Database Marketing Tips

Do you need a new Sales Force Automation System?

2012-01-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

If you support a sales staff you know how difficult it is to train and maintain a great team. I have worked with sales teams and understand the challenges. Like the daily pressures to meet your financial targets and keeping your staff happy as well as management. It’s a fun balancing act. A good Sales Force System (SFS) is an important tool for any company that faces these pressures. I have built these types of systems as well as worked with some that are currently on the market. I felt it would be valuable to document my experiences and outline the basic requirements of a great Sales Force System. This article is intended to outline features I have seen or built myself in the hopes that it may give you ideas on how you can improve your systems. The basic premise is to provide valuable, clean and detailed data to your sales staff to help them build a relationship with your customers to drive more sales and profits.

System Integration

A true Sales Force System (SFS) needs to integrate with several different systems within your organization. Such as marketing, customer service, order entry, the corporate phone system and even mobile computing applications. Below is a review of each system and how it should interact with your Sales Force System.

Marketing - The marketing team should be the main source of new leads for the SFS. Its marketing’s job is to find qualified leads, screen them and generate interest in your product or service. Then they apply campaign codes to the leads before they are sent to the SFS. I refer to campaign codes later as it is critical to your lead allocation and sales floor management.

Customer Service - You should be able to view all contacts the lead has with your organization. This includes all inbound and outbound contacts no matter what channel. You will want to know if they placed a customer service call and a help ticket was created. You should be able to view the tickets along with all comments entered about the customer. All contacts will be stored with the date and time the contact took place. Now the salesman will know in advance of a sales call if there were any issues that might help or hinder the sale. The more information they have about a lead will help them build a good relationship with that prospect. Good relationships lead to more sales.

Order Entry - Since the order will originate with the salesperson they should be able to enter the order online and get it validated and approved as quickly as possible. This means they will have discount approvals if required and all appropriate taxes and charges applied. The order entry will interface directly with the accounting systems and commissioning system. Order entry should also allow you to create a quote order. This is so the salesman can customize the order for the customer and save it in case they aren’t ready to buy. This will be important information to reference in a future call. Fulfillment of the order should happen quickly once the order has been approved.

Phone System - The interface to the phone system should have three possible ways to handle out bound calls.

On answer – The first technique I call “on answer”. Under these rules the system behaves like a classic auto dialer. Once someone answers the phone the call and the data page is automatically fed to the sales person. Delayed Dial - The second technique I call “delayed dial”. The data page is sent to the sales person and the phone will automatically be dialed in a few seconds after the data page has been sent to the user.

User Controlled Dial - The last technique is a “user controlled dial”. In this case the lead is fed to the user and they are given a one button interface to dial the lead.

I am not a fan of the on answer auto dialer technique. There is nothing less professional than receiving a sales call and hearing the phone click over to a sales person standing by that proceeds to butcher my name because they don’t have a chance to look at the lead for a few seconds before placing the call. In my opinion a lead should be fed to the salesperson and they have a few seconds to review the lead before the call is placed. Then they can figure out how to pronounce the name, look at contact history, past comments and orders so you have an opportunity to understand a little bit about this person.

Mobile Computing - This isn’t the technology of the future any longer. Today’s sales people will expect and demand that the SFS integrates and supports a mobile platform.

Lead Management or Lead Routing

Lead management is the main function of a sales force system. This is the process through which a lead travels in order to end up assigned to a salesman’s book of business. The sales manager needs to be able to control the flow of leads to the sales floor depending on the company’s priorities. For instance a company may wish to push a certain campaign like renewals or win back or perhaps promote a new product offering. In this case the manager may want to slow the flow of some leads while increasing the flow on others. Even to the point of completely stopping the flow of some altogether. Leads are controlled at two main levels first at the campaign level and second at the salesman level.

Campaign level control

The campaign level controls determines how new leads are distributed to the sales floor. This is usually done by changing the priority on leads that have not yet been assigned to a salesman. The campaign code has a priority set on it to determine the flow of one campaign over another. Date also plays a role in this allocation. You may want to hold all new leads entering the system until old leads have been processed. The campaign codes may differ for your organization but I included a list of possible campaign codes below.

• Initial Sale – The initial sale that turns the lead into a customer.

• Up Sell – Selling an existing customer a higher priced product.

• Renewal – Renewing a subscription or right to use your products.

