OPTIMIZING THE PROSPECT EXPERIENCE AND SALES PROCESS THROUGH CRM INTEGRATION

Overview
For many companies their online presence is the gateway to potential and current customers. Often behind the scenes a critical part of a business operation is a companies CRM (customer relationship Management) application. The CRM is the repository for leads, current customers, campaigns, products, reporting, and a myriad of other things relevant and specific to a particular business. Most CRM applications are highly customizable and allow companies to configure them to suit their business needs. With this flexibility often comes more complexity and resources are often required to configure and customize these applications. Frequently this entails bringing in specialized resources such as administrators and programmers.

A leading residence club had made the investment in Salesforce.com as its CRM but did not have dedicated resources available for their CRM. Partnering with DCG West and their CRM experience, web development, and fulfillment knowledge, this residence club was able to greatly reduce the amount of time it took to gets leads into the CRM and integrate those leads into their process and pipeline, automate manual tasks, configure their CRM to their business needs, and generate new leads.

Web to Lead and PURL’s
One of the challenges for residence club was the time it took for leads coming into their website to get into their CRM system. Their website captured potential clients on their website’s online submittal form. This data was then housed in a database and a resource had to manually enter all of the leads from the day into their CRM system. DCG West implemented a web to lead function that then allowed the leads to flow directly into Salesforce.com and set the corresponding referring source from the website.

In addition to the web to lead functionality, DCG West also worked to create extensive personalized URL’s for direct mail campaigns. Personalized URL’s are direct mail pieces that contain a unique URL personalized with the individual’s name. Requesting more information signified that the user was interested in receiving more information about the residence club and what it has to offer. When the URL is entered in a web browser, the user was directed a site that was created by DCG West that corresponded to the brand design of the residence club. Once the user entered their information, this lead data flowed directly into Salesforce.com under the particular direct mail campaign and also was captured by our PURL management software. Once this user data was captured, DCG West was then able to provide the residence club with precise response rate metrics and also fulfill the additional collateral by doing a daily extraction of new leads from the CRM system. Once the data was fulfilled, tracking information was immediately fed back into the CRM so the sales rep could see where the package was and follow up with the client, providing a full round trip from first touch to actual contact with interested leads primarily driven by automation.

Automating First Touch Responses and Tasks
First touch responses are ideal candidates for boilerplate responses and a perfect candidate for automation. DCG West set up the residence club’s CRM so when a lead from either the PURL or the client’s corporate website hit their system, an automated email that was personalized with the lead name and sales rep name would be auto generated and sent directly to the new lead. This freed the sales rep to follow up directly with other leads further in the pipeline while still ensuring that contact was being initiated on their behalf with the new lead. This automated email activity was then attached to a lead record in Salesforce.com so the lead could see that the email had been sent and also when and how many times the email had been opened. In addition to the automated email, a task was created for the sales rep (or lead owner) to follow up with the new lead in 10 days after the collateral had been shipped to the lead.

Custom CRM Configuration
One of the challenges with an extensive CRM system is learning how to utilize the application to get the best ROI and ensure you are getting the most functionality and precise reporting from the system. As leads progress through the pipeline at some point the lead will become a contact with an opportunity or multiple opportunities attached. Converting a lead to an opportunity provides better reporting and snapshots of what are now your customers. Building on DCG West’s experience with Salesforce.com, DCG West saw many areas of opportunity to utilize Salesforce.com effectively. By working closely with the client, DCG West set up their current sales funnel and mapped it to objects and fields in Salesforce.com. In addition, DCG West trained the sales and marketing team on how to convert leads to actual contacts and opportunities providing better separation of leads and prospects that had moved further through the pipeline and providing better reporting from Salesforce.com.

DCG West also has created proprietary collateral ordering functionality within Salesforce.com that allows sales reps to tailor custom pieces of collateral and letters to opportunities or leads directly from within the CRM. All the back end fulfillment orders flow directly to DCG West and their warehouse and the items are pick, packed, printed and shipped.

Prospect Maturation & Nurture Strategy
With such a high-end considered purchase, the selling cycle is often times many months. Through DCG West’s luxury travel experience, they understood the need to develop an automated marketing process that worked to maintain the highest level of engagement from the prospect that the client had invested in obtaining through lead generation efforts.

DCG West worked closely with the client’s sales and marketing executive team to determine the most important value proposition and objection resolution points for early stage leads. DCG West then took this information and created several unique testing scenarios with multi-channel marketing strategies that allowed them to see what type of communication approach (via duration in-between touches, overall frequency and channel type) worked most effectively to “bubble-up” prospects and get them engaged with their sales director.

More importantly, in order to streamline this process for the sales team so that they could focus on selling to later-stage active leads, DCG West leveraged the custom CRM programming and automated task programming that they developed and created a triggered campaign approach. This approach allowed the sales director to focus their time on active leads and allowed the non-responders early in the sales process to experience a multi-touch prospect maturation campaign that was fully automated and timed appropriately based on initial testing that DCG West performed.

Further, since many leads went through the automated prospect maturation process without engaging, DCG West developed a secondary nurture strategy that automatically sent out quarterly email or direct mail communications (based on lead create date) as a way to maintain brand awareness, club updates and promotional offerings. DCG West worked to integrate this process into the client’s CRM tool so that like the prospect maturation process, the execution was fully optimized and automated leaving the sales team with more time to work active prospects.

Summary
DCG West has worked with multiple companies on custom application and CRM integration and customizations. Commonly we see gaps between websites and CRM systems or CRM systems and fulfillment systems and operations that could greatly reduce the time it takes to get a lead into a system or get collateral in the hands of potential clients. Building bridges between these gaps is one of the things DCG West specializes in. Aside from building bridges, we also consider building strong relationships with clients and are responsive to their needs and can communicate on levels specific to their unique business needs.