Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Marketing. Web-to-Print. Warehouse Management.
CRM Enhancement: Search for Contacts by Date Range
Posted by 
on Monday, June 13, 2011 
at 12:16 PM 
in We are happy to announce that we’ve recently released an enhancement to our already powerful contact management search features within ilinkONE Version 8. Customers can now search for contacts by filtering user-defined fields for specific date ranges.
How does this work?
Users of ilinkONE Version 8 have the ability to create their own user-defined contact fields. These are used to store various data fields and types that are meaningful to each specific customer but that do not come by default within our software.
Previously, users could search for specific values (i.e. give me everyone that has a value for one specific date) or simply on whether a contact has data in that field. This most recent enhancement of allowing users to search by entering a date range absolutely provides more flexibility.
No doubt, this feature will open up opportunities for solutions based on the Date-related data that users have within our system — perhaps to send messages (via email, SMS/Text, print) based on a Birthday, an Anniversary date, a Registration date, and more.
We hope that you find this enhancement beneficial.
Using Social CRM to Build Relationships
How well do your sales reps truly know your company’s top prospects?
Have they learned what they currently know by a few phone calls? Perhaps one or two face-to-face meetings? Did they perhaps pick up a newsworthy tidbit while chatting to a person in the middle of a crowded trade show floor?
All of that information can be valuable. It should also end up in your CRM’s system.
But is it possible for your company to learn more? Can you gain more relevant information, almost in real-time?
The answer is yes to both questions.
Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another social network, chances are very good that a a fair amount of your prospects are on at least one of those channels. Each channel has the potential to offer valuable information that can benefit a rep during the sales process.
- Facebook might help provide deeper insight into someone’s personal interests. Are they a major fan of sports or art? Are they absolutely giddy over their child”s accomplishments? Do they have a “secret” life as a drummer in a band?
- Twitter might help you to keep tabs on someone’s business-related trips. It might also help you to gain a greater understanding of the topics that they are truly passionate about? (What topics do they frequently tweet or RT about?)
- LinkedIn may help you to discover shared business connections.
The list of potential data points and insights that can be gained from social networks certainly goes beyond that. It will also continue to grow.
Are your marketing and sales folks finding ways to access that information and put it to use?
Mobile Improvements for Your Business
Mobile is certainly a channel that businesses are paying more attention to with each passing day. Investments are being made to help companies use mobile for external-focused tasks (i.e. finding prospects, communicating with customers). But it also can provide benefits to internal processes.
Here are two areas that companies could look at when figuring out how existing business processes could be improved thanks to mobile:
CRM
Raise your hand if your company’s database of customers and prospects is perfect………… Not there yet, are we? 
Certainly, we all are willing to say that our efforts would be more successful if we had better data. Our marketing campaigns would deliver greater ROI; our sales-cycle would be shortened, etc.
One way to develop a better database is to make it easier for your employees to populate it. Can your sales reps easily update a contact’s record from their mobile device after they’ve left an on-site meeting? Do they have the ability to add prospects to the system the night of a trade show, or are they waiting until they get back to the office next week?
In cases like those, mobile can certainly be the channel that contributes to a better database.
Reporting
Travel budgets may not be the same as they once were. But that doesn’t mean that travel to conferences, trade shows, and other events has stopped. Rather, in many cases it means that the bosses and management folks are traveling, but they’re leaving the worker-bees at home.
In those cases, how easy is it for your traveling team to access key reports? Can they hop on their phone to check on the sales pipeline without actually placing a call? Can they view a status report on open projects without chasing down representatives from each department?
Of course, being able to view critical reports quickly truly applies to all employees. Because mobile phones allow us to access channels such as email and social media 24-7, we may find that we are expected to do just that. In those cases where the minutes are absolutely precious, ensuring that your team can easily access the right information will earn a lot of goodwill — and increase productivity.
Customer Relationships Improve With Data Integration
When it comes to the world of clipart, the “database” is never really portrayed as a beautiful thing.
That really is a shame… When used properly, a database filled with integrated data can help provide absolutely relevant information to a company about their customers & prospects at exactly the right moment.
In many cases today, though, businesses choose to purchase point systems. One program does their email marketing; another one does PURLs; then there’s their CRM tool, etc. Yes, each customer and prospect might live separately in all 3 of those system’s database.
Now that is less than ideal! Is there a better way to do it?
DMNews published an article this month from our CEO, John Foley, Jr. The article is titled “Customer Relationships Improve With Data Integration“.
If you are looking for ways to better communicate and provide value to the people that are important to your business, this article may help.
(80) Comments
Tags article, best practices, CRM, data, integration, john foley, News, prospects, relationships Does your CRM help you deliver personalized communications?
“Dear [ContactFName],”
If I led every blog post with a personalized greeting, do you think you would read them more frequently? Most likely the answer is no. We may appreciate the “touch”, but the simple personalization of displaying a person’s First Name may not necessarily be enough to convince them to read the rest of the content.
WhatTheyThink published an article recently on “Having the Capability to Personalize Communications is Not Enough Today“.
It is a good read. You may need to register to read the article; but if you are involved with print or other forms of marketing, the subscription fee is well worth it.
If it’s not enough to simply have the capability to personalize communications, what do you need?
Well — let’s talk about one absolute: You need data!
You need to try to learn more than a person’s name, or which company they currently work for. In order to deliver content that is truly relevant to them, you need to find out what they are interested in when it comes to their career. It may be important to know some items from the past (where did they used to work?). It’s important to know where they want to take their business in the next 6 months, 12 months, and beyond. It also can help to know what they care about outside of their job. If you can determine that something such as music, sports, books, family, friends, or something else excites their passions, you can put that data to use to appeal to them.
Of course, while you may agree that those are important data points to fill, the question is – how do you get them?
Think about this for a second… When you are on the phone (not a conference call) with a prospect or customer for more than 5 minutes, I guarantee that you talk about something other than the task at hand. Even if you only “shoot the breeze” during the call for 30 seconds out of the 5 minutes, you usually can pick up some important detail that helps to provide relevant background information about that person.
Well, what do you with that info? Perhaps you feel pretty strongly about the capability of your memory. Sure, maybe you will be able to draw upon one of those points the next time you see the person. However, does that really help your marketing team deliver personalized emails or mailers?
Here’s a different idea — when you are on the phone with them, open up your CRM application. Search for their contact record, and enter a new Note. Type in what you’ve learned. If you can’t do it at that exact moment, then find some way to enter the data shortly afterwards. Perhaps you can enter the data easily on your smartphone… or maybe you can ask an Admin at your office to handle the task for you.
The bottom line is this — if our marketing database is thin, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have access to more data than we’ve ever had before. We can learn things about people through social media channels. We learn things about them at conferences, conventions, and trade shows. We learn things about people from their friends and associates that we may have in common.
We have access to the information, and we must take steps to record it.
If we have the data, then we have taken one major step in the direction of truly delivering personalized communications.
Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DATA_CARTRIDGE.jpg
