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Posts tagged ‘CRM’

3
Oct

Aligning Marketing and Sales Systems: Building the Right Foundations

 

Too busy to build foundations, Too busy because of the wrong foundations...

Too busy to build foundations, Too busy because of the wrong foundations…

Many B2B companies haven’t integrated their marketing and sales systems.

You have tools for marketing planning, events, webinars, email, PR, marketing automation, websites, document management, CRM, ERP, … Your customer services department also has its own systems, also containing customer touchpoint data. And the finance department is also sitting on similar data.

The effect? Dispersed contact databases, standalone CRM implementations and Excel import-export nightmares. These situations are more the rule than the exception.

We all know we need to integrate these systems. But how do you move towards integrated systems, to the benefit of the business? Read more »

30
Apr

How to avoid your marketing automation failure?

Many marketing organizations are looking into marketing automation.

Why? Because year after year they need to do more, with less.

By automating tasks, and by adding a number of intelligent marketing techniques, they think that their marketing operations will be easier to manage, and in the end their lead generation will run better.

But one should not jump into this technology too quickly.

What is the promise of marketing automation?

The promise of marketing automation sounds great.

  • integrate your website with your e-mail engine
  • automate the registration, confirmation and post-processing of webinars
  • set-up lead nurturing campaigns
  • get to know your prospects better and better through progressive profiling
  • automation of e-mails (website, webinars, events, …)
  • decrease manual segmentation, manual lead input, manual lead management, etc…

It cannot go wrong, or can it?

When considering marketing automation you should not jump into this technology without being ready, because you can fail at it.

In a great blog post on BrightCarbon, Joby Blume talks about what he considers the lessons learned after “his” marketing automation failure.

Read more »