By Chris Bucholtz
In one respected orator’s portentous address to an audience of his peers – well, actually, it was Triumph the Insult Comic Dog speaking to an audience at ComiCon – an interesting image was painted by the speaker using a film by Kevin Smith as its basis. “I watched ‘Jersey Girl’ on Showtime the other night,” said the caustic canine. “That movie sucked so hard the sides of my T.V. caved in!”
The economy is sucking to an even greater degree than that, I fear. Just the same, there’s clearly a thirst for knowledge about CRM and the contribution it can make to the future of businesses of all sizes. I’m involved in several webinars next week, as presenter and moderator, and among them is an event on Inside CRM called “5 Recession-Proof Tactics to Unlock Revenue Using Marketing Automation,” which will feature Craig Rosenberg of the Funnelholic fame.
Most companies have invested a lot of money in amassing information about who its customers are, but the sad truth is that few have fully harnessed the power of those ideas. Sales reps get leads from marketing and discard 80 percent of them, according to studies; leads that are not ready to buy immediately slip through the cracks and are never nurtured to maturity; and sales people spend time prospecting and cold-calling when they should be out selling.
The webinar will provide five marketing automation tactics to cost-effectively use CRM to generate the best, highest-quality leads for sales and tips for achieving higher conversion rates and close deal ratios using marketing automation. And here’s a bonus: if you really embrace these ideas, you will indeed be out in front of your competitors.
Jon Miller, Marketo’s chief marketing officer, pointed out that users really embracing marketing automation still number only in the low thousands. Growing that number requires marketing automation products to be easy to use, easy to integrate and built with the right features, but timing could also help.
“The current economy can actually help us,” Jon told me at a meeting at Dreamforce this week. “If companies look at marginal return analysis, where can they get the most efficiency for the least investment? Most processes – IT, HR, manufacturing and so on – have seen productivity improvement through automation over the years, and that makes it harder to squeeze more productivity out of them now. But the sales and marketing process is the last to be automated.”
It’s also the process that could benefit the most from automation, if only because it can help the two sides of the equation align themselves properly. If marketers can focus on generating and managing leads and sales people can focus on converting those leads, there’s a real revenue benefit to be had – even when the economy is as bad as “Jersey Girl.”