The Changing Face of CRM in Marketing

The role of CRM has always been to keep abreast with latest customer trends and maintain long term relationships with them. The marketing team makes use of CRM applications to make sure the campaigns are effective by optimising the processes of email, managing templates and recording responses of the campaigns. However there is always a gap in terms of quality leads generated and their authenticity when it comes to their handover to the sales team.

Marketing efforts are streamlined towards maximising leads generated through online campaigns, webinars, and such events. However the core focus of marketing is always lead quantity and the quality of leads generated is often ignored. In a recessionary economic scenario, companies cannot afford to waste time and resources running after junk leads or leads which are not fully qualified.

Marketing’s revised role

This is where evolution of marketing must take place. Marketing must be involved in the entire lead lifecycle stage, not just to generate leads but also the qualification stage. This will enable the sales team to work more efficiently as they would get sales ready leads.However, there must be a mutual understanding between sales and marketing as to define the company’s requirement of a sales ready lead.

Once this is determined marketing needs to devise targeted campaigns and work towards producing more qualified leads and passing them to the sales team. There is a trade-off that the quantity of leads might be reduced, however the leads generated would not be cold enquires as a result of campaigns, but potential customers who really have a need or requirement of the company’s products and services.

Most companies have a standardized process for sales and hence it is necessary for the company to understand the new role of marketing which would be responsible for the entire lead management process. It is up to the marketing team to design their campaigns in congruence with the company’s product and service strategies and what information it really needs from potential customers as a result of their campaigns.

For instance does a company need to track the leads demographic information, its buying behaviour in the past, its interaction with the company, specific questions to be asked regarding compelling events and so on. Once the marketeer tracks his requirements for a specific campaign, he needs to design the required tools and metrics to implement and measure the responses of these campaigns.

This change may come gradually with trial and error and learning through patterns and general trends. It would be best to start with one campaign and manage the entire lead management process with respect to designing metrics and tools in order to produce the required sales ready leads in line with the campaign objectives.

With the gradual change in processes marketing would be more in tune with sales and there would be better co-ordination and congruence with respect to sales and marketing efforts. Since lead generation is a pre-cursor to the sales process, refinement of this process would definitely lead to efficient use of resources and an overall win-win with respect to company objectives and the role of marketing in the company.

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