Leveraging SalesLogix CRM
by Dan Ogdon
You’ve been using SalesLogix for some time now and have invested the time to learn its nuances. Chances are you still feel like you have only scratched the surface or have a yearning to learn more. How do you get more from your existing customers and leads by leveraging the powerful features of SalesLogix? How do you make the most of these features to better manage an integrated, multi-touch marketing campaign? What makes a lead more valuable than another…document downloads, webinar signups, requests for more information?
So, where does SalesLogix provide value in itself the moment you have uploaded your contact database? Customer segmentation. Based on contact history, you may query referral source, industry, product interest, etc. The ability to filter to form customer segments on many levels is tremendously valuable in the search to further qualify your leads and pull them through the sales cycle in the most efficient manner.
So, your company is gathering customer data through a number of different inlets and has been strategic in keeping your brand in front of as many prospective leads as possible. What’s the next step? Where in the sales cycle can you draw the most value and learn who your A,B and C leads are?
Why is this important? Relevancy. As you continue customer outreach, the more relevant data you can provide each one of your segments, the more value you will be providing them. For example purposes, say you are a printing company. If one of your lead generation efforts includes directing leads to sign up for a webinar on the benefits of a new faster, cleaner printing process and another lead generation effort consists of website visitors signing up for a newsletter on ink performance, it would only make sense to have your marketing department develop printing information for the one segment and ink information for the other. This is not to say there is no cross-sell/up-sell opportunity, but that’s simply a further segmentation effort.
Take the filtered, targeted leads you have obtained and decide which segment should receive which information set. Have your marketing team design highly relevant communication pieces for each segment (ie – one for ink, one for printing). Now, what are the touch points that are the most appropriate for each segment?
To begin, in most cases, there is no faster or more efficient way to qualify a large amount of customers than email. Sending an email campaign through a trusted email marketing provider will ensure higher deliverability and in conjunction with relevant content, you will learn exactly which customers may be more interested than others based on their interaction with your campaign Let your customers further qualify themselves and follow up with a call or further information in a timely manner to increase retention.
So, what can you learn from an email campaign and why is this one of the most effective lead qualification tools in your marketing efforts? First, it is the easiest way to reach a large customer segment. By properly wording subject lines that will encourage opening, it is not uncommon to receive open rates far above the industry standard of 30%. Next, by providing highly relevant, targeted content in the email with a direct call to action or enough interesting content to garner a ‘read more’ interest, you may begin to gather the most interested contacts. Any action taken by the customer having to do with the email campaign, including opens, clicks, forwards etc. can be taken in and scored to rank contacts against one another.
A customer that opens your email three separate times, clicks on 4 links, one including a sign up for a demo and forwards the email twelve times is certainly more qualified than a customer that opens your email once and never clicks on a single link. Don’t you want to call the first customer before the second?
By using an email campaign service provider that is directly integrated into SalesLogix you will never have to leave your application to segment, choose the campaign to mail, deploy the campaign and receive all of the user interaction. You will never have to manage two lists or make separate notes in SalesLogix for each contact record. A fully integrated service will write, directly into the contact record history, that an email was sent, what email campaign it was, provide all of the individual contacts interaction data and ultimately provide a score based on this data that will enable you to determine if this contact should be called before another contact.
Moving on to the next step once your contacts have been further qualified using an email campaign means delivering on what was offered within the email. The hard qualification work has been accomplished by an integrated email solution and all that is left is providing a white paper, signing a lead up for a webinar, giving a live demo, or picking up the phone and calling your most interested contacts.
SalesLogix is certainly a powerful program that has the potential to unlock the real value each customer holds. Beginning with customer segmentation, you will be able to create highly relevant, specific campaigns that will appeal directly to those that are interested. Deployment of the campaign using an integrated email solution to reach the largest number of potential customers will eliminate the hassle of time consuming qualification and the export and import pain of non-integrated solutions. By providing direct call to action links within your email campaign user interaction begins a valuable scoring process that may be used rank leads based on interest. Follow up with the appropriate touch point and close business. By using the strengths that SalesLogix provides and pairing them with a multi touch outreach effort including email as a further qualification tool, you will begin to shorten the sales cycle and close more business in shorter amount of time.
Swiftpage is a hosted, CAN SPAM compliant email marketing service provider that is fully integrated into SalesLogix. By being fully integrated, you will never have to leave your existing, familiar application to send email campaigns. Simply segment and send. Swiftpage then compiles all of the user interaction data and writes it directly back into each specific contact records history. Based on this data Swiftpage enables you to create a call list. A highly qualified, ranked list of your most interested contacts delivered to you all within your existing application. Swiftpage understands the sales cycle and they want to help you shorten it.