Find a Marketing Goldmine with a CRM and Your Customer Data

By leveraging the power of customer data, businesses can significantly increase their efficiency and competitiveness. Companies have the potential to unlock previously unrealized revenue streams through the transformation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform into an intelligent growth engine,

Having a CRM system in place has become an essential part of doing business today. But a CRM is more than just a collection of contacts like an old-school Rolodex. It’s a way for you to access, understand and monetize a valuable resource already at your fingertips: customer data. Maximizing ROI during an economic downturn is important for all businesses. Here is how you can get the most out of your customer data and turn that business intelligence into profit.

Customer Data is a Goldmine

Raw data is worthless without the context to make it meaningful. But with a few strategic steps, you can transform large amounts of information into valuable insights and improved outcomes for your business.

Consider this: having an up-to-date list of all those who have interacted with your brand over the past year or so could prove advantageous – but wouldn’t it be better if you knew which customers were just browsing, ready to buy…or even primed to close AND met various criteria essential for successful sales?

Knowing how to analyze and leverage your data can make sure the right people receive pertinent messages without excessive work or intrusive tactics.

New Solutions for New Times

In the last two decades, digital marketing has been upended by a variety of forces. Legal regulations and savvy buyers have pushed marketers to change and improve their tactics—or risk being left behind.

CRMs play a vital role in any business, acting as an all-in-one repository of customer data. They range from simple spreadsheets to intelligent AI systems that develop over time – but their true power lies in taking customers on personalized buying journeys and increasing revenue potential.

These days, powerful CRM systems are now available for every type of business and every price level. We believe the HubSpot CRM is an excellent fit for most small and mid-sized businesses. The value of HubSpot truly lies in its superior tool set, customer support, and training resources. Key benefits of this software platform include the ability to integrate with other tools, it’s easy to learn and use, and the value of the investment makes it attractive and affordable to most businesses. Calculate the ROI you could experience with Hubspot products here.

CRM is heart of scaling business

Use Your CRM for Experience-Driven Marketing

Unlock the path for your business’s growth through experience-driven marketing. Taking advantage of this CRM strategy can open up new pathways to success. Research from Forrester shows that companies that prioritize customer experiences grow 40% faster than companies that don’t. Plus, it shows that those focused on building meaningful connections with their customers increase customer lifetime value by over 60%.

With CRM-rooted marketing, you can deliver the ultimate customer experience: personalized communication across all channels. Personalization remains an effective strategy for gaining attention in today’s fiercely competitive world—tailor messages to customers and your chances of standing out from the crowd to increase significantly!

 

Three Paths for CRM Success

There are three paths to better results with your CRM. Segmentation ensures that your prospects see or hear your message that is best suited to their specific needs. Contextualization explains in clear terms why your marketing message is relevant and appropriate to your prospects’ buying stage. Personalization makes your prospect feel a connection with your brand.

Segment

Using the data in your CRM, you can isolate specific groups of customers by wants, needs, and readiness to buy.

Lists are an incredibly useful tool to segment and precisely target your database down to the exact specifics that you need. Companies, contacts, and activities can all be effectively grouped together based on any data point stored in your system. Plus, these lists will maintain their accuracy by automatically updating as soon as changes occur.

Contextualize

Every buyer for every product must pass through the three key buying stages:

    • Awareness
    • Consideration
    • Decision

Although this journey is flexible for different circumstances, one fundamental remains consistent. It is that consumers need specific buying stage content before they can make a decision.

Knowing where customers are in their journey is the key to providing them with customized messaging that’s on point and tailored just for them. Label prospects appropriately in your CRM and make sure they get relevant messages—it’ll strengthen those valuable relationships.

Personalize

Personalization isn’t just a buzzword—it’s an essential art of communicating effectively with your audience. To get it right, you need to know the language they use, choose topics that interest them, and send messages at precisely the opportune moment. Prospects will feel a connection with your brand because the message is aimed at their needs at the right time.

Your CRM is Your Growth Engine

By segmenting, contextualizing, and personalizing customer data in your CRM system, you can take customers on personalized buying journeys that will significantly increase revenue potential.

The key to successful CRM strategies lies in utilizing clean and easily accessible data so that you can provide tailored messaging that strengthens relationships with prospects at precisely the right moment. When used correctly, a CRM system can be an invaluable goldmine for effective marketing strategies.


