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Marketing & Sales
Feb 22, 2019

The ABCs of CRMs

Sponsored Content provided by Bill Hunter - President & Creative Director, Wilmington Design Company



You’ve worked hard. You built out complex marketing campaigns. You’ve hired outside help to consult on best practices. You’ve invested money into advertising. Now, the leads are rolling in.
 
So, you’ve got all these leads… now what?
 
This is where the rubber meets the road. If you don’t have a strategy in place to convert these leads into real customers, then you could see your efforts go to waste.
 
Here’s how to get started.
 

A) Track them With CRM

Customer Relationship Management is an essential tool for managing your leads. Having something in place to keep track of all your opportunities will keep you from letting potential sales fall through the cracks. A CRM also helps you track each point of contact with your leads, giving you the ability to see when the last touch point was completed and what communication they received.
 
This sounds simple but makes a big difference when trying to remember what happened last with each potential customer, especially since it’s known that it takes five to seven touch points on average before closing a sale.
 
Not to mention, a CRM will give you tools to help prioritize your leads. That way you can spend your time following up on the leads that have the highest profit potential or are more likely to close.
 
The good news is that CRM’s are a hot topic, so there are a ton of tools out there to choose from. You could do something easy and basic like Hubspot’s free CRM tool or Pipedrive. Or you can go the other direction and invest big time into an enterprise-level system like Salesforce. Some CRM’s are even vertical-specific, making it even easier to integrate into your workflow.
 

B) Nurture Them Through A Sales Funnel

You’ll have to make touch points to do this: phone calls, emails, social connections, in-person meetings. Knowing the best cadence for this isn’t always clear. If you haven’t documented your customer’s persona and their purchasing journey, it’s an eye-opening exercise and highly recommended.
 
By putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and thoroughly looking at their purchasing process, you can get a full grasp of the obstacles and emotions they experience throughout the buying cycle. This information puts you in a perfect place to build and provide the right content for your customers and deliver it at exactly the right moment.
 
Being strategic with your content, communication and cadence is key. Knowing your customer’s purchase journey will help you develop the right content plan. At each step in their journey, you can be there with a touch point that helps nurture them down the funnel.
 
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C) Automate The Process

Now that you have a tool in place and understand the best strategy to deliver content, automate it. Use technology to automate and drive these customers down your sales funnel. Investing in the automation piece is how you free up your time from manual follow-ups to focus on other tasks that can’t be automated.
 
It also streamlines your nurturing and makes your sales growth scalable and sustainable. With the plethora of complex online marketing tools out there, you might need help from a digital marketing agency to nail this down and execute.
 

Bonus – Remarket

As the saying goes; it’s easier to keep an existing customer than to get a new customer. This philosophy can be applied to people interacting with your brand. Once they engage with you, it’s easier to turn them into a real customer.
 
You can use tools like social advertising or email marketing to remarket to those who have already engaged with you. These are quick wins that can get your brand back in front of those potential customers. Make sure you keep your brand top-of-mind with those who have interacted with your brand. You’ll see your efforts pay off when you re-engage with these leads multiple times.
 
Want to learn more about CRMs and how they can help you grow your business and become more efficient? Let’s chat today!

At WDC, we believe honest business and innovative design go hand-in-hand. Our talented team of designers, marketers, and developers are as diverse as their work. We offer a range of services from creative web design and development to digital marketing strategies and branding solutions tailored specifically to your business. Contact Bill at [email protected] or visit www.wilmingtondesignco.com.

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