ready to speak to a rep. Not only did this feel a bit spammy, but the emails and calls had stopped by the point I was ready to think about buying. Getting the timeline of the customer’s buying lifecycle is not easy.

Secondly, this was the rep’s deal to lose. As opposed to sweet talking me into buying an expensive product or service, the rep had to ensure the call matched the expectations I had already set for the product myself (i.e. professional, useful feature set, support and training provided). While a great rep helped me through the buying process and a decent rep could have maintained my interest, a poor rep could have lost a deal the company had already effectively won by losing my interest or giving me a bad experience on the phone.

2)      I felt like I was going to gain something from the time spent on the phone with the sales rep even if I didn’t buy the product

One of the greatest experiences during this process was the feeling that my time on the phone with a sales rep was not busy work or wasted time between Point A of me needing a solution and Point B of me buying their product but was productive in its own right.

From my point of view, I received information that was relevant to my job (such as the best practices for lead scoring while talking to the marketing automation company or how important it is to measure the amount of time it takes to get a contract signed with the esignature company) which gave me a positive feeling associated with the company and product and made me think this training and support would continue after the sale. From their point of view, I kept all my scheduled call times – as I associated value with the call I didn’t cancel or forget it thus wasting their time – and moved more quickly through the sales process.

The companies I was speaking to considered themselves experts in their fields –whether that field was marketing automation, customer relationship management or online contracts. They were excited to share that expertise even before I became a customer, and had highlighted relevant and bite-sized chunks of information that they could impart during a call to educate and inspire me even while selling me.

3)      Seamless transitions from one contact at the company to another when relevant

In most cases, there was a point during my buying lifecycle in each company where I needed to speak to a new contact at that company. In some cases, after an initial qualifying phone call (to determine if I was in fact interested in their product) I was passed to the person who would be my eventual account manager. In another case, even after I spoke to that account manager, I needed to meet someone new for technical or installation support. In one or two cases this actually wasn’t handled very well at all, leaving me feeling a bit lost as a customer, which is why I noticed when it was done particularly well.

With the electronic signature software, I needed to be passed to a technical guy, after having been speaking to an account manager for a few weeks. Rather than just tell me I’d get a call from someone new, I had a call scheduled with my account manager, who told me I’d be speaking to the technical contact as well. They both joined the call, I was introduced and my account manager even listened in to the entire technical conversation so that he could hear my questions and concerns. Although in the future I’ll go to the technical contact with the majority of my questions, if I ever wanted to upgrade our account or change the service in some way, I still feel like my account manager has a vested interest in my account and knows where I am with their product.

4)      Onboarding

This is worth a blog post all on its own but it’s worth mentioning here. The great sales cycles incorporated onboarding into the sales process, so that by the time I was actually signing a contract, I felt that I had a pretty clear idea of what the next steps were – and in some cases had already completed a couple of those steps.

This worked particularly well for the companies that had a freemium model or a 30 day free trial of their product however even for the company with no free or trial service, they sent me material such as worksheets or videos that formed part of their new customer training process and even invited me to an event.

By the time I was actually at the point of asking my directors for budget sign off, I could already show them more clearly where we were going to be with the product in a few months.

5)      Extras

Finally, in the great sales experiences, I always felt like after the contract was signed, I was told (or at least reminded) about a little something extra, whether that was a feature, training or added value, that I hadn’t expected (or remembered). In one case this was a feature of our support package, in another it was the access to an “enablement manager” who would schedule hours of one on one training with me, and in one more it was just a side comment about a feature we hadn’t spoken about yet.

Reiterating the value I received and even adding a little extra after the contract closed the sale with great feelings all around.

 

I’ve taken these experiences from three services I’ve dealt with over the course of three months, and indirectly from the services that I didn’t end up using, often because they didn’t do particularly well at one of the points above. It’s not surprise that for the ones I went with, I’ve been putting a huge amount of time and effort into getting them set up and using them properly, and that I’m still speaking with the great teams at each company.

Why Should Marketing Be Agile?

15 Jan 2012

The other day I had lunch with Sarah from Unruly Media. We had a great conversation about agile methodologies, in particular agile in marketing. She certainly knows her stuff around agile – her company (of which she is a co-founder) started out in a very different place from where it is today but as the whole company was founded on agile principles, they pivoted to becoming a 100 person company across multiple countries selling a social and viral video enablement software to media agencies and their clients.

Sarah asked a really interesting question that I thought gets to the heart of why marketing should be agile. She wondered, if we already have plans for marketing, in a way we don’t necessarily have for other departments, like number of events or case studies per quarter, why do we need to break marketing’s task down into smaller stories?

My personal answer to that question has to do with the agile idea of continually adding value through numerous small releases. A marketing department can easily spend the quarter working their butts off to produce one fantastic event, however there’s really only one point at which the team delivers business value to other departments or customers – the day of the event. What if agile allowed marketing departments to turn that single event into a series of releases that added value to the business?

By breaking larger tasks down into small stories, each with the aim of adding value to the business, a marketing department can do two things. First, they can see where they need to focus their time in the lead up to a big event (or whitepaper release or new website launch, any activity works here really) because they’ve defined their stories in a way that helps the team understand where they are adding business value. Secondly, they can use these smaller yet valuable “releases” within marketing to delight customers and other departments more regularly throughout the process.

Let’s take, for example, hosting an event for new and prospective customers. One could easily argue that this project is only fit for a waterfall style release (you work on everything until it’s all finished then release all at once) and there is no way to deliver value to the business from this project until the event actually happens.

