How a
Marketer Can Find Value in Using a
Database System
A database system, if
used properly, can help people at all
levels and functions of a business.
This article will focus on the role of
the marketing team or individual
marketer and how such software can ease
their day-to-day processes.
No matter what industry
you are in – financial, food and
beverage, IT, etc. – a marketer has a
dual role; one of a supporter and one of
a doer. The supporter role helps the
management, sales, and operations of a
company. As doers, marketing gets
involved in many types of activities to
help generate business and maintain
customer satisfaction across the
company.
In some companies, it is
the marketer’s job to follow-up with
each salesperson, trying to find out
what new sales activities they have had
this week. How many hours do you spend
correlating what you’ve discovered from
your salespeople into forecast and sales
reports for your management team? What
if I told you that you could stop
hunting down your sales team and never
have to develop a sales report from
scratch again?
The overall goal in
marketing a company is getting in front
of people and tracking the statistics of
such work. Because the marketing
department is typically not responsible
for bringing in revenues, and they have
many expenses, there is a great need to
prove that their efforts are successful
and useful to the company.
Well, here’s how you can
do this. Use a database system! There,
four simple words can help you out
immensely and save you hours a week
completing unnecessary tasks. Do you
want to know how you can achieve this?
As
expressed in the October 2007 issue of CRM
Monthly, there are many features to a
database system. The following is
a description of the features relevant
to a sales manager and
how one can benefit from them.
Account and Contact
Management
Let’s start with the
basics – account and contact
management. If you have more than a
handful of customers, you probably
cannot remember all of the pertinent
details of their sales orders, let alone
which sales rep is responsible for each
one. In addition, it would become very
cumbersome for you to keep track of
every detail about a company or
executive involved in your company.
That’s where a database system comes
into play. If the salespeople and other
key departments of a company are
entering the key information into a
database system, you as a marketer can
extract the information as needed to
complete your marketing tasks. An
example of this would be when you need
to pull a mailing list of all companies
in a given industry in a geographic
area. If the data is entered
thoroughly, this can be done quite
easily.
Value: more
visibility = saved time; easier
tracking of marketing data
Marketing Campaign
Management
Today’s marketing
activities are much more complex than
they were several years ago, especially
with the amount of online marketing
available to companies. Because of
this, it has become more cumbersome to
track all of the necessary statistics
and components of all of the marketing
campaigns being run at once.
However, with the
ever-growing features of database
systems, this is no longer such a
difficult feat. The Campaign management
component of these systems can make a
marketers life much easier, and can also
prove the value and worth of the
successful campaigns. It can also show
which campaigns are not worth trying
again.
Marketing campaigns can
be used in conjunction with workflow
management (see below), to make sure all
necessary steps for the campaign are
followed at the right time, to the right
set of people, in the right method. It
also works in conjunction with
opportunity management (see below),
showing what new opportunities were
created because of the marketing
campaign; and which of those
opportunities was successfully won.
This allows metrics to be tracked
(automatically by the system) across
multiple areas of the system, providing
a complete picture of the campaign. And
seeing each campaign side-by-side with
one another, you can rate the success of
each campaign to determine what to
continue using in the future and what to
eliminate.
Value: Simple analysis of marketing
campaigns; ability to prove value of
marketing efforts
Opportunity Management
Have you ever asked your
salespeople what they have in their
pipeline? Have you ever had to analyze
what internal sales teams were
successful? Or which competitors you
are consistently losing new business
to? What if you were able to do this
with the click of 2 or 3 buttons on your
computer? Would that save you time and
energy, allowing you to do more
important things with your day, like run
a new marketing campaign; or prepare for
the upcoming trade show? I thought so!
Database systems are very
helpful with what we in the industry
call Opportunity Management – or the
tracking of all bids/proposals/potential
sales. This information is tracked on
many levels, including account, type of
project/job, amount of potential sale,
salesperson responsible, sales team
involved; competition you’re up against;
date brought in, potential close date,
and the stage at which this potential
sale is currently at. The idea behind a
database system is to enter this
information in as sales activities
happen. If your sales rep just sent a
bid out to a new prospect, and they
enter the key information into the
database system, you have it to refer
back to. This also allows you to know
that there is a new prospect in the mix.
Value: easy pipeline
access; easy reporting for internal
tracking/measures; saved time
Workflow Management
Do you find yourself
frustrated because the follow-up process
across the company is inconsistent? If
so, then workflow management will become
one of your favorite database features!
Workflow management is comparable to a
macro – define your steps once and run
the macro as often as you would like.
The results will be the same every time
because it is following the same
sequence of steps each time. Just like
a macro, workflow management, once
built, can ensure your team completes
their follow-up on time and in the
proper sequence of steps. Workflow
management will help keep the sales
process consistent; make your marketing
campaigns flow smoothly, and even ensure
the appropriate communications go out at
the appropriate time to clients,
prospects, and the like.
Value: maintains consistency in
processes; eliminates duplicate
efforts; saves time
Dashboards
Do you ever want all of
the key metrics and activities you need
access to available in an instant for
you? This is now possible through a
database’s dashboard feature. A
dashboard is a summary view into the
database’s myriad of data – with charts,
graphs, etc. Most can be customized to
show you what you need on a regular
basis.
For example, you can view
all open opportunities by sales team.
You can see a summary of all active
marketing campaigns and how they are
faring against one another. And you can
view data like client dollars brought in
by industry.
Value: succinct
information at your fingertips;
quick way to access key business
metrics
Summary
There are more features
of a database system that can be
beneficial to a marketer in his/her
day-to-day activities than what is
mentioned above, but there are too many
to list in detail here. What you should
take away from this article is that
using a database system every day (or
even every week) can be extremely
beneficial for you. It can save you
hours of time a week by being more
efficient, having information at your
fingertips, and helping your team manage
your customers, prospects and marketing
activities.
If you could save
yourself 5 hours a week by using a
database system, wouldn’t it be worth
learning how to use the system and
putting in the information on a regular
basis? Yes, there is always that
beginning learning curve that actually
adds some time to your week because
you’re still fumbling around trying to
remember the steps to take in accessing
the information. But once that curve is
gone, you will be thanking yourself for
using the system because you will have
more time to do the things you want to
do, and you will most likely increase
your productivity because you will have
an extra 5 hours a week to be managing
the marketing activities!
If you would like to
learn more about how a database system
can help you as a marketer, contact
DB Pros at
info@dbprosconsulting.com or call
(973) 607-1627.
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