• Cancellation – The process of saving a sale when the customer calls to cancel.

• Win Back – Getting a customer to repurchase your product after they have previously cancelled or their subscription has expired.

Salesman level control

There are several controls that can determine if a salesman should receive leads.

• Book of Business Limits – This limits the amount of unworked leads a salesman can retain in their book of business. If the salesman wants to receive new leads they need to work the old leads to free up room for new ones.

• Salesman Skills – New lead assignment should be driven by the ability of a salesman to work a specific type of lead. Skills are assigned to each salesman individually and determined by the sales manager based on training or ability. Salesman’s skills equate to campaign codes. For example a customer calls in to cancel an order. A lead is created with the campaign code of cancellation. It’s then routed to the first salesman available with the skill that allows them to work this lead.

• Daily distribution limit – This limits the leads by campaign that can be given to a salesman in a given day. This keeps a poor salesman from burning through a lot of valuable leads. This limit is set for each sales person so the better salesmen can get more leads and your trainees get fewer.

Lead Cycling

Once a lead ends up in a book of business, lead cycling is the process in which the lead is recycled. It will continue to recycle until it receives a status that indicates the lead is closed. The system will track the type of lead and the current status of each lead being worked.

Lead status

This tracks the current status of the lead being worked.

• No answer – The lead stays open and is recycled.
• Busy – The lead stays open and is recycled.
• Response: Do not call – Someone answered the phone and asked to be on the do not call list. The lead is closed.
• Response: Not interested – Someone answered and said they were not interested. The lead is closed.
• Response: Interested with no sale - Lead showed interest but did not buy.
• Response: With scheduled follow up – An agreed upon future date is set up for a follow up call.
• Response: Sale – It doesn’t get better than this so the lead is closed.

The lead status changes based on actions taken by the sales person. Depending on the status assigned the lead will recycle or not automatically. These rules will depend on your own business rules but for example. A busy signal could recycle in 15 minutes. A no answer should be reattempted at a different time of day. For example the day can be broken up into pieces like morning, lunch time, afternoon and evening. A no answer should be contacted in each of the different time slots. This will improve the likelihood that you will catch the lead at home and they will answer the phone.

Data Quality

I can’t stress enough the importance of clean data. I have seen dramatic increases in sale close rates just because we took the time and thoroughly cleansed the data before it was sent to the sales floor.

What exactly do I mean by clean data. No Duplicates, valid phone number, valid addresses, accurate names. Invalid information wastes your salesman’s time and reduces their effectiveness. You don’t want people wasting their time pursuing invalid information or worse yet angering your leads because you contact them multiple times with the same offer.

You can consider a company that is able to append phone numbers to your data. This has proven very effective for me in the past. But you need to keep the appended phone number separate from any other phone numbers in your system. Then be sure to scrub the appended numbers against the national do not call list.

Salesman’s interface

When a salesman sits down in front of the application it should be the one stop shop for all the information they require about the lead. This is their contact management system. This means they can view any interaction your organization has had with the lead or record any comments they have. This will give them the information needed to form a good relationship with the individual. They can communicate via phone or email and all of the contacts will be tracked and stored.

The Book of Business or Book of Leads will be the place they spend most of their time. Through this application they can ask for a new lead, contact a lead already in the book of business and schedule follow ups with their leads. The follow ups can be scheduled and viewed though a calendaring type of interface. The salesman will receive reminder messages before each follow up so none will be missed.

Managements Interface

I call the sales managers interface the Lead Management System (LMS). This gives the manager the ability to control what is happening on the sales floor day by day or hour by hour if needed. Some of the features are summarized below.

Set the priority of the new leads – This is the application that allows the manager to control the rules that regulates the flow of new leads entering the system. It also maintains the recycling rule for old leads.
Purge old leads – The manager uses this interface to remove any old leads from the system which are no longer viable.
Order approval – Occasionally an order is created that requires a manager’s approval. This could be required for many reasons like a discount that is beyond the normal range. The request for the approval will come to the manager in real-time. They then use a password to approve the order. The record of the approval is stored with the order for future reference.
Review orders – All order created by a team member should be viewable by the manager.
Clean out book of businesses - The sales manager should be able to remove leads from a salesmen’s book of business. This is needed in case someone quits, is on vacation or sick. The leads can be moved to another salesman or put back into the group of unallocated leads and will be redistributed automatically to other salesmen.

