Website optimisation | 18/07/2016

Banish your CRM blues

Posted by Lawrence Greenlee

According to a recent survey, 30% of marketers say having disparate data sources is one of the main reasons they can’t produce useful insights from customer data.

Because CRM is growing at such a rapid rate, American technology research firm Gartner has predicted that it will increase to a worldwide market worth £27.54 billion by 2017.

The problem is that despite 67% of businesses saying they rely on customer relationship management (CRM) data to segment and target customers, many are still not getting insights they need from their data in order to refine marketing messages and close the capture and conversion gap.

So, the question is, how do you make the most out of your CRM data? We’ve listed 5 common CRM challenges and what can be done to overcome them.

Duplicate leads

Picture this: it’s a busy day at the office and your manager has requested information on a lead immediately. Off you go to search for their name in your CRM to gather the data, only to find that there are five different versions of the same lead. You have no clear indication on whereabouts they are in the sales funnel, which marketing they are interacting with, or even what data they have provided.

Your CRM provider may give you advice on how these can be removed. Unfortunately, us busy marketers don’t have the time, or necessarily the budget, to do this. And you shouldn’t have to; duplicates don’t have to be an inevitable part of your software.

No relationship with automation

The CMO Council has found that only 14% of marketers say customer centricity is ranked high within their organisation and only 11% percent say that their customers would say customer centricity is ranked high within their organisation.

Considering the fact that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated (McKinsey), these figures ought to be higher. Incredible customer experience is the key factor that will differentiate you from your competitors.

Arm yourself with the ability to create landing pages and forms that successfully uncover secrets behind your leads’ key motivations and challenges; linking these to specific customer journeys is paramount to the success of any nurture campaign.

A CRM that doesn’t easily allow marketers to add individual leads to certain paths or have automation in place when data is submitted on your landing pages is definitely doing its job wrong. Ineffective CRMs can be extremely detrimental to providing the all-important relevant and personalised experience that customers so value.

It doesn’t protect you from fake data

Unclean data is one of the worst things for any CRM. Usually, duplicate leads are the culprit for this particular challenge. However, sometimes CRMs contain fake email addresses posing as actual leads and these can be even more damaging to database statistics, as well as marketing performance.

Choosing a CRM that automatically vets email addresses at the moment they are captured can nip this problem in the bud. This way your CRM will save you and your team a lot of time and hassle by negating the need to manually scrap false data from your system.

A robust qualifying process

This just in: 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. The right CRM will have the ability to disqualify leads at the very first instance (when they encounter the form on your website). There are several ways you can do this. First, by setting rules based on company standards on who qualifies. Second, by using conditional and second part forms on your landing page. These are sure-fire ways to save time and effort for your sales team.

Easy access to the User Journey

Are you able to define each of your leads separately? If the answer is no, your CRM data isn’t working for you. You should be able to gain insight on the various touch points each of your leads are experiencing. In turn, this can lead to more relevant, refined and personalised nurture processes which ultimately speeds up conversion.

It’s not all about the customer experience though. Marketers can better understand which marketing messages work well with which leads and so can create effective, targeted campaigns to specific demographics. That’s all because they have the right insights to do so.