Pipeline Generation

Pipeline generation is the lifeblood of most companies. A high-performing pipeline aligns sales and marketing efforts and clarifies available opportunities to maximize potential. When done well, the pipeline flows full with prospects that are a good match. Good match prospects have a higher close rate because the service matches the client’s needs. Likewise, good-match customers and clients see better results with their service providers because values and cultures are aligned. 

pipeline generation bootcamp

Bynder Group director Rob Bynder recently completed the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp, an immersive 6-week program provided by HubSpot Academy designed to teach HubSpot partners and customers the first parts of the inbound sales process. The experience was highly informative and a perfect blend of education, inspiration, and motivation. 

Instructors for this cohort included Trygve Olsen, Keith Gutierrez, and Debbie Akintonde, all HubSpot Certified Trainers. Also on hand to share knowledge and enliven the group was Dan Tyre, Sales Director at HubSpot, who pioneered the concept of alignment between sales and marketing known as “Smarketing.” 

Align Marketing and Sales

Businesses that bridge the gap between marketing and sales see better results using this more strategic approach to client acquisition and growth.

While some of the tasks associated with pipeline generation are outbound practices, the spirit of the inbound methodology is the foundation of inbound sales. The goal is to be helpful and respectful rather than pushy, aggressive, or “salesy.” Providing value to customers through helpfulness encourages trust and enhances rapport. 

The program covered all elements of implementing effective connect calls, including:

  • How to identify good fit leads
  • How to speak and what to say
  • How to use voicemail and how to coordinate email
  • How and why to leverage video
  • How to address objections

The training included workbooks, presentations, access to numerous additional resources, and real-life role-playing, where we could practice the techniques on each other in break-out rooms. Practice and role-playing are highly encouraged and provide a valuable process for working out the kinks. Also covered was the use of conversational pauses and listening techniques like “chin-strokes” and open-ended questions to encourage more and better communication.

What’s the Upshot? 

Bynder Group provides expert guidance on web strategy, design, marketing, and HubSpot CRM for our B2B clients. With the knowledge gained from training programs like the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp, we further provide our clients with additional insight into the skills, techniques, and best practices of high-quality pipeline generation. When used with HubSpot’s powerful marketing, sales, and operations tools, our clients see better results and higher ROI from their efforts.

 


How to Grow Your Manufacturing Business

Manufacturing is a crucial component of the global economy. According to the Global Manufacturing Industry Report 2020, as recently as 2018, the industry represented nearly 16% of the global GDP. Today, manufacturing is more critical than ever but faces a host of new challenges. Skilled labor is hard to find and keep. Consumers are becoming harder to reach. Technology is changing, competition is getting more fierce, and growing a manufacturing business during a global crisis is incredibly difficult. Here are tips to grow your manufacturing business with tools, technology, and methodology.

Manufacturing is Under Pressure

*Deloitte. (2021). Creating Pathways for Tomorrow’s Workforce Today

Efficiency is at a Premium

For industries in a crunch, efficiency is key. You’re required to do more with less in a way that serves your bottom line. Digitizing legacy sales and marketing processes has helped many manufacturers pick up the pace, but what if that’s not enough? No matter how great your products are, outpacing the competition won’t happen with the old way of doing things.

Choose the Best CRM to Avoid Silos and Reduce Friction

Choosing the right CRM for your business is challenging and can be complicated. Businesses often end up with cobbled-together systems that create silos between your departments and friction in your processes. Technology platforms that are not a good fit can stunt your growth, producing inefficiencies and unnecessary complexities to your processes. 

Having worked with many software systems since we started in 2002, we have found that HubSpot provides an optimized technology platform for manufacturers that meets the needs of businesses as they grow — without adding unnecessary costs or complexity. According to top software ranking site G2, Hubspot is one of the highest-rated and highest performing products in the industry. Similarly, Captera ranks HubSpot with 4 1/2 stars. The all-in-one platform creates seamless integration across marketing, sales, customer service, and operations. This gives you visibility and insights into the entire customer journey, creating improved customer experiences and less work for your team by creating efficiencies in every step of the sales, marketing, and service processes.


