Written by: Sean Burrell, SVP of Business Development & Global Alliances
More than 24 hours in this market and you have a big problem
According to the Harvard Business Review, “U.S firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query (this was defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) were 60x more likely to become a qualified lead than those that contacted them after 24 hours, or longer.”
Don’t Blame The Marketing Department
If you are in sales, it’s often the marketing department that get a bad rap, but it is likely not their fault. For enterprise organizations dealing with an ever-growing list of data sources from the web and third parties, coupled with ever-expanding compliance issues, much has slowed down the flow of information (data is often synced in nightly batch processes). This means that the time it takes to get leads into the hands of someone that can qualify them and potentially open opportunities successfully is greatly reduced. These factors are often completely outside of marketing’s control and leads to frequent struggles with the same challenges this data latency creates. Without more frequent or near real-time integrations to data sources, building and executing engaging nurture campaigns or having the ability to communicate with the right audience at the right time creates a challenge to push leads from the marketing funnel to the sales funnel.
What Can Be Done About It?
The truth is everyone’s life could become a whole lot easier, but it is going to involve ensuring that you are using the right marketing technology or technologies in the right way. If done correctly, sales could get qualified leads in record time, compliance and legal teams can be assured communications meet all legislation and IT can get back to focusing on all the other tasks they have to contend with rather than running queries from multiple data sources to extract lists for campaigns. In fact, list extraction is exactly where the problem starts!
Many enterprise organizations are still stuck with extracting data out of disparate systems instead of using applications which can query and report on multiple data sources without the manual pain or compliance headaches of extracting a list. The moment you extract a list, the amount of work you assume becomes exponential. More departments are forced to become involved, and the level of risk and vulnerability to human error rises significantly.
The first step that can be done to create positive change is to agree to a directive from the leadership level down that the organization is going to need to mandate. This includes moving away from manual list extraction wherever possible.
The second step is to review your marketing technology stack and analyze what manual processes between systems can be automated.
If you are looking to expedite getting the appropriate staff from your organization to speak to your prospects quicker, it is crucial to review the relationship between the data latency of your campaign management or channel execution tools with your CRM system. This is a great place to start to drive quick wins.
To make this process as streamlined as possible, you may need to look at ways of consolidating or simplifying the technology you use. It is also going to be important to check that you have several prerequisites in place to make this transition at a technology level as smooth as possible.
Integrating CRM; Some Considerations
Does your communication platform integrate easily with all the underlying data sources you need for marketing communications and processes?
Do the APIs or connectivity processes of your communication platform and your CRM system allow you to share appropriate data bilaterally between the applications? Can these sources easily be updated or changed?
Can each application track or manage user rights and permissions?
Is it possible to add or subtract any desired fields or tables between either system easily?
Is your campaign management application and communication platform (such as email) the same tool?
If your answer is yes to all of the above, then technology will not be the challenge you will need to overcome; it will more likely be people and processes.
If your answer was 'no' to any of the above, that’s okay! You will still be able to speed up your turnaround time speaking to your prospects. However, you may not yet be ready to lean on technology to catapult your trajectory in the same way as you could if you had these options in place already.
We Have The Technical Requirements. What Next?
Identify who is going to be your executive sponsor(s)and bring key stakeholders together from marketing, sales, IT, compliance/legal and operations to decide what are the key considerations, concerns, targets and motivators that each team has around utilizing automation to speed up and deescalate the risk regarding a potential shift in the flow of new business prospect data.
Agree Upon Success Criteria
Identifying the key success criteria needed from each department in order to get their abundant willingness (that’s the target!) will be key to the success of this program of work and the ongoing journey toward modernization in an ever-evolving market.
Start Small
Don’t overcomplicate the initial objective. Start with something that everyone feels is achievable within a short time frame. Be diligent in moving tasks to the parking lot and out to phase 1A or 1B items. Keep the objective of “how can we get prospect data to sales faster for follow through?” for example. If the conversation moves to “what about existing customers? We don’t want to accidentally contact them,” move that out of the initial program of work. Prospect data could be run through an automated de-dupe query against customer records before being exposed in CRM for sales outreach. The idea is that you are trying to collectively get a big quick win under your belt to motivate everyone and get them to believe in the art of the possible.
Agree On The Smallest Possible Exchange of Data (both ways)
What is the lowest common denominator of data that can be exchanged between applications to ensure a meaningful interaction between sales and the prospect? Additionally, how does this information need to be rendered to make it as easy as possible to take action upon? This could be as simple as sales receiving a task in near real-time to contact an individual based on only one or two data points that they have provided in addition to their name and contact details. This information could be an expressed interest to a particular product or services or simply just a request to speak to an advisor/sales associate/consultant/etc.
No matter how simple, the exchange of data should be bilateral. There has to be the opportunity for the CRM user to input something in return for the data they have been provided, such as a note that the “prospect is now interested in X product” or “prospect not yet ready to buy.” This information will inform your campaign system as to which nurture track the individual should be allocated to, and this can be done automatically, without human or manual intervention. Data exchanges between marketing and sales, no matter how small, need to be symbiotic.
How Does Celerity Go About This Challenge?
Once you have identified the stakeholders that you want to include internally for this program of work, Celerity can coordinate well-defined but short workshops to identify how we can integrate Adobe Campaign into your CRM application in the most expedited manner. We will work with you to identify the lowest common bilateral exchange of data between the systems for a minimum viable product that will provide quick wins and win over those who may be hesitant to fully automate particular processes. This essentially forms part of the first phase of work from which we will help evolve in an iterative manner to get you as mature as necessary in your marketing and sales efforts. Within Campaign, we will help you to integrate applications together meaningfully. Once the integration is tested and pushed live to production, we hand over documentation of what we have built alongside training your teams on how to use, support and grow the integration going forward.
Whether your CRM system is one of the market leaders such as Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Oracle or is another 3rd party or homegrown application, we have a wealth of experience in integrating these to provide a holistic solution that will greatly benefit your organization and win your teams back time to focus on other initiatives.
Adobe Campaign and Salesforce CRM Integration
Celerity has been involved in consultation and delivery around a number of Adobe Campaign and CRM integrations, most frequently with Adobe Campaign and Salesforce CRM. Adobe Campaign and Salesforce CRM are really well-suited to one another and have a substantially deep out-of-the-box integration already in place. This combination tracks back to the days when Adobe Campaign was known as Neolane, and the two organizations were actually partners, not competitors. Bringing the two tools together arguably combines the best-of-breed solutions between campaign management and CRM. While we’ve had much success integrating Adobe Campaign and Salesforce CRM, we are also well-versed in integrating with other CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle and other 3rd party systems.
About Us
Celerity has experts in the marketing automation platform, Adobe Campaign. Over the last 14 years, we have solved a wide variety of business challenges for Fortune 1000 companies to help them squeeze every possible ounce of value out of the application. Significant value has been obtained by leveraging the data automation capabilities of the software to an increasing list of Adobe, 3rd party and home-grown applications both horizontally and vertically across an organization’s Martech stack. It is not uncommon for us to achieve 80% campaign automation with a 300% increase in data personalization over a short period.
Would Love To See An Adobe Campaign Salesforce Integration?
We understand seeing is believing, and it is always much easier to fully comprehend how things work if you can view it working end-to-end and can ask the questions relevant to your own organization.