Rethinking the Purpose of your CRM: Ideas to Move Beyond Customer Management

We’ve got to change the way we think about a CRM’s role in your business. To be fair, they can be bloody complex, and you’re not alone in feeling like you’re using too many disjointed marketing and CRM tools and software on the daily. And what it does is it often confuses your team. It’s going to give you the impression that your marketing and your sales process isn’t working, because you can’t track your success. It’s going to make you think there’s got to be a better way, and luckily there is. And today I’m going to share three ways that are actually going to help you lead to better success with using a CRM-based marketing strategy in your business, but we’re going to be keeping the customer at the heart of the process.

How’s it going? My name is Jordan McFadyen, and welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast, where we challenge you to become the smartest marketer in the room. We talk about ways for you to move away from random acts of marketing and start helping you build your long-term marketing strategy.

And today we’re talking about CRMs. We’ve literally just finished off building a CRM for a client today, so I thought it was kind of timely to have a bit of a chat about, because this client came to us and their data was a complete mess. It was all over the place. Customer data was flowing all over the place. So they’re using spreadsheets, different spreadsheets; different team members had different spreadsheets. When people wanted to update their details, it would be done by email. None of that was captured, and it was just all over the place.

So being able to implement a CRM meant that they were able to really consolidate and to move all that data into one centralised place for their entire team to use. And that’s one example of how a CRM can be really beneficial for a business: obviously making sure that data has that central point. But with a CRM, we can actually take it even a step further. That’s an example of a traditional customer relationship management system, and it’s where it’s built to generally hold together all that data around your customer.

And while that is really important, because that is really going to help you be able to provide such a better service for your clients and your customers. Forrester Research, in fact, even found that companies who said that they were focused on their customers’ experience using a CRM actually grew 40% faster and increased customer lifetime value by more than 60% versus people that weren’t. So what it shows is that when we can rethink the way we use a CRM, and actually reuse a CRM to focus on experience-driven marketing, where we put the customer at the centre of everything we actually do in marketing, products and services, it can actually have a really good impact on your business.

If you think about it, we can use a CRM to market, to attract new clients and new customers, which is then going to feed into your sales. Sales is then going to engage and warm up that client, and actually feed them into service once they become a client. And then service, their job is actually to delight, and to make sure that client has a spectacular time with your business. And it’s going to feed back into your marketing as social proof and as testimonials and as reviews, to help grow that business over and over. But all of that’s only possible when the customer really is at the heart of that entire process.

So when we think about CRMs, they can be completely different. So like the example I just shared before: spreadsheets, Google spreadsheets, emails, data was everywhere. We’ve seen them all. Plus, obviously, there is some amazing CRM software which will do the entire thing for you as well. But in essence, a CRM, what it’s really used for is making sure that you can manage that customer information really well. It’s making sure that you can look at that lead management. So where are leads coming from? If it was a Facebook ad or a LinkedIn ad or a piece of content or something on your website, where did that client come through? What type of content resonated with them? What was some of their pain points they felt? And how can we get another piece of content in front of them that kind of solves that problem? So lead management is really important.

Thinking about your sales management: how you can take that lead and that pain point and turn it into a sale. Thinking about your marketing automation. And this one, automation is so far past just thinking around sending someone an email the minute they sign up for a form or your contact form or something like that. It’s thinking about how we can put those people onto a targeted list, where we can get some targeted adverts to that person, which helps to explain your product and service so much clearer, and how we can actually get some more emails in front of that person, or how we can actually get some content that’s actually going to be really valuable and right to that person at that right time.

We’ll get into that a bit sooner as well. And also CRM, traditionally used for customer service and support. And obviously it’s really helpful as well when we’re thinking about analytics and reporting and things like that at the end of the day as well.

So today what I want us to do is try and simplify it, because at the end of the day we need to rethink how we are using that CRM, because it can get really complex. And all those things I’ve just laid out there, there’s a lot of different moving parts to be thinking about. But with these three ideas, we can actually try and break it down into three separate areas, to really think about how our CRM is working, and how it’s actually helping to build our marketing and build our marketing strategy. So today we’re going to call it the CXRM, the Customer Experience Relationship Management tool.

We’re going to go past “John came to my website”, and instead we’re going to think about “John came to my website, and the actions he performed on that website show us that he is ready to buy”. And that’s like, he went to the website and he either filled in a lead form, or he viewed a video, or he did something that shows you really clearly that he’s ready to go.

So the first thing with these three paths to success is segment. Now, I say this so many times a day, to clients and also on this podcast as well. We’ve got to understand our buyer persona. We’ve got to understand who we’re actually talking to. We can’t be everything to everyone. So we need to make sure that we are very clear about who we are talking to, and making sure that the content and the way that we deliver our services is perfect for that particular buyer. We’ve got to ensure that prospects hear a message that’s suited direct to their needs.

So when your consumer is not generally feeling like your messaging is directly relating to their life at that moment, they’re obviously going to tune out. We see these stats all the time around how many messages we see, a thousand different pieces of marketing or advertising that we see day in, day out. And if that messaging doesn’t directly relate to something that we’re feeling and that we’re living at that moment, we just tune out at the end of the day.