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Operate with a Lean Marketing Strategy

Many manufacturing companies limp along with an ineffective website and digital marketing strategy that is not helping their businesses. A good website—designed with business goals in mind—will help you get more out of your existing customers and distributors and find new ones. Leveraging inbound marketing strategy, will attract customers, build trust, and nurture relationships. Most importantly, leverage reporting that provides the clarity you need to help you adjust and optimize our efforts. 

When developing your marketing strategy, focus on:

  • Search: Leveraging education and helpful content that attracts prospective customers to your website over your competitors
  • Automation: Nurturing your leads to the point of conversion by building trust all along the sales cycle. 
  • Segmentation and tracking: Store all of your data in one place to best understand the full lifecycle and every touch-point of your prospective customers. 

Scale With Confidence

Manufacturers are under pressure and need business solutions that address their unique needs. Finding and implementing the right tools is mandatory for companies to achieve and sustain growth.

Key takeaways:

  • Avoid the inefficiency and waste that comes with cobbled-together solutions.
  • Consolidate and integrate your technology and get all of your departments and their efforts on the same track.
  • Whether it’s in-house, outsourced, or a hybrid of both, your marketing strategy needs to be lean and focused, with a strong methodology.
  • Track your ROI with data-driven processes and unified technology.

Bridging the gap between your departments, reducing friction in your processes, and using data to track all of your efforts will improve your ROI and lift your bottom line.


How Inbound Strategy Propels Marketing for Manufacturers

For manufacturers and distributers, marketing plays a crucial role in growing brand awareness and creating a more competitive edge. Relying on referrals is not a strategy. Start with investing in a high-quality marketing plan that will pave the road for success. The implementation of a sound strategy will result in better quality leads, more customers, and more growth opportunities than shooting from the hip or just winging it.

 

explicit and implicit objectives

 

Manufacturers and Distributers Face Unique Challenges

Purchasing equipment, materials, or supplies are vastly different than buying a new toaster. The buyer’s journey in the B2B market place is more complex than most other types of purchases. Make sure your marketing strategy accounts for the unique challenges manufacturers face, including multiple targets and objectives, complex and/or highly technical products, and long sales cycles.

1. Multiple Audiences

Manufacturers sell to a number of different buyer personas and each one has different motivators, priorities and agendas. Typical target personas could include:

    • Engineers and designers
    • Distributers
    • Purchasing agents
    • Purchase influencers
    • End-users

Marketers are faced with addressing the challenges and goals for each different persona. Each one is looking for a solution to their specific issues.

2.  Multiple Objectives

Your customers have multiple criteria for purchasing your product. They are broken into explicit and implicit categories.

Explicit objectives are related to your product and are rational in nature. They are focused on element like price and delivery time. The includes things like:

      • Quality
      • Quantity
      • Price
      • Value
      • Delivery
      • Service

Implicit objectives are concerned with your brand and are emotional in nature. They are related to your market position, business relationships, and business practices. These could include:

      • Location
      • Reputation
      • Suppliers
      • Sales experience
      • Expertise

It is generally advised that brand perception weighs heavily in influencing B2B sales. Humans make purchase decisions based on emotion, even after logic is factored into the decision making process. Manufacturers should rely on explicit objectives to attract prospects and leads, and implicit objectives to convert those leads into customers and generate referrals.

3. Complex Products and Services

Complex products and services require a depth of technical knowledge not typically found in marketers. Many companies train their engineers and technicians in sales and marketing in order to help explain the values and benefits of your company’s product or service. People who serve in these roles can be extremely valuable in the sales process.

However, with this approach it’s easy to under-represent the implicit qualities that resonate so strongly in the buying process. Marketers skilled in communicating your brand story and appealing to your implicit objectives will give you a competitive edge. Your subject matter experts still play an important role in the sales process and investing in a marketing strategy will provide the framework for even greater success.

4. Lengthy Sales Cycles

The amount of time that passes between the first touch with a prospective customer and the closing of the deal is referred to as length of the sales cycle. It is common for manufacturers to experience sales cycles greater than 4 months and some up to more than 12 months.

These long sales cycles are for good reason. Products can be complicated or highly technical and deals can involve many players with many objectives. Sales cycles that take a long time can experience more hurdles that can increase the chances of derailing a deal. Companies with a well-defined sales and marketing process benefit by increased transparency during these long processes. This transparency can reveal where sales are stalling and improve the results of your efforts.