Management Reporting

The following is a list of reports will help the manager identify problem areas and top performers on the sales floor. I included a few report descriptions that should exist in your system with a short description of the benefits of each report.

• Close rates by salesman – This is one of the most important reports you can get. You want to be sure you don’t have some salesman that is burning through your leads inefficiently.

• Goal reports – Goals should exist at the sales person, department or lead campaign levels to track progress toward the goal.

• Salesman report by Lead Status – This should point out unusual behavior that needs to be reviewed like a salesman recording an inordinate number of do not contacts or busy signals.

• Salesman performance by Campaign – This will identify performance based on a campaign. You may have people that under or over perform in some campaign verses others. This can help you take action in training your staff or to improve lead routing.

• Stagnant leads – Used to make sure salesmen are working their book of business. If leads aren’t being worked by a salesman you may want to reassign them to another sales person.

• Commission reports – Track your top performers.

Calling Rules

I am not a lawyer nor do I want to be so I will just say that you need to comply with the calling rules generated by the FTC. Rules like scrubbing the phone numbers against the national do not call list or complying with the calling hour’s restrictions can be referenced on their web site. My advice is to be conservative in your policies so you don’t run into any issues with the FTC.

I hope there was some information here that is valuable to you. Feel free to send me an email with any questions or suggestions.

Regards

Scott Matson
CRMWhiz.com

Quick Demonstration of the Customer Relationship System

2012-01-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

This is a very quick demonstration of the Customer Relationship System. It is intended to give you an idea of some of the functionality.

Quick Start Demo of the Customer Relationship System

If you would like more information please feel free to connect to me on linked in.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmatson

Regards

Scott
CRMWhiz.com

Introduction to CRM

2012-01-03T08:33:00.000-08:00

The following is a video blog introduction to CRM. Your feed back is appreciated.

Introduction to CRM

If you would like more information please feel free to connect to me on linked in.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmatson

Regards

Scott

CRMWhiz.com

Marketing Holdouts (What, When and How)

2010-03-12T15:59:00.000-08:00

I have had several discussions about holdouts and the proper way to track response rates. I have found that this subject confuses many people so as a result I am writing this article to clarify the process. Let’s start with a basic definition. A holdout is a segment of customers or prospects that will be removed (or held out) of all marketing efforts. This enables a marketing team to get a clear idea of how much “lift” the marketing effort has produced over that of the normal unsolicited buying behavior. Sounds simple enough right? Well not really, you will be surprised by the complexity of such a simple process.

Note: Holdouts may not be required in all marketing campaigns. If you can confidently track the source of your responder’s holdouts wouldn’t be needed because you would know exactly where the responder originated. For this to be true you need to have a dedicated response channel like a phone number, an internet link or redeemable item like a bar coded ticket or coupon. Then there would be no argument as to the source because you would be sure how the lead was generated.

Rules for Holdouts

1. I’ve outlined 4 basic rules when selecting holdouts. The first rule is that the holdouts must be statistically significant. Let me give you a simple example of this. Imagine that you flip a coin 3 times and it comes up heads 3 times. Does that mean if you flip it 1000 times you will get 1000 heads? Obviously not, this is a simple example of an incorrect sample size that is not statistically significant. What if you flip it 100 times and you get 55% heads and 45% tails. The variance on this would be plus or minus 5%. This is called the confidence interval. That level of variance may or may not be acceptable to you. The trick is to know what level of error you are willing to accept. Generally the more records you select the tighter your confidence interval becomes. The goal being to pull enough records for your holdout and be statistically viable but not use up too many records from your marketing universe. I will get in much more detail on this subject in an article I am writing about marketing statistics.

2. The next rule is that the control group needs to reflect the same selection criteria as your marketing campaign. In other words you need to compare apples to apples. If your marketing campaign is to males over 50 that earn 100k a year your holdout needs to be made up of the same group. It wouldn’t make much sense to match the response rate against a holdout of teenage girls.

3. Your sample size must be selected randomly from your marketing universe. I use a random number generator to identify the holdouts. The random generator is preferred because it is the most accurate way to select the records. This is done to make sure you can’t skew the results by over selecting some group either by segment or demographic attribute.

