Fostering more-effective sales and marketing efforts with customer data collection, tracking, and updates. Whether you’re B2C, B2B, or B2E, you likely have (or want) prospects that you will convert to leads and from leads to customers. How you identify prospects, engage and nurture leads, and convert to customers is probably unique to your company and the products or services you sell; the software that you use to facilitate this process is called a CRM or customer relationship manager. There are myriad CRM applications available, both standard apps and SaaS models but that in and of itself is not a determination of the scope of functionality. Some CRMs are a small step up from list-management applications or a series of features within other applications, such as an email-automation application. Others are complex end-to-end relationship identification, engagement, and closing tools, such as Salesforce. In this article, I’ll discuss how a CRM can be an effective method for enabling and empowering both your sales and your marketing teams, while keeping the ­C-suite informed and involved.

1. The CRM Cycle
Fostering more-effective sales and marketing
efforts with customer data collection,
tracking, and updates.

2. CONTENTS
PAGE 2
CONTENTS.......................................................2
YOU SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE IF YOU:........3
TAGS.......................................................................3
INTRODUCTION ..............................................4
ACQUIRING A PROSPECT LIST ............................5
CLEANSING YOUR LIST..................................5
CHOOSING A CRM ...............................................6
UPDATING YOUR CRM WITH OFFLINE DATA.....6
USING YOUR CRM FOR MARKETING..................6
TRACKING YOUR EMAIL ENGAGEMENT ....7
SUMMARY ..............................................................7
ABOUT SPIDER TRAINERS ....................................7
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

3. PAGE 3
YOU SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE IF YOU:
 Are considering implementing a CRM system
 Need more information about CRM to emailautomation integration
 Have questions about acquiring lists to feed
 Wonder about offline activities, such as
phone conversations and sales meetings
 Would like to create more visibility between
marketing and sales efforts
your CRM system
TAGS
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Customer relationship management
CRM
Marketing
Automated marketing
Offline marketing
Sales management
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List acquisition
Lead scoring
Cazoomi
Radiology Data
Spider Trainers
Cyndie Shaffstall
List management
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

4. INTRODUCTION
PAGE 4
Whether you’re B2C, B2B, or B2E, you likely have (or
In 2009, Forrester Research estimated that 47% of all
want) prospects that you will convert to leads and from
CRM initiatives fail and the primary reasons for these
leads to customers. How you identify prospects,
failures are centered around a lack of focus, a lack of
engage and nurture leads, and convert to customers is
buy-in from stakeholders, and approaching the
probably unique to your company and the products or
software as a technology rather than as a solution to
services you sell; the software that you use to facilitate
managing customer relationships.
this process is called a CRM or customer relationship
manager.
In this article, I’ll discuss how a CRM can be an
effective method for enabling and empowering both
There are myriad CRM applications available, both
your sales and your marketing teams, while keeping
standard apps and SaaS models that in and of itself is
the C-suite informed and involved.
not a determination of the scope of functionality.
Some CRMs are a small step up from list management
applications or a series of features within other
applications, such as an email-automation application.
Others are complex end-to-end relationship
identification, engagement, and closing tools, such as
Salesforce.
According to Manoj Ranaweera, CEO, edocr.com,
“The customer-relationship management process can
be illustrated as: lists + enrichment + qualification +
emailing + scoring + sales + updating. Repeat.” I
agree wholeheartedly that the process we’ve outlined
here has nuances that we have not disclosed, but for
the purpose of an introduction, I’ll focus on the
35,000-foot view.
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

5. PAGE 5
ACQUIRING
A PROSPECT LIST
person for the type of contact they will receive from
our customers. This raises the bar on both
deliverability and engagement.”
I am often asked by clients to weigh in on the topic of
list rental and purchase, and my answer remains the
“I want to ensure that the prospects’ names that
same: it depends on the list. After sending millions of
we collect are high quality and the appropriate
emails for our clients over the years, we know that the
point person for the type of contact they will
vast majority of commercially available lists do far
receive from our customers.”
more harm than good, but we’ve also found that even
— David Ramsey, president, Radiology Data
some of the worst lists can be gently nurtured in order
to avoid a total loss.
In short, purchasing or renting a list can be a viable
Direct-mail lists, for instance, have shown to be
option for your business, but don’t forego your
powerful aids in the nurturing process and using this
homework. Make sure you know how the list was
vehicle as an introduction before beginning an email
generated, what expectations the people in the list
campaign can mean the difference between expense
have for receiving marketing messages, and, if you
and revenue.
intend to email, use direct mail to first establish the
List vendors range from the nefarious — lists of
relationship.
millions for a pittance — to the notorious, such as
CLEANSING YOUR LIST
those offered by Dunn & Bradstreet or other reputable
Whether you have an existing list or you have
companies, and how each vendor collects the data will
be reflected in the deliverability of your emails or
direct mails.
As an example, we spoke with David Ramsey,
president, Radiology Data, and learned that their lists
of hospitals and outpatient imaging centers have been
methodically built through the process of making
acquired a list, cleansing your list is an important
process and one that should be repeated regularly. A
CRM is a powerful tool and one that will help you to
send appropriate messages and correspondence,
shorten the sales cycle, manage contractual
documents, and more, but it will only be as accurate
as the data within.
individual phone calls to each of the facilities. During
An especially helpful best practice is to have your list
the call, an introduction is made defining the purpose
processed through the national change of address
of their call and information collected concerning the
service offered by the USPS and licensed vendors. An
appropriate contact person, type of equipment,
NCOA will update the physical addresses for each
buying practices, and more.
prospect ensuring that mail is sent only to valid
According to Ramsey, “I see both sides of the coin. I
own a business that needs prospects to whom we can
market, but I’m also in the business of helping other
addresses (saving postage costs) and that you don’t
head out the door for a meeting at an address that
changed two years ago.
companies with their prospects. With this unique
Other best practices include removing duplicates and
vantage point, ensuring that our data is collected in a
appending data to gain information you don’t have
manner that produces the best results for my
(such as gender, age, income, revenue, and so on).
customers is of the utmost importance. At the same
Maintenance processes can be a great drain on
time, I want to ensure that the prospects’ names that
resources, but with each cleansing session, the process
we collect are high quality and the appropriate point
will go more quickly, and you will find fewer errors.
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

