Marketing is no longer just a ‘job’ – it has become an ‘operation’ involving a range of creative, administrative, scientific, analytic and technological skills with the potential to stretch the abilities of even the most experienced or highly-qualified marketing professionals.

Today, you need to be able to juggle campaign activity with gathering customer data and delivering high quality, qualified leads to your sales team, while reporting to an increasingly-savvy board of directors, who all want to be convinced that their money is being well spent.

What you need is an expert capable of bringing all of these technological, analytical and database skills together in a solution which recognises your need to practically integrate and synchronise all of your marketing systems and processes – someone like CRM Technologies. As a pioneer of the ‘marketing operations’ concept – with the hands-on experience to appreciate your marketing challenges and the in-depth knowledge to provide a solution - there is none better placed to help you.

Marketing Operations can deliver the entire automated customer lifecycle model to your overstretched marketing team, in a way which enables individuals to gain a clear oversight of the whole process, from data gathering and relationship acquisition, through the sales process and on to customer retention and development – in other words, the so-called ‘single customer view’ from first contact through to repeat buyer.

The notion of a ‘single customer view’ is not new in itself – but achieving it almost certainly is. The business world is littered with the remains of those marketing departments that have tried to achieve this ‘single view’ without being in possession of the necessary understanding and skills to make it work in practice. Anyone who has attempted to combine disciplines like database management, email marketing, event marketing and relationship management into a single, fully-synchronised ‘closed loop’ marketing system will fully appreciate the problems to be overcome!

Marketing operations can effectively offer the ‘glue’ which has been lacking until now. By focusing on providing the technical services, solutions and knowledge required by today’s marketing departments, operations specialists can allow the marketing department to focus on strategic and tactical innovation, without becoming bogged down by operational, technology and data challenges.

Marketing Operations can cover a wide range of specialist services for marketers, from data cleansing, enhancement and analysis, marketing database design, development and management through to fully-managed web based automated marketing systems. The skill is in the application of working practices, resources and technology to address the needs of the marketing department and other departments that rely on it. Without it, departments that truly wish to achieve the goal of a fully-synchronised, single view approach will either spend a fortune on ‘not quite achieving it’ or worse, will put the integrity of the entire department and its systems at risk.

Technology has taken over the marketing process in a way that few could have possibly imagined even just 10 years ago. CRM Technologies’ Marketing Operations expertise offers a real opportunity for marketing departments of any size, all over the UK, to achieve the kind of technology-based, fully integrated marketing process that business has always wanted.

It also means that marketing technology no longer needs to rely on the IT department for its upkeep, while marketers can go back to marketing again, safe in the knowledge that you now have the systems and data specialists available to keep both the sales team and the board happy!

About CRM Technologies
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on-demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT overhead from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee and Netstore Benendon Health, Gartner , Manhattan Associates and Micro Focus.

Over the years I have experienced the foibles of many many CRM systems from SAP to Seibel , Oracle to Onyx, Pivotal to Peoplesoft. Why is it that most out of the box CRM systems seem to apply all the sophisticated work flow to opportunity management and leave lead management  as an after thought.

I think this largely due to the history of CRM and its roots in SFA. The workflow associated with SFA is relatively mature and the major demand for CRM is most often sales led.

Lead management on the other hand is often more complex with many stakeholders crossing multiple departmental boundaries and applying a generic workflow is often problematic. I’ll give you an example.

We recently worked on an event for a major IT hardware manufacturer. To encourage attendees several product offers were designed spanning several product lines. The invites to the delegates were personalised for each market segment. Invites (both electronic and printed) were sent at intervals of three weeks starting six months before the event. The first three invites contained additional “early bird” offers. Click-thru ads were distributed amongst various publications and websites with offers matching the specific target segment. At the event itself leads across the different product streams were captured and collated. All the offer take-ups, leads and enquiries required distribution to the appropriate sales team. The Sales teams were given the option of accepting the lead or passing it back for nurturing into a telemarketing queue. Attendees/non attendees  were contacted after the event to follow up and further enquiries required assignment to the appropriate sales team.

Now this event was an annual conference and the workflows and matrices were relatively complex and intensive and required tailoring to the clients needs. But in many companies, especially in retail where volumes are high the general lead management process is equally or yet more complex.  Campaigns may last a few weeks or a few days. The workflow for a campaign may not be reusable having been tailored so specifically.

As a result the workflow required for modern campaign and lead management is most often beyond the scope of a standard CRM package. They are not designed  for project based “throw-away” workflow.

This leaves a huge gap. Campaigns often start life as a record within a CRM system but it is then necessary to move to another system or agency to run the campaign. Then leads need to be import back into the CRM system – possibly losing vital information. Only then can the leads be assigned and generate opportunities.

We have been helping companies run campaigns such as this for the past  8 years. We know that the limits of campaign management in CRM systems. We have helped plug this gap for many successful companies. Whilst CRM vendors continue to rely on static and inflexible workflow management techniques the need for services such as ours will remain necessary and lead management will continue to be the poor relation.

Marketing is about change. It’s the nature of the job. We are constantly trying to re-invent the way we present ourselves/our companies. Marketers are judged on their creativity and it is likely to consume all your time and effort. Creativity has always been the most highly prized skill. But recruiting marketers with the right credentials and experience seems to be well nigh impossible. Some research says that 95% of companies are finding it difficult to recruit the skills required.

It appears that training for marketers is still light on the technical aspects of marketing including: Digital marketing, eMarketing, Social marketing, Data Protection legislation, building communities. Courses do cover these aspects but its no good having a great idea if you have no idea how or if it will work in practice.

Marketing has become a more  technical discipline.  You either need technicians with marketing acumen or marketers with a technical bent. This is where providing a Marketing Operations service to marketers has been successful. It’s a blend of the right skills. Our agency model allows marketers an interface  they know and understand.

If we are expecting marketers to perform creative summersaults everyday they need to understand the deeper technicalities of marketing. The lack of appropriate skills and the rapid changes in marketing techniques reinforce the need for services provided by CRM.