4. Holdouts need to be isolated for a period of time from all marketing efforts. This will vary depending on your circumstance. If your campaigns have a long tail. In other words they have a long duration response curve. You will want a longer holdout period. A shorter tail would get a short period. If you run many campaigns concurrently you will need a more complex holdout process with leads regularly going into a holdout and leaving it. Holdouts can’t be held out forever. Simply because people and businesses move. You can expect a 1 to 1.5 percent churn every month. As a result you need to regularly recycle your holdouts.

Computing the True Response Rate from the Holdout.

Now we finally get to the meat of the matter. We use the holdouts to prove the effectiveness of the marketing. Your response rate is the variance between the holdout rate and the responder’s rate. For example if your holdout group responds at .80% and your marketed group responds at 1.10%. To calculate the lift, use the following formula. Mail response rate – Holdout response rate / Holdout response rate = Percent of Lift. In my example it would look like this .0110 - .0080 / .0080 = 37.5% lift

Regards

Scott
CRMWhiz.com

Why should you build a marketing database?

2010-03-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

I am occasionally asked what are the benefits of a marketing database. It’s important because good marketing data can unleash tremendous profits. So I came up with the following short summary outlining some of the benefits.

- A marketing database will consolidate your sales and marketing data into one single source. It’s likely that your marketing data including both customers and prospects is spread all over your organization. This is a typical problem. Sometimes it’s hard to locate all the data. Even if you know where it all is, it can be impossible to effectively or accurately pull this data together to run a campaign. In a situation like this campaign reporting is nearly non-existent.

- A major function of a marketing database is data maintenance and cleansing. Chances are your data is messy, full of duplicates, movers, deceased, or “do not contact” records. You don’t want to embarrass your company by sending out messy unprofessional looking data. You also don’t want to waste money attempting to contact invalid or duplicate data. I have actually seen a sales team double the close rate on sales just by receiving clean deduplicated data.

- Another feature is scoring and segmenting your prospects and customers. This process will identify your most responsive and/or most profitable leads. They will be ranked best to worst performing. Then you can concentrate your sales and marketing efforts on the best scoring leads filtering down to the lower levels if you have the time and money.

- A database will give you a complete history of customer communications. Imagine how valuable this history would be to your sales and marketing team. You will have a record of who, when and how often you have talked to each customer or prospect. This will help to insure you will not harass your leads at the same time you can insure that you talk to everyone in your list.

- You will have campaign management support with the database. The database will support all your campaign types including acquisition, retention, up sell and cross sell. As the campaign is executed you will automatically store the contact information in the database with all the relevant information surrounding the campaign (like: channel, message, offer, etc…). All this data will all be at your finger tips and ready for campaign reporting and follow up.

- You can perform triggered or recurring campaigns. You will be able to automatically trigger campaigns when certain conditions have been met. If you have renewal or subscription campaigns. You can automatically notify the customer when it is time to renew. It will also be possible to inform your sales staff of an imminent renewal or a resent expiration so they can follow up with the customer. Depending on your product or service there may be several opportunities for triggered events.

- Campaign reporting is a must-have in today’s world. The database will have a complete history of incoming and outgoing contacts including sales. This along with the campaign management data is the foundation required to do campaign effectiveness reporting. You will be able to calculate the ROI and cost per acquisition on all your marketing campaigns.

- With accurate campaign reporting you will be able to perform one of the basic tenets of marketing and that is testing. This allows the marketers to refine their strategies. They can adjust the channel, message and/or offers until they get the optimal response. This will maximize your ROI and save the company money.

- A marketing database will keep track of all your “do not contact” requests. An important feature to stay in compliance with marketing regulations.

I have personally seen companies be turned around just by treating their sales and marketing data as a precious resource.

Feel free to contact me with any questions

Regards

Scott
CRMWhiz.com

How effective is your marketing?

2010-02-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

Do you know if your marketing is effective? Can you answer questions like what is my return on investment, what is my cost per acquisition, what is my most effective offer? I have documented some ideas so you can begin to track your marketing efforts and improve their effectiveness.

A MARKETING DATABASE is critical to effectively track marketing efforts. It is the single source of consolidated marketing data. The database will have all customer and prospect data cleaned and householded. Along with all the contact and response history of each lead including sales history.

