Don't ask sales people to record Salesforce history

We all know of the power of a good CRM, chock-full of history about every interaction your business has had with any contact, account or opportunity. Your marketing automation system probably plugs in beautifully to your CRM so that the buyer actions and your automated responses are all recorded. Marketing nirvana?

Maybe not. Half of the problem is that most record only YOUR actions, not THEIR responses. The power of knowing how buyers have acted, what they are interested in, what they have read, how they responded to survey questions is obvious, but many businesses stop at recording the outbound emails and not the inbound responses.

But what if you work for one of the smart ones that records all the buyer responses in their CRM? Do we now have the basis of great digital marketing? Not yet. The most critical data is the more tailored stuff, the banter once we get personal. Picture this:

• Inbound visitor using your hottest search term loves your landing page, so:
• Listens to your 2 minute video blog,
• Reads your eBook,
• Provides you some simple profile information, and
• Responds in a survey the problem you are writing about is a big one for their business and they want to talk.

So far so good. What happens next? Unless you have a diligent sales force, you probably don't know until the opportunity turns up in your funnel reports (or doesn't). Neither the sales manager looking to coach the sales person, nor the replacement sales person who picks up the account months later know anything about the personal exchanges between buyer and seller if the sales person doesn't record them.

We have started using a new plug-in to Salesforce.com that fixes that. I want to tell you about it, but first a big disclosure: we are retained by the company behind this product to help with their marketing. We have no role re this product (in fact it is specifically out of scope), but we do have a positive bias towards these guys that needs to be declared.

Now, that said, let me effuse. CCRM is a salesforce.com application that captures every inbound and outbound email from your domain and appends the email to contacts, opportunities and accounts as appropriate. Basically this means that every automated email, hand-crafted email from your sales person, and the reply on the fly (via whatever means) is captured, and stored where they are needed.

I've never had this much rich contact history. If only I could get the phone conversations and meetings as diligently recorded, then I'd be in measurement heaven.

CCRM is cheap, simple, unobtrusive and totally set and forget. We've been trialling it for a couple of months and it does everything I had hoped. Again, I have a  bias here, but am now a major fan. Full link here. http://www.ccrm.com/

Let me know your thoughts.

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