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Posts Tagged: CRM

Less is More…Funneling the Right Sales Leads for Higher Conversions

Poll your sales team: Would they rather receive three well-qualified leads from marketing next month, or 15 cold ones? Well-qualified leads will win every time.

Even with sales cycles lengthening and becoming more complex, a 2011 SiriusDecisions survey of B2B sales and marketing leaders found that top-performing companies are using business intelligence technology to approach the sales pipeline with an emphasis on identifying higher-quality leads.

The concept may seem counter-intuitive, but less, better-qualified leads are actually easier for sales to work with:

Sales representatives have busy calendars. Filling them up with calls or meetings with non-qualified leads is a waste of time and resources.
Cold calls or reps that come off as too aggressive too early in the buying cycle may turn off potential customers that are not ready to make a purchase decision, ruining chances of future sales.
When marketing is able to hand a lead over to sales with a complete history already established, it leads to a shorter process for the rep, and shorter sales cycle overall.
Sales can tailor messaging to leads that have qualified themselves, making each interaction more effective.

“Too many raw, unqualified leads can create a clogged marketing and sales process and an unhealthy sales funnel.” —Why Your Sales Force Needs Fewer Leads, PointClear, LLC

Today’s marketing and sales business intelligence technologies—including web analytics, call tracking, and CRM systems—enable marketers and sales reps to work together to maintain a tighter pipeline-to-quota ratio and grow sales.

Complete Analytics Qualifies Marketing Leads

Spending on online advertising specifically aimed to generate leads has grown by $12 billion in the last four years. Once you have a lead’s attention, tracking activity and scoring leads is made simple through comprehensive analytics that measure online and offline activity.

Web Analytics

Consumer buying habits indicate that overall, 43 percent of consumers go online to research before buying. This number increases for technology purchases, as well as other complex purchases.

Track online activity to target your most qualified leads. If marketing can remove the qualification process from sales’ plate by placing leads into a nurturing program, assessing actions, and profiling the most qualified prospects, it can confidentially deliver a narrow list of well-qualified leads (and their lead history) to sales.

Call Tracking

Web analytics are great, but all is lost when a lead picks up the phone. When a lead calls, he or she is taking a proactive step in the decision-making process, and you should have the technologies in place to track and report on these prospects.

Integrating call tracking with marketing activities through one-to-one and Javascript integration, you can monitor offline lead activity, including how leads found you and what prompted them to call. Analyze these reports to score and qualify leads that reach out to you by phone.

CRM Systems

What tools are best used to house lead history, and combine efforts of marketing and sales? A sound customer relationship management (CRM) system is a necessity to make the process between marketing and sales flow effectively.

Track lead timelines, history, actions, touchpoints, demographic and firmographic information, who’s responsible for the lead (sales vs. marketing), and more with CRM software. You can also use a CRM to evaluate and prioritze all leads in your database.

Good Lead, Bad Lead.

Another challenge for marketers is defining a qualified lead. Once you have compiled your lead history, what should you look for, and what information should you provide to sales?

What determines a qualified lead will change for specific business cases, but here’s a list to get started. Consider these parameters when building lead forms so you have the information needed to evaluate:

Budget
Decision-making timeline
How the lead found you
Lead history, interactions and touch points

Have you found success with a “less-is-more” approach to sales leads? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Call Tracking / CRM / Integration — No Comments
15
Feb 11

How to Integrate Call Tracking with Salesforce CRM

Whether you’re a Salesforce power-user or a novice, you’ve come to rely on the power and reliability of the platform to run your business.

Aside from scheduling meetings, follow-up phone calls and keeping track of customers and prospects, perhaps one of the most important data points Salesforce illuminates is how leads are created and which marketing sources deliver them.

For most Salesforce users, leads are created through the usual channels:

A sales representative manually creates or updates the lead;
Marketing automation software feeds leads into the system;
Prospects download web forms on your website and your backend system injects the information into Salesforce.

But what happens if a new or existing prospect calls in to your business?

Can you rely on the person answering the phone to accurately record how, where and when the caller found your business?

Integrating call tracking data into Salesforce solves these dilemmas and provides a treasure-trove of data points to better understand how prospects navigate through the sales funnel.

Call tracking as a middleware component also allows you to understand more of your prospect’s DNA. Imagine being able to see leads by phone call within your Salesforce lead reports. When you integrate phone call data you’ll immediately see phone calls as well as the corresponding keywords and marketing sources which generated them in a number of Salesforce reports.

