VetMedux™, powered by Instinct

Well-integrated customer relationship management software, or CRM for short, can help propel your business to new levels. Optimizing your CRM to connect the dots and reduce friction between sales and marketing is a major plus. In addition, optimizing your CRM helps align an organization with the achievement of common business objectives.

There are many benefits to be had from optimizing your CRM, so we’ve unpacked a few ideas to get you started. Here are 5 ways to capitalize on leads, sales, and data tracking using your CRM.

1. Tracking by Campaign

Use your CRM to track specific campaign performance such as webinar participants, ebook downloads, and information requests. This helps sales find marketing-generated leads more easily. It also supports audience segmentation into appropriate nurturing sequences and enables campaign ROI measurement.

Most marketers associate leads with a specific campaign using the following methods.

Forms and Landing Pages

The easiest way to streamline lead tracking is to create landing pages with unique forms. These forms can then be directed into their proper campaign within your CRM.

For example, an on-demand webinar would require participant submission forms to be directed into that webinar’s campaign in your CRM. This method takes the human error out of the lead-to-campaign association. Marketers often use their marketing automation systems to build forms and landing pages and pass information into their CRM.

CRM Campaigns and Uploads

If you’ve attended an event that generated leads, you may be required to upload them manually into your CRM. In this case, create a specific campaign for the event first and then associate the leads as campaign members.

Sales Representatives

Many campaigns are driven by your sales reps. When this is the case, create a specific campaign in your CRM and ask that they associate campaign members. If compliance is a concern, populate the campaign with their target audience to avoid missed data. Lastly, train the sales team to update campaign members in alignment with your campaign tracking goals.

Once you’ve generated your campaign leads, pass the sales-qualified leads to your sales team. Enroll marketing-qualified leads into nurturing sequences to prepare them for sales.

2. Nurturing Marketing-Qualified Leads

Marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, have shown interest in a top-of-funnel lead magnet, but aren’t ready for a sales conversation. Use your CRM to funnel these campaign participants into an appropriate marketing automation sequence.

Important note: Often these sequences happen outside of your CRM in an integrated marketing automation platform. Add the following steps to the automation sequence to ensure the valuable information you gather can pass into the CRM:

Update rating (eg, hot, warm) based on behaviors performed in your sequence.
Assign tasks to salespeople based on sales-qualified behaviors.
Pass information about email open and click behaviors to your CRM for sales.
Use forms in your sequence to fill in missing information from your CRM, such as job title.

3. Handing Off Sales-Qualified Leads

Once MQLs have completed the nurturing sequence, it’s time to transition them to sales via your CRM. A smooth hand-off is essential for campaign success.

Here are a few tips to streamline the process:

Tasks: Automate task assignments to be sent to the appropriate sales rep with pre-filled due dates and action items.
Email: Automate emails for sales representatives to reach out to hot leads. Regardless of other hand-off methods, email should be part of your notification system.
Dashboards: Create dashboards for each sales rep to visualize top priority leads. This keeps sales-qualified leads from falling through the cracks.
Lists/ Views/ Queues: Create a standard list that automatically populates with the most urgent leads for each sales representative. Demonstrate where to find these leads and how to report on their conversion into sales opportunities in the CRM.

4. Track Pipeline Opportunities

Sales should track all of their opportunities through your CRM pipeline tracking tool. Each CRM handles pipelines a little differently, but it’s a plus to have easy visibility of a few key things. These usually include the deals in the pipeline, close dates, sales process stage, and the probability of a sale. For ROI purposes, keep track of the campaign that brought them into the funnel.

Often, CRMs will default to the last campaign a prospect interacted with as their campaign for ROI attribution. Make sure the team understands lead-to-campaign association to get the most out of your pipeline tracking.