Next evolution step: marketing and sales automatation
It is incredible how many important companies still work without having automatized their sales and marketing processes. From obsolete customized CRMs, to depending on paper to share a contact information among the team. Though yet amazing, they can still manage to subsist in this XXIst century without those tools, but they are completely unaware, in most cases, of the real amount of business opportunities and money they are really throwing over the window by working the way they do.
During my career, I have talked to commercial managers across the world over the years who complain their CRM tool does not allow them to even share contacts within the team so they have less visibility in monitoring global partners or clients, for example...
In some cases, marketing department and sales team work completely splitted, and only obtain reports from one another through the management, adding even more complexity to their internal and external commercial processes. When 99% of the sales and marketing experts around the globe insist that these two areas must work together constantly in order to provide success, only few corporations seem to care of putting the right tools place while promoting team work within departments.
These organizations have decided to invest in automatization of commercial processes, combined with experienced human resources it is proven to provide best effiency, effectiveness and best return on investment. Therefore, if companies want to be competitive within their business scopes in the next 20 years, they need to combine both software and qualified staff. It is not sufficient to buy and install a program like Eloqua and expect people in your company to use it effectively. They will need to be properly trained, to make sure they are capable to optimize their tasks with the new software.
Disregarding on how profitable your company or institution seems to be, with all the bottle necks and lost opportunities, at some point evolution is indispensable. There was a moment, like 10 years ago, when offices were full of faxes, but progressively we started using email, and digitalized documents. Marketing and sales automatization is suffering the same evolution, and they are becoming already essential tools for the good development of commercial departments all over the world.
The leaders in industries prefer Eloqua (Oracle) or Marketto, yet there are many many other possibilities for both marketing automatization and sales management. Starting for adding some Business Intelligence to your CRM. I will discuss more deeply about BI in a future article, but an extensive CRM with full functionalities still must have some customized views and dashboards that will probably not be included in your standard version. I always recommend to get on board good consultants to guide decision-makers further, in order to make sure they get the right software for their needs and that they get what they paid for, including proper implementation and integration with existing software, as well as high quality training courses for the users.
