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How to Create a CRM Strategy (Step-by-Step Guide)

Customer relationship management is the process and tools through which your company grows and maintains a long-term relationship with its clients and customers. Since it is a process and there are several tools on the market, it’s important to craft an intentional CRM strategy, taking into account your unique business needs. Moreover, creating a CRM strategy should be a cross-functional endeavor that involves IT in the implementation process.

How to Choose CRM Software

B2B vs B2C

CRM in B2B vs. B2C are both complex in their own ways. In a B2B setting, you’re juggling multiple stakeholders, and it takes time and savvy to know whom to contact. In fact, the purchasing group at any given company contains an average of 6-10 people, according to Gartner. Given that there are often multiple people to please and convince, the length of time for tracking, negotiating, and finalizing contracts in B2B is also longer than CRM processes in the B2C environment.

The purchasing group at any given company contains an average of 6-10 people.

At the same time, B2C has its own level of complexity. For starters, B2C sales are often repetitive and cyclical, so analytics that provide detailed insights into consumer purchasing patterns will be a key feature to seek in CRM software. There are far more customers in this selling environment, making lead management essential in your CRM software of choice.

Whether you do business in a B2B or B2C setting, you’ll want to focus on CRM software that can handle the level of intricacy unique to your selling environment.

Read more: How to Create a CRM Strategy (Step-by-Step Guide)

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4 November 2021
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B2B Content Marketing
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How to choose the right CRM software for your organization

When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed B2B and B2C commerce online, customer relationship management software became an indispensable tool.

CRM products were once complex, monolithic systems and have evolved to accommodate changing work habits and IT strategies. CRM technology trends illustrate the importance of CRM strategies and careful evaluation of the software. However, the divided market between software and cloud services complicates how organizations choose the right CRM software. Sprawling feature sets and vertical bundles tailored to specific industries also increase these challenges.

CRM buyers should follow these steps as they shop for CRM software or cloud services.

1. Identify needs and priorities

Organizations can break down product evaluation into three major categories, each with multiple elements: technology and features, vision and roadmap, and deployment and purchasing models. Some criteria may conflict, so organizations should weigh it all to account for requirements and constraints.

Evaluations must start with identifying needs, including the following:

overall business processes and how customer outreach fits within them;

customer buying and communication preferences, with input from marketing teams;

sales teams’ processes, pipelines and needs;

the importance of sales force and marketing automation to achieve business goals and how organizations document and standardize processes for programmatic execution;

how customer service fits into the organization, requirements of customer service representatives and how customer service and support integrate with other business processes;

Read more: How to choose the right CRM software for your organization

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3 October 2021
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B2B Content Marketing
B2B Marketing
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Why people are essential to B2B marketing success

If you are sci-fi film buff, Charlton Heston’s desperate plea, “Soylent Green is people!” from the classic movie (it’s dark, overwrought and partially in fun) is something today’s marketers should note. Your return on investment is dependent on people because people are essential to the modern B2B marketing strategy that actually drives real ROI.

I’m launching this thread because of a combination of client observations, conversations I’ve been having with rising stars, developments in AI and recent announcements from certain tech companies regarding their own learnings about marketing’s impact on earnings and business health. It’s become clear to me that personnel challenges remain a basic, stubborn impediment still keeping many companies from making substantive, scalable marketing progress. There are two core elements at issue:

Read more: Why people are essential to B2B marketing success

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15 April 2019
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B2B Content Marketing
B2B Marketing
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Do Social Stories Have a Place in B2B Marketing?

Just as they have been with most things digital, B2C marketers are ahead of their B2B counterparts in adopting the latest social marketing trends.  While our B2C friends have been leveraging social media stories since they originated on Snapchat several years ago, it’s taking the B2B world a little longer to figure out where they fit in the digital marketing mix.

Why should B2B Marketers Care?

Social stories are the newest way social platforms are trying to engage their users- and they’re working.  Research shows that social media stories are growing at a faster pace than newsfeeds and offer a new way for marketers to advertise.  As businesses try to personalize their brands, marketing via social channels is more important than ever. The new story formats allow the brand message to be told in a logical, linear pattern, rather than having it split across newsfeeds.

Read more: Do Social Stories Have a Place in B2B Marketing?

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8 April 2019
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B2B Content Marketing
B2B Marketing
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THE REAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN B2C AND B2B MARKETING

In 2017, is there still such a big difference between B2C and B2B marketing? We asked experts of both sides of the fence to weigh in on their approaches to communicating with customers, promoting products and moving prospects through the sales cycle.

Driving Factors

B2B and B2C marketers are driven by different factors. “B2C and B2B marketing have similar goals but we’re communicating to two very distinct audiences,” says Tabara N’Diaye, sales and marketing manager, Cocktails in The City. “B2C marketing is more emotional and focuses on the benefits of the product whereas B2B marketing is more logical and focuses on the knowledge and return on investment.”

Marketing Investments

The length of the B2B sales cycle is also challenging, as multiple touchpoints can make it tricky to determine the impact of different campaign components.

Ryan Gould, vice president of strategy and marketing services at Elevation Marketing, feels companies should view marketing as a capital expense and not as an operating expense. “When done right, marketing has a direct and lasting impact on an organization. Unfortunately, we often see companies take marketing too lightly.”

B2B marketing should focus not only on lead gen but building connections with prospects. “It is critical to look at the infrastructure, programs and activities that are directly responsible for developing these business assets as an investment,” adds Gould.

Setting Goals

Sales goals are more obvious in B2C than in B2B, and it is more challenging for B2B marketers to set KPIs. “Many great marketers and professionals fall into paralysis by analysis by focusing on lower level priorities and metrics,” notes Gould. “Top-level alignment of metrics to goals is critical in keeping all eyes on the prize and establishing how success will be measured globally.’

“The lines between B2C and B2B are definitely blurred nowadays,” feels N’Diaye. “Quantitive and qualitative data are invaluable when targeting both audiences.”

But do marketers really know why an audience buys? “As a B2C buying decision is more emotional towards the product, understanding lifestyle and market segmentation to really target your message is key,” adds N’Diaye. “We spend quite a lot of time trying to understand our audience and create a profile so all our content is bespoke and something they are effectively going to engage with.”

Read more: THE REAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN B2C AND B2B MARKETING

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9 March 2017
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B2B Content Marketing
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