How a CRM Turns Good Marketing Into Predictable Growth
More businesses these days spend big on marketing. A once-in-a-while extra, or a nice-to-have for companies with larger budgets, has now become an essential growth engine for even the smallest of startups. Whether through paid social, SEO, search ads, or even community building through organic social media, business owners lean heavily on these channels. And with good reason.
The buyer journey is becoming less straightforward, and depending on your audience, you know you have to be front and center when the time comes that they need the product or service that you are offering.
Here comes the “but”. If your business is doing an outstanding job advertising, with tons of organic presence, healthy ads budget, a welcoming online space, and its own loyal customer base, but you don’t have a great sales pipeline, your company is getting along in a fog.
That said, let’s get an overview of why this matters and what it looks like — and how to string it together on your end.
The Advantages of a Sound Lead Tracking System
The first page of your resume will summarize the advantages of having a well-oiled lead tracking system. A pipeline that is high-performing gives you understanding of your leads you need just as much as you need to catch the leads. Each new visitor to your ecosystem brings data with them that can take any of multiple forms like intent signals and behaviours with timing and also preferences.
And when this data is accumulated and processed correctly, it means your team can react fast and, perhaps most importantly, individualize their approach in a manner that drastically increases conversion rates. These days when you’re a marketer, marketing without personalisation only gets buried under the sea of mediocre ads.
Without this kind of structure, more the equivalent of leaving money on the table and wishing your prospects to go to the trouble of looking towards the plate in order to help you with your business. Bad idea!
What You Should Be Looking for in a CRM
A proper CRM should feel like less of another piece of software and more part of your team's lifeblood.
What would that look like, you may ask? Easy to navigate, easy to update, and easy to understand at a glance.
It should provide you insight into where every single lead is in the buying journey and help you make use of that information without friction or delay. If you have to continuously remind your team to log in or track things manually in spreadsheets “just in case,” then your CRM isn’t doing its job. Well done CRM can also automatically automate the areas of a sales process that waste your team time and attention.
Consider follow-up reminders, task assignments, email sequences, lead scoring and contact segmentation. These are all super repetitive tasks, and that’s sort of a golden rule with automation: If a task remains the same day in and day out, it can be automated. Which means, when those steps run in the background, auto-generating sales reps are far more likely to be focused on meaningful touchpoints and authentic conversations, rather than admin.
You can even go so far as to say that concluding this will boost employee morale because cutting those frills, the end result is your team can show up where it matters, which will increase the feeling of actually getting a good job done, not just donkey work.
How does CRM help you optimize your marketing?
When your CRM and marketing efforts complement one another, you have everything sharper, more strategic. A CRM offers your marketing team the most accurate information about which campaigns are generating the best leads.
Plus, you’ll see what messages are hitting the most with the most people and where prospects tend to drop off in the journey. Very useful insights that could easily have drifted off into the ether! Now instead of trying to guess what's going well, you know real and hard data that allows you to supercharge your marketing and know what content is resonating with your audience's reactions.
An increasing number of owners sometimes feel as if they don’t have a full feel for all the things happening in their business, and this can become worse if the company expands. A CRM isn’t just a kind of tool you use or another piece of software, costing hundreds or thousands of pounds a year. It’s the one thing meant to tie every piece of your business together.
It’s meant to be where you go to get a balanced view of your marketing, and how sales are performing and aren’t and everything else in between. So if growth is important to you, this is where the real momentum starts, and you will be hard-pressed to reconcile the time you got along without it!
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