CRM Archives - align.me

5 tools you should be using for sales & marketing

They say a good tool improves the way you work, but a great tool improves the way you think. In the digital era, this has never been truer. Within the exciting world of sales and marketing, there is no shortage of tools, and the rate of which these tools are evolving is both intimidating and inspiring. It’s impossible to have them all and keep up – regardless of resources or budget. And it’s also completely unnecessary. If you can find the few that will have the most impact and add the most value, you’ll be setting yourself READ MORE ›

By Ary Nagrath|Strategy|

How CRM customisation affects your B2B sales and marketing success

When you make a sale, the details of that sale can be used to create more sales opportunities. You want to know who the buyer is and what they need, so you can upsell and cross sell. You want to know why they needed your product or service so you can sell to others like them. And you want to know how they found you so you can reach others in the same way. On the other hand, you also want to know the how’s and why’s of prospects that leak, so you can adjust your approach READ MORE ›

By Brittany Shipton|Tactics|

Buyer readiness stages: How to make your content work harder

The probability of closing a marketing lead is 46% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM to use customised stages. This goes up by another 28% if those renamed stages are buyer-readiness stages, not seller-activity stages. But only 24% of marketers make this change. Why? And what are the buyer readiness stages, anyway? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfrLc8gLgZY In our sales and marketing alignment study published a couple of years ago, we found that only 24% of marketers had changed the stage names from the out-of-the-box configuration given by the CRM vendors to buyer readiness stages (the stages READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Evergreen|

How to find contact details for your ideal target market

I want leads, I want their names, and I want it now. There's a strategic piece to this and a tactical piece to this. I'm going to show you today some of our favourite tactics for finding the right names and the right buyers. But along the way I am going to argue very strongly that you need to get the strategy right first and then I'll show you how we get the names. Well there's a strategic piece to this; of course, I need to have the right buyers - people who are likely to have READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Tactics, Velocity|

Why you should align your CRM stage names to the Buyers’ Journey

If the probability of closing a marketing lead is 28% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM stages, and 88% higher if those new stages are buyer stages not seller stages, why do only 24% of marketers make this change? In this blog, Hugh explains the Buyer's Journey - a phrase he coined in 2003 when he wrote The Leaky Funnel - and makes concrete suggestions about how to name the lead and opportunity stages in your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Evergreen|

Is your CRM System a Sales Prevention System?

Most sales organisations have some sort of CRM system in place. Many have made significant investments in the system. Yet simply implementing CRM – just like just running a sales training course – offers no “magic wand” for improving sales performance. In fact the energies expended on them are often wasted. Time after time, we come across Customer Relationship Management solutions that bear little or no relation to how a vendors’ most promising prospects actually buy, or what the vendors’ top performing sales people actually do. There are 5 danger signs that indicate that a CRM system READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Alignment, Sales, Tactics, Velocity|

Maximising CRM investment to drive productivity and return

(Too) Many sales organisations undertake a CRM strategy and associated hefty investment, and then when the software vendors come on site to undertake their (too) often “generic customisation”, the purchasing sales organisation is jolted into a process that forces them to retro-think about the functionality and the process support that can be derived from their investment. This common egg-and-chicken scenario usually results in one or two forms of investment sub-optimisation: Paying for functionality embedded in the system that is unnecessary but the organisation was not well prepared to say they didn’t want it; Conversely, they don’t adequately tailor READ MORE ›

By Glenn Guilfoyle|Alignment, Sales, Tactics, Velocity|

Hugh Macfarlane to present keynote at CRM Acceleration

February 21st, Melbourne, VIC, AU – align.me CEO & Founder, Hugh Macfarlane, has accepted an invitation from Sugar CRM to provide a keynote presentation at CRM Acceleration in Sydney and Melbourne this March. Hugh’s keynote will address ‘How to Make Your Funnel Flow Faster with SugarCRM.' SugarCRM provides open source CRM software used by over 7,000 customers, and more than 1 million users for executing marketing and sales strategies. The two four-hour seminars will cover successful CRM strategy and implementation. Event details: 2ndMarch 2011, 2pm – 6pm, Stamford Plaza, Melbourne. 4thMarch 2011, 2pm – 6pm, Kirribili Club, READ MORE ›

By Clare Anderson|Alignment, News, Tactics, Velocity|

Why you need to protect existing client relationships

Eddie Smith, Founder of Sales Schematics Australia, writes... Increase your business with existing accounts Many companies make the mistake of concentrating too hard on winning new business instead of cultivating additional business with their existing clients. The matrix below explains the notion that selling existing products and services into existing relationships is the easiest sale to make. After all, if your client is familiar and comfortable with your offering, they’re more likely to increase their business with you. Furthermore, selling new products and services into these existing accounts is also a relatively easy sale to make. Existing products/services READ MORE ›

By Eddie Smith|Alignment, Tactics, Velocity|

Don’t ask sales people to record Salesforce history

We all know of the power of a good CRM, chock-full of history about every interaction your business has had with any contact, account or opportunity. Your marketing automation system probably plugs in beautifully to your CRM so that the buyer actions and your automated responses are all recorded. Marketing nirvana? Maybe not. Half of the problem is that most record only YOUR actions, not THEIR responses. The power of knowing how buyers have acted, what they are interested in, what they have read, how they responded to survey questions is obvious, but many businesses stop at READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, B2B marketing blog, Tactics, Velocity|