Adventures in Business and CRM

After a long and cautious year for marketers, 2010 will likely also be a year of cutting corners and even marketing budgets. I’ve seen many companies that were once flaunting marketing departments 60+ strong now cut down to 10 people, with similar results in terms of ROI. This is an amazing concept that makes you wonder how accountable they were keeping their employees and outside marketing agencies during better economic times. When the CFO says more people can be hired and more can be allocated for marketing funds, the money just kind of floats away, without any solid method for tracking productivity and results in terms of new marketing endeavors.

Now that times are tougher, employers should really be looking to squeeze every bit of ROI out of every dollar they’re spending on direct and indirect marketing tactics. If you’re reading this blog, then it’s very likely that your company has implemented some kind of social media campaigning tactics within the past year or two. Perhaps you’ve learned how to integrate something like Google Analytics into the mix as well, but are you really tracking results based on the time spent on each task?

Some may say that micro-managing your marketing leads to over-thinking and too much time spent on often tedious reports and tracking. Some may also say that the CEO and CFO, and even perhaps the CMO shouldn’t be responsible for making sure correct tracking has been implemented.

All things considered, even some of the most seasoned internet marketers and CRM experts have been in the industry for less than 10 years.

By most other industry standards, you’d quite possibly still be a newbie.

This being said, I am a firm believer in every CEO having a very active role in the companies CRM and social efforts. Many CEO and VP clients of mine have argued quite a lot with me about this. They insist their VP or Marketing departments can handle it. The CFO generally has the best idea of the company’s culture, as well as hidden markets and niches that the company could be targeting with it’s efforts. They have a better idea of the sales that are closing, and the reasons for stalled sales for closing. In the end, the CEO should be consistently viewing and analyzing an 360 view of every 360 view.

I’ve compiled a few of the must-do tips for keeping accountability within your CRM and Social Media efforts:

• Track time spent on tasks. I know this seems a bit aimless, but if your employees are running social media campaigns, ask them to track their time. Using apps like Rescue Time or other time tracking resources help immensely.
• Keeping these tracked times in your CRM campaign management data is imperative for accountability. If your employees are spending 5 hours per day on Twitter, with similar ROI’s to a Facebook campaign they’re spending 2 hours on, this would alert you to perhaps have them focus on Facebook a bit more. There are many scenarios like this where you’d spot better and more efficient ways to use time.
• Build enthusiasm for accountability in your department. Let employees know that it’s not that you don’t trust they’re doing their jobs correctly, but for tracking and expansion purposes.
• Keep data clean. Clean data is happy data. Make sure all client and service data is correct. There should be no duplicates, as this can greatly affect your tracking.
• Consistently re-evaluate how and what you track within your business. CRM is like fine wine. It only gets better with age. The reasoning behind this is that with time, you should be fine-tuning and customizing your CRM solution to meet your business needs. No CRM solution should be utilized right out of the box. Make sure to take the time to learn everything that it offers. This includes the all important CEO.

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