Best Practices Series

SAP
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WHY MARKETING AUTOMATION IS CRITICAL

to Driving Sustainable Growth
The compelling case for a disciplined approach to marketing automation is that it is the only way to ensure a steady stream of leads, prospects, and opportunities that will eventually lead to more sales, customers, and revenue. Producing a consistently strong inflow of new business possibilities is crucial to driving sustainable growth and can help insulate an organization from other inefficiencies in the business model or challenges from outside competition. Its that simple, and its quantifiable and repeatable. In this Best Practices Guide to Marketing Automation, both SAP and SalesFUSION offer compelling cases for embracing marketing automation as a way to generate leads and convert those leads into customers. For more information on this topic, be sure to visit their websites. Bob Fernekees VP/Group Publisher CRM Media Information Today, Inc.

SAP CUSTOMERS GAIN THE COMPETITIVE EDGE THROUGH INTEGRATING CUSTOMER ANALYTICS WITHIN MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETING PROGRAMS

SalesFUSION
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THE TOP FIVE WAYS INTEGRATING MARKETING AUTOMATION TO YOUR CRM CAN SAVE A TROUBLED DEPLOYMENT AND INCREASE CRM USAGE

Bob Fernekees,
Group Publisher 212-251-0608 x13 bfernekees@destinationcrm.com

SPONSORS

Adrienne Snyder,
Eastern/Midwest Account Director 201-327-2773 adrienne@destinationcrm.com
3999 West Chester Pike Newtown Square, PA 19073 Phone: 1-800-872-1727 www.sap.com 1 Concourse Parkway Suite 190 Atlanta, GA 30328 1-800-558-1760 www.salesfusion.com

Dennis Sullivan,
Western Account Director 800-248-8466 x538 dennis@destinationcrm.com

Produced by: CRM Media

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June 2013 | CRM Magazine

Sponsored Content

SAP Customers Gain the Competitive Edge through Integrating Customer Analytics within Multi-Channel Marketing Programs
According to Aberdeens January 2012 Customer Experience Management: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight research, the top challenge facing 48% of companies with Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives is integrating customer insights within existing business activities (i.e. marketing). Customer analytics tools provide the remedy to this challenge by helping companies extract crucial insights from customer data gathered through multiple channels (e.g. social media and web). Thirty- nine (39) companies within the January 2012 CEM study report using SAP as their customer analytics provider. Findings from this research reveal that SAP customers are 36% more likely (49% vs. 36%) than all other companies to use customer analytics tools as a key component of their marketing, sales and customer service activities. This article highlights how SAP customers perform compared to their peers by using differentiating business processes and technology tools required to establish a successful customer analytics program built on precision marketing.
SAP CUSTOMERS OUTPERFORM OTHER BUSINESSES IN THREE KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

differentiator of precision marketing activities.

Key Business Processes

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of SAP users deploy an online community that allows their customers to engage each other within an interactive online discussion. This is contrasted by 39% adoption of this capability by all other organizations. Customer analytics tools help marketers and other key customer-facing organizational departments (e.g. Sales) sort these online conversations by numerous criteria (such as demographics and prior purchase) within dashboards showing customer activity. These activity results are then used in conjunction with existing customer profiles to identify insights based on customer behavioral and feedback data. Research shows that companies with this capability are far more successful (5.2% vs. 2.4%) in increasing customer lifetime value year-over-year, compared to those without this capability.
Key Technologies

technology to establish a unified view of customer insights. Considering that the ability to effectively integrate customer information within existing business activities (i.e. marketing) is a top challenge faced by 48% of businesses within the CEM study, the value of this technology becomes clear. By deploying this technology more widely than their peers, SAP clients are able to better manage the core ingredient of customer analytics programs: customer data.
Key Takeaways

First, SAP customers are able to attain 67% better year-over-year performance in creating social buzz, compared to all others. They also report substantial annual improvement in their customer satisfaction and customer retention results. SAP clients are also far more likely (32% vs. 11%) to accomplish year-over-year improvement in their return on marketing investments - a key metric validating the success of an organization in effectively using customer data for personalized multichannel and multi-touch marketing campaigns. These improvements dont happen overnight, they are the results of a wellestablished and nurtured effort in making customer information a strategic

In addition to a well-crafted strategy to blend the processes mentioned above with their customer analytics programs, SAP customers are also utilizing a set of technology enablers to support these activities. As illustrated in Figure 4, they are 18% more likely (66% vs. 56%) than other businesses to deploy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools within their customer analytics programs. CRM has long been a pillar of Best-inClass customer engagement strategies. In fact, Aberdeens September 2011 report Leveraging the 360 Degree Customer View to Maximize Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Potential shows that Best-in-Class companies are 27% more likely (71% vs. 56%) than Laggard businesses to use this

SAP customers are more adept in adopting a set of differentiating business processes and technologies that are critical to achieving success through customer analytics deployments. They focus on building an organizational infrastructure that allows effectively capturing, storing and using customer insights within myriad business activities, including multi-channel and multi-touch marketing programs. They are also more likely to be able to micro-manage their customer interactions by segmenting customer behavioral and feedback data based on certain criteria. These insights allow companies with enhanced precision marketing capabilities engage the right customer with the right content through the right channel at the right time. To find out how your company can benefit from SAPs experience, visit www.sap.com today.