But look at the assets produced for that one day – handouts, speaker bios, marketing materials, case studies, training documents, video footage, email comms to attendees and event promotion. Why shouldn’t a case study be released to the sales team as soon as it’s produced, delivering value to their sales process? Couldn’t speaker bios be turned into blog posts showing your company’s involvement in supporting individuals in the industry, delivering value to your readers? Post video footage on YouTube early, make marketing materials the content basis for your Tweets, allow sales or support to piggy back on email comms – and most importantly show your company and your team how marketing is continually adding value.

The upshot of this is that marketing gets the recognition for the ongoing work they are doing and the company gains the momentum that comes with having continual access to new marketing and sales materials throughout the quarter.

Do you agree? Why do you think marketing should even bother with being agile?

Inducting the Sales Team

2 Jun 2011

For the second time this year, I’ve just said goodbye to staff members who spent less than two weeks in the marketing department. No, I’m not talking about employee churn, I’m talking about our newest sales reps.  For 2011, we’ve begun a new program for inducting new members of the sales team into the company by requiring they spend two weeks with the marketing team before they hit the phones. With the second batch of new hires through the system, I wanted to take some time to reflect on what our goals were going into the induction plan and how well we’ve achieved them.

What we hope to achieve from a two week induction period on the marketing team for new sales reps:

1) Company and departmental knowledge

One of the challenges we’ve faced as a company as we’ve grown is in keeping our company culture in tact as we scale the team. On the face of things, this should be quite simple as our hiring processes make team fit a number one priority for any new hire however things have changed since we were all in a one room, open plan office together. Now, with clear divisions between departments, there are literally walls keeping the employees of the company from interacting and communicating in the way many of us are accustom to. Each department struggles to overcome these barriers and the sales team is no exception – and with the added competitive nature of a sales role, building ties with the rest of the office can take some extra resources.  The induction process includes seminars from different department heads, an overview of each department’s role within the company, introductions to the staff and an overview of the company’s history. As the marketing team has to produce a lot of related material for resources like the blog and website, they are ideally placed to facilitate these intros.

2) Product knowledge

Content creation for product support pages online and support documentation is managed by the marketing team, as is QA and bug testing. Such in-depth product knowledge is an asset to any member of the team, regardless of department, and seeing the product through the eyes of the marketing team hopefully provides further understanding of the benefits the product provides, not just a list of features. A product induction also allows time for more detailed questions about how the product works and what features are in the pipeline.

3) Industry knowledge

The marketing team has produced market research about the industries with which the sales reps will be communicating. Rather than provide paper print outs of this research, the induction period allows a more indepth discussion of what we know about different verticals, the challenges different subsets of our clients or potential clients might face, and how our product and specifically address those challenges.

4) Respect for the lead generation system

The sales process within our company is a highly consultative one – partially due to the nature of the product and our business and partially due to the initial qualification of sales leads. Throw out the phone book – this isn’t endless cold calling. The marketing team spends a minimum of 50% of its resources on direct lead generation channels including highly qualitative research into potential new clients which are then evaluated for the sales team (the rest of marketing’s time is spent on indirect channels and creating research and collateral for the rest of the company). Our aim is to build in each sales rep a healthy respect for the lead generation process and the thought that goes into warming the leads before they reach the sales pipeline. Confidence in this process leads in turn to more confident and effective sales reps who don’t feel they’re facing an endless day of unqualified cold calls.

5) Expertise

Finally we hope that two weeks of thinking like a company marketeer will help new sales reps begin to think of themselves as experts in the events space where our product is sold. In-depth vertical insight, highly thoughtful application of the product’s features and benefits to particular clients, an understanding of the customer journey before and after that individual customer interacts with the sales rep and an appreciation for the company culture all contribute to a successful sales rep within our business. Projects like contributing to market research and case studies, and composing blog posts about topics relevant to the industry help in the consultative sales process and, we hope, encourage our sales reps to continue to contribute to these projects in the future.

So, how did we do?

The two weeks are up and sales reps back to the sales department. While this was the second such induction I’ve run, the primary difference was that in our first round we had a single sales rep and over the last two weeks we had three all taking part at once. In some ways, having more than one person involved in the process was beneficial – they were able to split up the work during projects related to various marketing tasks about which they had learned and seminars with various other people in the office were more engaging as there were three participants to ask questions. On the other hand, it was more difficult to give the individual attention that really seemed to benefit our initial induction test case. There was physically a difference in the room as well – with a group of three and due to space constraints, the three inductees were sitting together on one table, instead of in the previous session where the inductee sat next to me, so I was easily accessible for direction or to just chat about what I was working on and how it was relevant to our marketing and company strategy.

Difference in group size aside, I still believe this is an incredibly effective and valuable process for bringing new sales reps up to speed. In particular I felt that the product knowledge marketing was able to provide, including in-depth discussion around the advanced usage and the benefits to different subsets of our clients, was something that would have taken an extraordinarily long time for the reps to learn on the job. Likewise, having an opportunity to instill some respect for and knowledge of where leads come from will make a difference in how the reps approach each call – with the knowledge that someone has done quite a lot of work to get that lead to them and not with the defeatist attitude of someone who expects to be hung up on.

If our three inductees left the marketing department feeling more confident in their product knowledge, more aware of the people and departments within the company and with some level of expertise which they can share with potential clients on the phone then these two weeks have been an incredible success. I look forward to seeing their progress over the next few weeks to see the answer for myself.

Top Floor Flat Takeaways

  • As our company’s grown, we’ve no longer been able to let new hires absorb company culture and knowledge the way we did when we were all in one open plan room
  • We first identified what it was that we wanted new hires on the sales team to learn in their first few weeks with the company (company knowledge, product knowledge, industry knowledge, understanding of the sales process and the expertise for consultative sales) then recognised that the place for new hires to learn all of that was with the marketing team
  • We find it important and a valuable use of time to run a two week induction for sales reps where they sit on the marketing team to learn those pre-defined skills which can quickly get them better prepared to sell the product.