Your Customer Relationship Management Questions Answered

To capture leads is one thing, but what you do with them is a whole different ball game.  Have you ever had the experience of inquiring about a product or service and never receive a follow-up?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the marketing nerve center of your marketing powerhouse.  A CRM system will help you keep track of customer details and automate and manage follow-up.  It’s a much more efficient way of managing customer records than just using a spreadsheet or some ad-hoc filing system.

This is where you’ll separate yourself from the pack when you take on a powerful framework.  The framework you adopt will show you how your follow-up can be automated to fire off an email to a lead or customer or alert your sales force to call and follow up.

Automated systems allow you to sort, sift and screen prospects and customers so that your time would be leveraged more effectively.

Such automation will allow you to a have a list of high probability prospects, and your job will be to market to them until they buy.  But your marketing shouldn’t be about pestering people until they cave in.

Your prospects will see you as a welcome guest as you consistently send your high probability prospects a continuous stream of value until they’re ready to buy.  This could be in the form of articles, case studies or even something as simple as a monthly newsletter that’s related to what they would be interested in.

This is how you will build trust and goodwill that positions you as an expert and educator rather than just a salesperson going for the hard sell.

There is a vast array of technological tools that will automate this continuous follow-up mechanism, that will make the cost effective and scalable to build a huge pipeline of interested and motivated prospects.  Some of these prospects will convert into customers right away, while others will do so in weeks, months or even years later.

The point is that by the time they’re ready to buy, you will already have built a solid relationship with them based on value and trust.  This is what will make you the logical choice when it comes time for them to decide to buy.

Building a marketing powerhouse this way is the most ethical and painless way of selling, because it’s based completely on trust and the exchange of value.  When you focus your efforts using this technique, you wouldn’t be blindly shooting at your target.  Instead you will end up focusing all your firepower on a clear and visible target.

With time, your marketing powerhouse will be made up of “assets”.  Here are a few assets you can deploy in your marketing powerhouse:

• Lead capture Websites

• E-Newsletters

• Blogs

• Free reports

• Email sequences

• Social media

• Online videos and DVDs

• Podcasts and Audio CDs

• Email auto-responders

You can build even bigger assets and more sophisticated assets, but you can build up to these for the time being.  Each one of these has a place and purpose.  Run your ads to plug cold leads and prospects into this system and convert them to customers and raving fans.

It does take time and money to build such a marketing powerhouse, but just like building anything that’s worth your time and effort – the bulk of your time and cost will go into the initial build.  After that it will be just maintenance.

Advances in technology will cause much of your marketing powerhouse to be automated, which will give you a whole lot of leverage.  Once you find a combination that works, you’ll be able to deploy it over and over until you reliably get the same positive results.

As you build out your marketing powerhouse, your results will continually improve.  Doing so is what will put you ahead of your competition that’ll be just wigging it with random acts of marketing.