So let’s take an example. Let’s say a small business owner, or someone who’s creating a new business. We’ll call him Bob. So Bob is starting up a new business. He’s currently now trying to register his business and register it at the IRD. He’s visiting banking websites. He’s looking for commercial leases, looking for commercial real estate online. He’s showing all the signs of someone who is starting a new business. So we need to ensure that the messaging that we’re getting through to Bob is actually suited to match his online behaviours and to suit his need.

So we need to ask ourselves, what type of messaging can we get in front of Bob to actually attract him to look at the product and service that we have to offer, which is ultimately going to help the challenges and the pains that he’s feeling now?

So the second stage that I want you to think about after segment is contextualise. So we’ve got that target market, and we’ve got that first piece of content that they’re seeing. But now we need to actually think about how we explain really clearly why your product and service is going to be helpful to Bob, or to your customer, your defined customer segment and your defined customer audience. And again, this goes back to having that clear buyer persona that your entire team, your marketing team and your sales team, know and understand and truly get.

Because that’s going to include the pain points, the pain points that they’re feeling at that moment, or what are the pain that they’re going to feel pretty soon, that it’s going to be coming pretty soon. Or can you show your customer a before and after of how their day, or how their business, or how their life is going to look before or after using your product or service? How is it actually going to help them further? And I think it’s really interesting for us to have a bit of a think about, and really focus on those pain points, and contextualise those pain points back to that segment that we’ve already discussed.

So let’s go back to Bob. Bob, the small business owner. He’s creating that new business. And to be fair, Bob’s mind is a bit of a mess. He’s trying to figure out everything. He’s got payroll in his mind. He’s trying to sort out the bank. Maybe he’s trying to get some more cash in. He’s trying to think about rent. He’s trying to buy stock. He’s looking at all these different things. So we need to think about how is our product and service going to help him in that exact moment to help clear his mind? Let’s say that you were accounting software or something like that. So you’re going to be able to take off the payroll, the bank, and all the accounting straight off his head with your solution. So you can get that messaging in front of him, knowing what he is going through at that particular moment.

And the third thing I want you to focus on is personalising it. Personalising is, as I kind of said at the start, it’s gone well past just adding a first name and an email. We need to take it so much further than that. We need to make clients and customers feel really valued and loved. We need to send them relevant, timely messaging. And we need to use that right language, that right tone and that right subject matter, again, that is talking directly to them, to make them feel as though, man, this company, they get me. They get exactly where I’m at right now.

So again, if we think about Bob, small business owner, he’s creating that business. His mind’s a bit of a mess. He’s got all those different things going on. How can we think about personalising this experience for him more? Let’s think about when he’s more likely to engage with an email from us. It potentially could be in the evening, where he’s sitting down re-looking at the day. Or maybe in the evening, when he’s got so much on throughout the day, he’s not got time to look at your emails. But in the evening, he’s sitting down and he’s clearing out his inbox, and bam, you’re right at the top. And he sees the service or product that you provide, and you think, actually, that could really actually help me.

Or maybe it’s first thing in the morning. Maybe he’s an early riser, and he gets up early, and he wants to be able to see, what type of messaging does he want to see at that time of the day? What subject matter is going to matter to him right at that moment? So think about the content you’re also getting in front of him. Think about the day that he’s had. Think about the problems that he’s facing coming up as well. So it really comes back to that buyer persona, and making sure that you’re really connected as to who that person is that you’re trying to talk to.

And even that example kind of works with the origin of Done By Nine. So my digital agency, a lot of that, when we first kicked off, we were focused on small business owners, people that were just kicking off their business. And in those early days, we were trying to find those business owners that had so much of their day sucked up with working in the business. And so the only times that they could really work on the business was, we’ve typically found, either late in the evening or early in the morning. So, Done By Nine.

So we’d typically try and get our emails out to people before that nine o’clock threshold. Because once the nine o’clock doors opened to the office, or the nine o’clock shop front doors opened, that’s when they had to work in the business again. So we tried to make sure that all of our content was delivered to them at specific times of the day.

So here’s a bit of a recap of those three success paths for you to use a true CXRM, that customer experience relationship management tool, in your business. That first one, segmentation. So again, who do you want to speak to in terms of your CRM? The second one is contextualisation: what are you going to say to that person? And that third one being personalisation: how are you actually going to say it to those people as well? Those are those three steps that I want you to think about. And applying any or all of those ideas into your CRM, it’s undoubtedly going to drive more revenue through your business. But it’s going to do it in a much more sustainable and cost-effective way.

Now, what we do at Done By Nine is we actually build marketing-led CRM strategies for businesses. We do this every month. It’s kind of like our bread and butter. So if you do have some questions about mapping out your user journey or building a solution with a CRM, please feel free to get in touch with myself or a member of the team. I’d be more than happy to chat you through how we work, and also give you some ideas of how a CRM, or marketing-led CRM, could work well in your business. You can get all the details on our website. Go to donebynine.com and you can find us on the contact page.

Or if you just need some new ideas around marketing, and building out your marketing strategy, and moving away from random acts of marketing, please head across to the website, donebynine.com. You can find all our previous podcasts and all our blogs and all our resources and articles on there as well. And thank you so much for joining us here on another episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast, and we look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thank you.