Lead Generation and Conversion for CRM and Marketing Automation

The Task: Successfully integrate all of the activities in your B2B marketing program into your company’s CRM system.

Project Execution: Learn how to:

Benefits to You: Master the features of CRM to make your marketing program responsive and measurable, for sales lead generation and effective conversion of prospects to new customers.

Increasingly, CRM systems such as Salesforce .com, HubSpot, SAP, NetSuite, and others, play a critical role in company sales and marketing programs. And whenever they're implemented, CRM systems force greater accountability on the part of that company's marketing and product managers when developing and executing their company's marketing programs. While CRM systems help to make communication and interaction between your company's sales team and their prospects more efficient and productive, they also force marketing professionals to develop marketing programs that generate measurable response, in the form of more qualified sales leads assigned to the sales team using the CRM system at the "top of the sales funnel."

For many marketing and product managers, CRM adoption also forces a change from expensive "brand" oriented advertising to more targeted, effective marketing techniques, activities, and media that generate tangible and measurable sales response: Opt-ins from interested prospects who download content from your company's Web site and pay-per-click promotions, and measurable response—inquiries from interested prospects—generated from trade shows, direct mail, advertising, and all other marketing activities that are part of your B2B marketing program.

CRM-optimized marketing programs don't just end with lead generation, either: Once interested prospects contact your company as a result of your marketing efforts, they become part of your company's ongoing lead conversion program, the longer-term effort to convert prospects into paying customers, with the help of content-based marketing programs and marketing automation systems, such as those provided by Pardot, ActOn, HubSpot, and others. Because sales cycles for most companies selling high-dollar, complex products in B2B markets may be long—many months, or even years—these content-based marketing programs, distributed through marketing automation, play a critical role in assisting your company's sales team during their ongoing "sales conversations" to convince their prospects that your company's product is their best solution to their specific problem.

In this New Marketing Model™, company sales teams using CRM and marketing automation demand greater accountability from marketing. Since every new sales opportunity can be tracked from the marketing activity that produced it, and the response and payback from each of these marketing activities can be precisely measured in CRM, every marketing activity must be optimized to generate meaningful response for lead generation, and every new prospect now becomes part of a longer-term program, using marketing automation, to convert this prospect into a paying customer.

To achieve these goals, CRM and marketing automation force big changes to B2B marketing programs: Expensive, image-oriented "branding" advertising and other inefficient marketing programs are now replaced by high-impact online and offline direct response marketing activities and targeted editorial content that motivates prospects to opt-in to receive additional information from your company, and to start these prospects on the path to becoming customers.

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This module details the critical changes required to integrate your B2B marketing program to your company's CRM and marketing automation systems, providing step-by-step, project-ready training to help you:

You can also buy this module as part of our special Marketing Automation Bundle, which also includes two additional BMI modules covering content-based marketing and execution, to help you combine CRM, marketing automation, and content marketing to execute effective lead generation and conversion programs.

Check the Course Module Overview at right for detail on topics covered in this module . . .

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This module helps you:

This module provides the proven, step-by-step techniques required to integrate all of your company's marketing activities into your company's CRM and marketing automation systems, make these marketing activities a measurable investment in higher sales and new customers for your sales team.

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Includes printed workbook, module review .PDF, and online skill-builder, review, and examination.

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