Phone call data can be injected into a number of Salesforce reporting dashboards and is fully customizable to your particular needs whether your the CEO looking for an overview of lead sources or a sales representative trying to understand why a prospect has been calling customer support.

Here’s the simple upload form within the Mongoose dashboard:

Once you’ve connected your Mongoose phone call data with Salesforce you’ll be able to start analyzing how, when and why phone calls are coming into your business. Here’s an example:

By drilling down further into a lead generated by a phone call within Salesforce — as the following screen shot depicts — users can access a recording of the call, see which pay-per-click keyword generated the call, get the geolocation of the caller as well as caller ID and IP address.

By arming yourself with phone call data within Salesforce you’ll close more deals and learn more about how prospects are responding and interacting with your company.

Do you track phone data within Salesforce? Please share your experience within the comments.

Analytics / Call Tracking / Examples / Integration — No Comments
15
Dec 10

Tracking Phone Calls from Click to Close

“Hello. How can I help you today? This call may be monitored for service quality.”

That’s the basic script if your business relies on phone calls. Of course, it’s imperative to employ friendly and knowledgeable humans to answer the phone. But perhaps more important is to understand – at a deep level – which online search engines, social media campaigns and direct advertisements are driving phone calls to your business. After understanding the marketing sources, you then need to understand how much revenue each phone call generated and then link that back to the marketing source so you can optimize your next round of spending.

An enterprise-level call tracking solution is specifically designed to take the mystery out of your web visitors’ search path from first click to phone call to completed sale.

Here is how we connect the click to the close:

Marketing: Log website activity through Mongoose Metrics proprietary web analytics
Action: When the prospect calls, connect the call information to the existing web analytics data
Conversion: Synchronize information between Mongoose Metrics and the customer CRM
Intelligence: Analyze reports from the Mongoose or CRM level to optimize which marketing sources are generating the highest value closes.

By integrating a robust set of call tracking data with your marketing automation software, bid management provider, analytics vendor and CRM system, it is possible to see the entire conversion picture from click to close. View a list of our integration partners including Google Adwords and Google Analytics.

The following screenshots detail the journey of Mike Browne, a recent Mongoose Metrics customer who called after viewing a PPC ad on Google and downloading a white paper. Here’s the path he took:

Step 1:

Mike Browne appears on the radar as a prospect in our marketing automation software indicating that he has been browsing the website and interacting with our content. This means he is interested but possibly not a qualified sales candidate yet.

Step 2:

The Mongoose Metrics system logs a phone call from Mike Browne. We link this phone call back to the web analytics data we have gathered about Mike from his website interaction. The data logged includes time, date, recording, geolocation, keyword source, keyword type and a variety of other data points. See a detailed list of data points.

Step 3

The Mongoose Metrics system injects this data into our CRM and assigns the lead to sales representative Drew Johnson. Drew then takes that lead and moves it through our sales process from qualified to opportunity and finally to closed sale. Once the sale is closed, the Mongoose Metrics system again synchronizes to the CRM allowing the Mongoose Metrics system to report the actual revenue generated from that lead and ultimately tying that revenue back to the source of the inquiry. Learn more about CRM integrations.

Step 4

View an aggregate of call data in the Mongoose Metrics dashboard to understand which advertising sources are driving phone calls. This completes the feedback loop so that you can make accurate determinations of which marketing sources are driving the key sales for your business.

Conclusion – Call tracking provides marketers with a powerfully simple way to understand and validate marketing campaigns. It’s a fact: Forty-six percent of local online searchers contacted a business by telephone following their Web research (TMP Directional Marketing and comScore, summer 2009).

With so many consumers letting their fingers do the walking, online marketers must learn how to measure and analyze calls resulting from online searches. And, as nearly all consumers (97 percent) now use online media to shop locally (BIA/Kelsey and ConStat Survey, February 2010), tracking phone calls resulting from online searches is more imperative than at any time in history.

Call Tracking / CRM — No Comments
7
Dec 10

Watch it Live: 20,000 CRM Fans Rockin’ w/ Stevie Wonder & Pres. Bill Clinton at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2010

Customer relationship management giant, Salesforce, is playing host to 20,000 CRM fans at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference through Dec. 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Watch the amazing live stream happening now at www.salesforce.com/live

At this moment, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is demonstrating Jigsaw and Chatter. And yes, former President Bill Clinton and Grammy winner, Stevie Wonder, also are on the bill.