TRACKING RESPONDERS to campaigns can be tricky especially if you are running many overlapping campaigns in several different channels. You need to determine which campaign drove the response so you can credit the correct campaign. Tracking responders differs depending on the channel. Direct mail could have a bar coded remittance. If there is no remittance you will need to match the responder back to the mail file by name and address. Newspapers or magazines could be tracked by different phone numbers. TV can be tracked by date and time of the response in relationship to the commercial.

Lead SEGMENTS should be attached to the individuals being contacted in your campaign. The segment tracks the predictive attributes of each individual. The predictive attributes of an individual varies depending on the business but some attributes I have found to be predictive are age, income, sex, home ownership, presence of children, investable assets, proximity, etc…once you identify the predictive attributes of your client base you will put together segments and associate them with your leads.

In CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT all marketing data is associated with a unique campaign identifier. The campaign identifier has several attributes like channel, offer, message, cost per piece, list, creative code, etc… With this data you will be able to report on any campaign or cross reference any of the campaign attributes across several campaigns. The database will track outbound campaign data as well as the incoming response data. The unique campaign code will be associated with the outbound data. This will allow you to credit the correct campaign when the prospect responds. Responses will include everything from buyers to inquirers. Each kind of response is valuable to analyze.

The campaign management system is the foundation for CAMPAIGN REPORTING. We will now be able to report on every outgoing campaign and the response rate for each. We will be able to cross reference any of the campaign attributes over time and show improvements or fatigue in any of the attributes.

DATA WAREHOUSING helps make reporting faster and simpler. I recommend OLAP technology to create data warehouses. Sometimes this technology is referred to as a “cube” or “multi dimensional database”. It allows us to rapidly produce many reports very quickly from one OLAP database.

With the marketing database in place a marketing analyst can review the reports and turn them into actionable MARKETING STRATEGIES. With all this information at your demand you can test and constantly improve your marketing generating bigger sales and better ROI.

This is a very brief overview about tracking marketing effectiveness. If you have questions or need help tracking your marketing efforts please feel free to contact me.

Regards

Scott Matson
CRMWhiz.com

Need to find Customers?

2010-01-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

If you are currently trying to grow your customer base I am sure you are thinking about how and where you are going to find new prospects. In today’s economy we need to be as smart as possible how we spend our marketing dollars. We need to target our marketing so it reaches prospects that are likely to buy our products or services. To assist in this endeavor I outlined several techniques that I have used to grow a clients customer base.

• First understand your existing customers. This is critical to do before you waste money chasing prospects that are unlikely to buy your product. Who are your customers? What is their age, income, are they homeowners or renters, do they have investable assets, do they have children? Depending on your product the demographic attributes you analyze will vary. You need to understand what attributes are predictive in your data in order to find good prospects or to up sell existing customers more efficiently.

• Now that you know what your customers look like you need to group them into like segments. Once this is done look at your sales data and identify the profitability of each segment. Then you can determine what segments you should aggressively pursue and which you should stop wasting money on.

• Once you have segmented your customers go out and look for prospects that fit within your most profitable or most responsive segments. I will outline where to look for prospects in upcoming articles.

• Next score your customers and prospect data. The score can be based on profitability or response rate depending on what you want to accomplish. For example we might choose to score customers by profitability. You will segment the customer into deciles from one to ten. One being the group we want to spend the most marketing dollars on and ten being the least. If you have the time and money building a model is preferable. This essentially takes many attributes of your data and generates a more accurate composite score.

• Make sure your data is clean as possible. You don’t want to waste your time attempting to communicate with invalid, duplicate or out of date customer information. Best case is you will waste your money and time. Worst case is you irritate your customers and we don’t want to do that.

• Remember the old adage location, location, location. Depending on your business or product the proximity to your customer can be the most important factor in acquisition or retention. Map out the locations of your high profit prospects. This is relatively simple with today’s technology. It may point out some surprising facts you haven’t considered.

• Keep a history of your marketing communications. This is the only way to determine the success or failure of your campaigns. With this history you will be able to test your message, offer, channels and segments to see if they are performing as you expect? You will also be able to track your marketing ROI. You can see an article about the advantages of a marketing database on my blog.

The quality of your data and knowledge of it can unlock fantastic profits and efficiencies. The preceding is just a short list of ideas to improve the profitability of your customer acquisition. I hope this got you to think of new ways you can improve your marketing.

Regards

Scott
CRMWhiz.com