Books and Articles by Lars Helgeson

Funnels are useful to measure the progress of leads as they move along your buyer journeys. From stage to stage, you can visualize the effectiveness of your sales process. They provide an excellent reporting overview that your team can monitor regularly. A typical funnel. Funnels are useful for sales and marketing alike, as both interact with leads and contribute to the buyer journey at different times and in different ways.

Web traffic is important data for CRM. Web analytics can be complicated to dive into, but your marketing team should be able to distill important factors in your marketing that can guide your strategy and policy. Assessing SEO and PPC performance Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are two top-of-funnel marketing-related activities that directly influence sales.

The forms you place on your website are absolutely critical for gathering contacts into your CRM and starting them down the path of becoming clients. Forms generally fall into two categories: confirmed opt-in and single opt-in. Using confirmed and single opt-in forms to gather info for CRM Confirmed opt-in (also known as double opt-in) forms are most frequently used for newsletters, e-book downloads, and other marketing-related content.

Tickets can help you gather information for your CRM. Ticketing uses forms to track an “issue” that is created by filling out the form. This “issue” could be interest in your product, or it could be someone having a problem with a product you sell. In either case, you want a person from your company to engage with the person filling out the form and manually close it.

Design your campaigns with your CRM in mind. A campaign is a programmed effort to create awareness about your products and/or services to a defined group of people with the intention of driving them toward a conversion. A good campaign is planned out, with a journey model and people to support leads as they progress through their journeys.

Lead scoring assign points to contacts in your CRM based on actions those leads take. Your CRM should store both demographic and activity lead scores for each contact, so your marketing and sales teams can use that information. Updating your CRM with lead scoring data Create a custom data field to store demographic and activity lead scores.

A workflow is an action or a series of actions. Workflows are the execution step that connects sales to marketing and vice versa. The more complete your CRM, the more powerful your workflows. When your CRM incorporates all your sales, marketing, and operational activities, your workflows can automate all of them.

Just because you can store CRM information in a private knowledge base doesn’t mean everyone in your company should be able to see it all. Some information you store isn’t relevant to everyone. Some is simply private information. Separating knowledge by group in CRM Your CRM’s group architecture is key for protecting information from various leads, clients, and internal team members.

Your knowledge base is an extension of the collective knowledge of your CRM team. It’s important to document anything you can, to avoid the possibility of employees taking their knowledge when they leave your company.Store publicly distributed information in your knowledge base. Public corporate documents such as your mission and vision statements, company history, organizational chart, and frequently asked questions are all useful.