Benioff says at the end of the day, “It’s about managing your deals and closing business.”

But we ask you, Mr. Benioff, “How do Salesforce users understand their customers click paths when a phone call enters the mix?”

Of course, Mongoose Metrics has the answer. Our robust call tracking data integrates with Salesforce.

The benefit of integrating call tracking is the ability to track multiple calls from the same website visitor and associate those calls to a specific ad or more importantly, distilling the average number of visits it takes (based on the marketing campaign) before the person makes the calls. This extended data set not only helps the sales team, but the marketing team as well. Marketing can learn which ads generate calls versus ads that drive visitors straight to online conversions.

To learn more about how call tracking data adds a layer of intelligence to your CRM, download the whitepaper “Call Tracking for CRM Integrations.”

Features, Tips, & Announcements — No Comments
14
Apr 10

Furry Mongoose with Headset “Gets” Call Tracking for SalesForce CRM

Thanks to prolific blogger Joe “Giuseppe” Zuccaro, aka The Marketing Consigliere (www.marketing-consigliere.com) for educating his readers about the power of call tracking. His entertaining take — complete with an adorable picture of a mongoose wearing headphones — simply explains how and why marketers are using call tracking with CRM vendors such as SalesForce CRM. Click here for the story, “Tracking Phone Conversion Like a Mongoose.”

Features, Tips, & Announcements — No Comments
9
Apr 10

Mongoose Metrics Partners with Leading CRM Vendor SalesForce CRM to Integrate Call Tracking Data

Today we introduced another functionality to help marketers increase sales, reduce costs and improve customer loyalty.

Our call tracking data now integrates with SalesForce CRM to help users understand the entire marketing funnel from first click to phone call.

With the addition of call tracking data, SalesForce CRM users can view a number of rich data points such as:

Which marketing sources drive phone calls.
Which keywords are driving phone calls.
Last Web page visited before calling.
Caller’s entire click history before placing the call.
Caller geo-location.
Custom data relevant to your needs.

“Call tracking for CRM software is a natural. It’s really all about providing access to relevant information about customer activity through the entire sales cycle — from marketing source to final sale,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose.

For example, Mongoose’s phone call data stream automatically creates and updates leads within SalesForce CRM and conversely, changes in SalesForce CRM are immediately show in Mongoose Metrics’ data.

Features, Tips, & Announcements / Integration — No Comments
17
Sep 09

Phone Call Tracking To Sugar CRM Lead Integration

For CRM users looking for phone call conversion tracking, Mongoose Metrics enables SugarCRM users to instruct tracking phone calls to automatically generate a new lead. As a part of the phone call generated lead, all call detail metrics can be saved to the lead record in SugarCRM. For AccuTrack Session campaigns, in addition to call details, online session metrics such as keyword and visitor IP can be saved to the SugarCRM lead. This solution enables SugarCRM users to further expand their tracking capabilities by recording all inbound phone calls from a marketing campaign.

Here’s the key phone call data which can be inserted into SugarCRM:

Caller ID
Tracking number dialed
Date/time
Call duration
For successful 411 look-ups, incoming caller’s:
- billing name
- billing address

For AccuTrack Session campaigns, the following visitor session data is available:

Organic or PPC keyword
Visitor IP
PPC ad ID
PPC campaign ID
URL view at the time of the call
Custom tracking variables

Integration Strategy

The phone to SugarCRM integration works by building off of Sugar’s built in Web Lead Form Tool. Using this tool, a Mongoose Metrics phone call can be recorded into SugarCRM as a lead via the simple method below:

Create a modified web to lead web form hosted on your server.
After the phone call completes, Mongoose Metrics posts back to your web form the phone call data.
JS code on your form’s webpage will read the phone call data contained in the post-back URL and auto-complete the form fields.
The form will auto-submit into your SugarCRM application as a web to lead form submission.

Sample Code and Integration Instructions

Below is an example code block of a web form that successfully creates a SugarCRM lead from a phone call. This is the form placed on a web page visited by the Mongoose Metrics phone server after each completed phone call. Full code and detailed instructions can be found here Phone Call To SugarCRM Integration Resource Document (Opens as a PDF).

Example Code:

Mongoose MetricsConversion & Call Tracking Blog