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CRM Magazine | June 2013

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The Top Five Ways

Integrating Marketing Automation to your CRM Can Save a Troubled Deployment and Increase CRM Usage
CRM deployments can suffer a variety of setbacks. One of the most common setbacks is poor adoption, usage, by the sales team. Marketing Automation Solutions, integrated and embedded within CRM, can play a significant role in improving your CRM deployment in a variety of ways. Over the last several years, marketing has risen above its traditional standing in the CRM world, which had been low man on the totem pole. Marketing historically was the other technology that existed outside of CRM. Poorly understood and generally operating outside of the framework of the core CRM, marketing automation as a technology solution was even further from the core. Todays marketing automation solutions; those that holistically combine Email Marketing, Web Analytics and other emerging channels such as Social Media, are adding tremendous value to traditional CRM deployments and, more so than ever, have the attention of the C-suite. These holistic and fully integrated solutions are now considered by many to be a must-have technology in the new social web selling environment. Why all the sudden attention? In a word, Social Web. Today, a companys prospective buyer has taken control of the top of the sales funnel and many buyers are engaging in self-directed sales cycles using websites, blogs, social platforms and other emerging outlets to evaluate solutions to the level that nearly 70% of a traditional sales cycle may very well be complete by the time you actually speak to a potential prospect. In addition to this, many B2B companies operate with much smaller sales teams and rely heavily on web-based marketing. Gone are the days of large telesales and inside sales teams supporting field reps working small geographic territories. Companies are now much more laser focused on building strategic, efficient, and cost effective lead-tosale and lead-to-revenue models. Technology, like marketing automation, fully supports these strategic efforts. Marketing Automation Solutions, like SalesFUSION, have focused virtually all of their development efforts on fully embedding demand generation technology and processes into CRM because this provides significant financial benefits to most B2B companies. Furthermore, for those CRM deployments that may be languishing or suffering from poor adoption & usage, adding marketing automation to the mix has proven to jumpstart, invigorate and align the sales & marketing executive teams to fully leverage the CRM investment. Here are the Top Five Ways integrating marketing automation to your CRM can save a potentially troubled deployment and increase overall CRM usage:
1. GETTING SALES EXCITED ABOUT CRM 3. KEEPING YOUR CRM DATABASE CLEAN AND EFFICIENT

You would be hard pressed to find a sales person who doesnt get excited about having qualified leads delivered to them on a silver platter. Lead scoring and lead routing can be configured in a marketing automation solution to stack-rank leads based on behavior and engagement. When a lead scores to a certain level of interest, that lead can then be immediately routed to the appropriate rep. Email alerts are generated and sent to sales reps when leads meet certain criteria. Reps get leads sent to their inbox with information about how the lead came to the website and what they did when they got there. A quick link allows the rep to open the lead in CRM directly from the email. This simple functionality gets sales excited about lead generation and dramatically reduces follow up time by the reps. Catching leads when they are engaged and hot ensures better conversion to qualified status in CRM.
2. ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES

Marketing automation solutions, like SalesFUSION, will police lead flow traffic into your CRM. The marketing database is often used as a lead staging area where Marketing-Ready Leads (MQL Marketing Qualified Leads) are marketed to and nurtured to a point at which they become Sales-Ready (SQL Sales Qualified Lead). Only then does the marketing automation platform move the SQL into CRM. This methodology and process keeps the CRM uncluttered with suspects and ensures the sales team is only working the highest value (i.e. SQL) leads. Your CRM database size is also reduced, which in a cloud-based CRM model, can reduce your costs substantially.
4. IMPROVING LEAD CONVERSION

Marketing automation will gather vital information in the form of website visit activity, campaign touches, campaign responses and much more. The system(s) will then append this information to the lead and/or contact records in CRM. This information is at the fingertips of sales when they are tasked to follow-up with a high-value SQL. Sales then has the ability to quickly view the contextual history in order to gain clear visibility and transparency into what the potential prospect may be interested in based on the pages viewed on-site, emails opened, links clicked, forms submitted, and general responses contained in the record history. This makes that first critical Sales Call more effective and will greatly increase the probability of lead conversion.
5. ROI ON MARKETING AND LEAD GENERATION

When implementing marketing automation, theres a lot more than simple bulk email marketing involved. Marketing and Sales will collaborate on processes for scoring inbound leads. This collaboration forces marketing and sales to work closely together and define better processes that will keep the CRM system clean. Process improvements stemming from this collaboration will lead to a better CRM deployment overall and to better aligned sales and marketing teams.

Marketing automation connects the leads generated from campaigns, and the cost of acquiring those leads (i.e. CPL), to the opportunities in CRM. This allows the C-suite members of any B2B company to stop throwing darts at a board with respect to marketing spend and pinpoint exactly how, where, and why they should most efficiently spend valuable (and shrinking) marketing dollars.