6. PAGE 6
CHOOSING A CRM
If you’re just now in search of a CRM, the likelihood is
that you’ve been tracking your prospects, leads, and
customers in a spreadsheet or database application.
The good news is that in most cases, you will be able
to directly import this data without too much effort
and, depending upon the size of your company, users,
and other factors, you will have many to a few possible
UPDATING YOUR CRM WITH
OFFLINE DATA
As you develop your CRM system, you will use it to
import/add prospects, nurture leads, monitor their
position in the pipeline, track the value as an
opportunity, manage contracts, close sales, and more.
The interactions you have with leads offline in activities
such as phone calls, meetings, trade show visits, and
CRM solutions from which to choose.
other events that occur outside the application, will be
In order to choose the best application, you should
critical to an accurate understanding of each lead’s
give consideration to the following (but this is not an
status.
exhaustive list):
As we pointed out in the introduction, the inability to
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Available budget
Desktop application vs. cloud-based solution
Who in your company will use the system
Number of system users
Calendar and scheduling integration
Mobile app or access to certain features
through your mobile device
Number of prospects you have
Pipeline management
gain buy-in from stakeholders is very often at the root
of a failed implementation. In order to be successful,
the people who use the system need to be involved in
the selection, deployment, and training of which CRM
you will use. Only then will you gain a commitment
and concerted effort from them to add prospects and
keep lead and customer records up to date.
Contract management
USING YOUR CRM FOR
MARKETING
Extended reporting
Your marketing department is a wealth of information
Opportunity management
Customization
on the sales readiness of your leads. With today’s
Technical support
analytics software, marketers have unprecedented
Multiple language
visibility into the behavior and preferences of
Import and export functions
recipients. When your sales team is armed with
Data sync with marketing lists
information about messages read, white papers
Lead scoring
downloaded, videos watched, podcasts heard, and
Email sending
other engagement points, the lead’s interest level in
Custom HTML templates
your products or services can be inferred.
Dial phone numbers
Social-media integration
For a feature comparison, information, and reviews on
some of the contenders, visit SoftwareAdvice.com
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

7. PAGE 7
“When you use your CRM, Excel, or other tools
separately from your automated-email marketing,
you’ve probably found yourself searching through
old email conversations trying to determine
engagement or have received an angry reply from
a prospect you emailed who had already optedout. CRMs and email-automation applications are
designed to work in tandem. As the account
owner, it’s your job to ensure they do.”
— Clint Wilson, CEO, Cazoomi
TRACKING YOUR EMAIL ENGAGEMENT
SUMMARY
Your B2C, B2B, or B2E organization will benefit from a
CRM deployment as it collect prospects, tracks lead
activity, and reports when leads convert to customers.
With dozens and perhaps hundreds of CRM
applications available, choosing the appropriate
feature set and gaining stakeholder buy-in will ensure
a successful implementation.
ABOUT SPIDER TRAINERS
Spider Trainers is a company of experts in email
development, web development, search-engine
Integrating your CRM with your email-automation
optimization, analytics, graphic design, ad creation,
system will enable marketing and sales to work more
multimedia creation, social-media postings, writing,
closely together for the benefit of the organization
and editing — and CRM-to-email integration.
through the sharing of data. In instances where you
have chosen disparate systems, software connectors
created by Cazoomi can bridge that gap. These
connectors will enable you to pass sales lists, in
whole or in part, to the email application and data
collected about engagement with the campaign back
to the CRM.
Lead scoring is information with both the CRM and
email-automation system that indicates the level of
sales readiness, usually with increasing numeric values,
but not always. Capitalizing on advanced integration
between your CRM and email-automation application,
engagement with campaigns can increment lead
As marketing-automation architects, we analyze your
needs and create campaigns for you that ensure your
return on your email-automation software investment
— even when you’re feeling the pinch of full workloads
and too-few resources.
At the Spider Trainers’ resource center, we have a library
of publications designed to help you with your
marketing efforts. While we may be guilty of giving
too much information, we know that the empowered
and informed client is the successful client. We hope
this article and our other resources do that for you.
Please call us at 651 702 3793 or email
cmeyer@spidertrainers.com to learn more.
scores in the same way that sales and offline
engagement that is being tracked by the sales team.
The syncing of this data to and from ensures that
marketing messages are on target and that messaging
improves sales readiness.
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS