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23 Oct 09

Social CRM Strategies for Sales

"VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”

VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”

Much of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. (And no, I’m not going to dive into the even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to sales). That’s up to each organization to decide – but unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there’s going to be trouble.

Clearly, the sales team is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like lead nurturing communities with lead scoring can help identify the buying interest before the sales team contacts the lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from marketing to sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold."

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lead leadgeneration sales socialcrm communities RFP businessprocess

Providing a social business process that facilitates the questioning and sharing of answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM for customer service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the expertise of your best subject matter experts – just as in customer service.
Imagine a living social “RFP answering” community. What if you took every question that came with an RFP and put it into your online community as a question (along with the answer) and the ability for others to ask more deeply about the question, or even to answer and discuss?
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- Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment.
- Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for the work products of professional services engagements and training

22 Sep 09

The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” you should think about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept to help visualize this process—we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:

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socialcrm customers customerservice sales marketing leadgeneration awareness

Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented opportunity to hear what’s being said—both within your own customer community and throughout the broader Web through social monitoring tools
Getting the word out is always high on the marketing agenda—Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing this. Word-of-mouth begins with your customers. It is important to make sure your marketing is delivering the right words to the right mouths;
3 more annotations...
- Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your community. Invite them to join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to those audiences. A proper social platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized experience that differs for customers, prospects, influencers and even competitors and naysayers—now you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides
- Once you’ve got leads visiting your community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until they’re ready to be sold to.
- Aside from awareness, sales benefits from the three “R”s that communities can readily offer: references, referrals and repeat business.