How Inbound Benefits Manufacturers

Inbound is an approach to marketing, sales, and service that is about meeting the needs of your audience and creating a trustworthy, authoritative brand with clarity and consistency. By providing valuable content with specific context, your company can offer the right solution at the right time to the right people.

Inbound marketing is especially useful for manufacturers and distributers because it aligns with the way that industrial and B2B buyers operate in today’s business environment. This buying cycle starts with identifying the need for a solution. The buyer then conducts research, including competitive options and specific features, then evaluates potential suppliers and eventually purchases. Factors that buyers take into consideration and form their brand perception about your business are:

  • Corporate website
  • Market presence
  • Brand reputation
  • Product offerings
  • Case studies and solutions
  • Industry leadership, knowledge and experience
  • Email, social media, advertising
  • Sales process

Together, these components contribute to a perceived customer experience that will exert influence on their decision to purchase from you or your competitor. Inbound methodology provides a framework for improving your brand perception at all customer touchpoints.

business blogs

Content is the Core of Inbound

A central component of inbound marketing leverages content as the main vehicle for communicating your brand values, product benefits, and overall value. It is what your prospects consume during the sales process and use to form their opinions, perceptions, and ultimately theirs buying decisions. Content comes in many forms and is used in many ways. Here are a few examples:

Blog content builds credibility and allows you to address the needs of your customers with as much detail as needed. Blog content also provides a forum for building subject matter authority. Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog.

SEO content is used when your customer is seeking solutions. Optimizing your content for search engines using organic SEO and based on an SEO strategy is key to appealing to every stage of your customers’ journey.

Email content is used to stay in touch with your customers and cultivate prospects. Leverate audience segmentation to cater to your customers’ interests. Most importantly, make sure your sales CRM is integrated with your marketing efforts.

Social media content builds awareness and provides a channel for connecting with your audience. Promote your content in social channels, and also contribute to the discussions within your industry. Don’t really on social media, especially LinkedIn, as a place to push sales.

Video content is highly consumable and provides an excellent format for improving engagement in nearly all channels. From short, informal social media videos to more polished corporate videos, you can amplify your real sales team and put a face to all your messaging. Video can also include webinars and online conferences.

Case studies empower customers to discover and relate to how you’ve solved problems for other businesses. When formatted correctly, case studies will provide proof of your ability to deliver.

Align Sales and Marketing

Customer persuasion now spans marketing, sales, and service. These functions can no longer operate within separate silos. The new customer experience is more educated, better informed and doing their research before they even engage with your business. By integrating sales and marketing functions, a business can improve visibility into customer data by leveraging multiple digital channels.By using account-based marketing (ABM), companies can see success as a result of data analytics and actionable insights to access even more value from their marketing budgets.

Get Control of Your Contact Management

CRMs have evolved tremendously in the last several years. New tools are available for building a powerful system, customized to your needs. Focus on a CRM strategy that connects all of your customer-facing business units and you’ll reap the rewards of greater efficiency and more consistent results. Many manufacturing executives are slow to adapt. However, those business leaders that do see the merits of integrated functions are able to see great value by aligning their efforts from a customer perspective. This process reduces friction and improves results by creating consistency and clarity through the entire buyer’s journey. Manufacturers gain insights into their customer’s needs and avoid “dropping the ball” on sales and upsetting opportunities.

Your CRM strategy should empower your field reps to more easily develop and maintain key customer relationships as access opens to them. Consider engaging with outside resource that can help build your new strategy and transition your processes and staff to the new paradigm.

Key Takeaway

Manufacturers face many unique challenges in marketing their products and services. Most manufacturing businesses rely heavily on sales and often overlook the true value that a marketing strategy can play in creating a competitive advantage. Building your strategy around your customers and leveraging inbound methodology will provide a data-driven process that will produce greater success with measurable results.

Examples

Some examples of how we’ve helped our manufacturer and distributor clients with B2B marketing services:

California Lighting Sales »
CSL represents commercial lighting and controls manufacturers

Semtech » and LoRaWAN Academy »
Supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms for consumer, enterprise computing, communications and industrial end-markets.

Unisource Solutions »
Workplace services and furniture distributor

Oregon »
A manufacturer and distributor for chainsaw, agriculture, forestry, and home landscaping and part of the Blount Int. group of brands.

Universal Motion Components »
A manufacturer and distributor of center pivot drivetrains and related components for agriculture