Alchemy: Turn Your CRM into Gold
Alchemy: There’s gold in your CRM
About 50 miles north of my old hometown, Atlanta, is the site of the first major US gold rush. It began in 1828, 20 years before the California gold rush started. Legend has it that it was on the steps of the county courthouse there in 1849 that Dahlonega Mint assayer, Dr. M.F. Stephenson, tried to dissuade miners from moving on to the California Gold Rush by saying, "Why go to California? In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There's millions in it."
A parallel exists in the form of unrefined “gold” that resides in your CRM. As companies generate leads from marketing initiatives, a symptom of success is that marketing databases grow by hundreds and thousands of names. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there is no intelligence about whether the names meet lead qualifying criteria like company size, target industry, decision maker title, business pain, budget and purchasing timeframe. There are far too many leads in the database for marketing to effectively contact and qualify the names, and sales’ focus on driving revenue rightly rules out culling through lists of hand-raisers.
The solution to this problem is segmenting prospects based on age, source and other data and testing into the prospect universe that is housed in the CRM to look for veins of gold. Essentially, alchemists turn lead into gold. You can turn your CRM leads into gold with a little alchemy.
This process is grounded in a precise market segmentation methodology to assure that all marketing and sales efforts are directed toward the highest performing targets via the most productive marketing initiatives. An efficient and cost-effective contact strategy systematically moves through the CRM and separates gold from rock so that marketing responses are turned into qualified leads.
Properly executed, a lead development program of this nature acts quickly to identify the real sales opportunities, keep sales focused on generating revenue and increase ROI on marketing investments.
In your CRM, right now, are millions of dollars of potential revenue that will never be identified if your staff keeps doing what it is doing.
Don’t confuse this with an expensive, time-consuming and almost always unsuccessful database clean-up project. If the alchemist does not know what they are doing all you are going to end up with is a big pile of broken-down rocks – and no gold.
In the spirit of earlier comments from our assayer friend, Dr. Stephenson, I might add, “In that CRM lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There's millions in it."
NOW, in August 2021, is the time to start mining your CRM for gold. It will be a substantially higher yield activity that will out-perform any other marketing investments you might make – especially between now and the end of the year.