As a business development lead, my job is to ask prospective clients questions and evaluate if we, as an agency, can help with their marketing efforts. I speak with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies and see my share of business strategies (or lack thereof). It still amazes me, however, how many times I learn that companies, regardless of size, are still not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
Before you call me crazy or bring out sales and marketing professionals worldwide to blow up my twitter feed, let me explain! Lead scoring does not work unless you have a full marketing and technology stack to score lead activities correctly and a tightly aligned sales and marketing team to take action, providing timely feedback on lead interactions and lead quality. Now see, that statement was certainly too long for a blog title, and search engines only allow so many characters to show in titles anyway.
It happened again. Your company president just told you that he wants something "really creative." You stare at him blankly. Wasn't last month's Fat Tuesday event creative? Wasn't that terrific ad campaign last quarter completely off the charts? What more does he want from you? What on earth does he mean by "really creative marketing?"
Let's face it, the competition for consumer attention is fierce. People are bombarded by hundreds (some say thousands) of marketing messages every day. How do you get your brand to stand up and be heard?
It's not enough to pull out the Mardi Gras masks and offer King Cake at your events. It's important to use those fun props and themes to tell your brand story in a compelling way that makes your potential customers pay attention.
Here are five ways to boost your creative marketing strategies and make your boss sing your praises at company picnics.
We don't hear this question enough. Its common practice to develop custom applications on the Salesforce1 platform and certainly should be a question asked by any organization who already runs Salesforce before developing on an alternative platform.
Too often I hear IT professionals and business managers try to keep Salesforce (SFDC) and its associated product offering Database.com in a small box known as CRM or SFA. The reality is, there is truly a lot of functionality “in the box” of the SFDC CRM/SFA offering yet there is tremendous room for out of the box thinking for those willing to take the blinders off and realize the power of database.com and the broader Salesforce1 Platform. The Stratagon team has led Salesforce1 implementations, which are as far away from CRM as you can imagine in both for profit and non-profit sectors. Consider these three benefits as you examine how to approach your next application development project.
Customer relationship management, or CRM, is the backbone of most sales and marketing efforts. Way back in 1986, a company called ACT! transformed the sales and marketing world with a revolutionary software tool that basically amounted to a digital Rolodex. CRM has come a long way since then with the advent of complex e-tools designed to find, know and delight customers.
