In the past Marketing had to justify it’s place at boardroom table. “Show me how spending $30,000 on an ad will generate $300,000 in revenue…!” Barked my the VP for Sales & Marketing. In the past the connections between advertising and revenue was fuzzy at best.  With CRM & E-marketing tools like Pardot,  Hub Spot, etc. Marketing has the ability to track where the lead – person entered the sales funnel and trace there every step to sale closed won. How much each step cost and where the best leads came from.

With the massive shift to online buying the ball is now in Sales court to justify their existence – place at the board room table.  The model has changed to where the inside team if you even need one is outselling the inside team and doing so at a much lower cost per sale.  There are customers that don’t want to see your outside person. They have done there research made 90% of their decision and now just need to tie up the loose ends. If they need to talk the phone or email is sufficient. Not all deals can be closed this way, yet this appears to be the trend, now how do we implement CRM – Marketing Automation before our competitor steals our markets.

Implementing a CRM is expensive justifying the cost can be difficult. One way to do it is to benchmark you current cost of net new leads to net new sales. Look at the cost of your sales & marketing segments: sales teams, inside, outside, cost of marketing. Then identify ways that CRM & Marketing software can either reduce costs or grow your business.

Several examples:

What was the cost of loosing a sales person in a $8 Million dollar territory ? usually the cost of a bad hire is 1.5 – 2 times there annual salary. (Per Lea Ask her) A portion of this cost is them taking their contacts and pipeline with them. So lets say it takes a new salesperson 3 months to get up to speed and they are only 50% effective. Lets do the math $8M / 4 = $2M x 50% = $1M in lost Gross sales. If you had a CRM with the Pipeline the new sales person could be 75% effective a $500,000 improvement.

Follow up, Follow up, Follow up… every sales person knows they should but do they? As I recall Tom Hopkins & Brian Tracy said 20-30% of Sales often occur after 5 -7 follow ups. Well CRM can lighten this load, automated email follow up and reports on customer buying activity can make Follow up easier for the sales person.

Customer service is another area where the connection between the Sale and keeping the customer. What is your customer turnover rate now? How much does it cost to acquire new customers? Reduce turnover and your margins go up. Find out what causes your customers to leave build the solution into your customer service process and use the CRM to manage it.

Reduce or Better Eliminate Manual Processes:

Sending out customer satisfaction emails was costing one of my clients $3,000 per year. Automating the process one time cost $400 the first year. Now year after year they save $3,000. Most any process that is routine is one that is a good candidate for automation. Just think of how many confirmation emails get sent out in your organization. With CRM automation even small businesses can automate much of their customer service process.

How many people are involved with order taking and customer service…? at what cost?Logging cases can be done using a customer portal. Where the customer logs in and securely creates a support case or even gives you business to service them. Twenty four hour service with automated confirmation. The product can even be delivered or the process of delivery can be automated as well. This is not only the realm of Amazon, small business has the access to these tools now.

One technique marketers frequently use is to count clicks & opens but only do it on a campaign level. Broaden your horizons and track it long term over years. This will help you show how marketing drove revenue by increasing engagement with prospects & customers over a period of years. Measure the reduced time from Lead to Revenue (Sale Closed Won) only 4% of B2B Marketers measure more than 6 months of impact according to DeDe Sabby at Roland DGA. She said by lifting the conversion of Leads by 1% she got a shift of 25% in revenue..!

The technology is here and available now, they only limit is your imagination. Not sure any of this applies in your world on the off chance it does email me at phil@salesforcemaven.com