Tag: CRM

Marketing Your Business without Paid Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Building strong relationships with influencers in your niche is a tenet of Marketing 101. The folks you connect with can not only provide terrific insights about your target market, but they can also help get your brand in front of potential customers. Nobody understands this strategy better than Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. A pioneer of CRM (customer relationship management), Jon firmly believes in the power of connecting with influencers on a personal level. His company strives to help marketers reach consumers through social influencers on a variety of online platforms. As the world of social media continues to expand, Jon offers advice on how companies can break through to their target audiences by networking with trusted advisors.

Jon explains that in order to reach your audience, you must look beyond it. People would rather buy a product or service that’s recommended to them by somebody they trust, and that’s where social influencers come in.

Nimble, a social selling software, lets its influencers talk about the brand to its target audience, rather than toot its own horn. “I think it’s more powerful when other people talk about you than when you talk about you,” Jon proclaims.

Jon began marketing Nimble not by talking about how great his brand is, but by adding value. Whenever he found a great article from a relevant influencer, he would share it on social media. Jon states, “Once the influencer who wrote that content reached out and thanked me, I then reeled them in and started a conversation.” Many of those conversations turned into relationships, which in turn resulted in more clients for his brand.

Jon’s example shows that by giving a little, you can get big returns providing more proof that we are in what I call “The Give to Get Economy.” Jon even goes so far as to say, “I think service is the new selling… Even if it means recommending somebody else’s product, that’s social selling.” Jon bases his business model on this message, and believes that “giving to get” is the future of marketing.

Jon’s doctrine has significantly expanded Nimble’s footprint. “As you see it, share it,” he says. “So that’s the way I built the Nimble brand…by identifying the influencers, sharing their content, engaging with the people that responded and engaged with those influencers as they’re responding, and turning them into evangelists.”

When getting in touch with influencers, Jon makes a point to genuinely connect with them rather than advertise to them outright. He’s been teaching salespeople to get to know the people they do business with from day one. Whenever we meet a new potential connection, Jon urges us to look around that person’s office and take note of the books or knickknacks. Jon says, “All those things are opportunities for you to discover things that you might have in common with that person to develop the intimacy and trust that you need in order to get that person to open up to you about their business issues, which as professionals you could then solve.”

 

The Future of CRM + AI (Live from PegaWorld)

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Every now and again, we like to switch things up here at Renegade Thinkers Unite. The Q&A below is a sample from an insightful—and completely impromptu—podcast I recorded live from PegaWorld with Jeff Nicholson, VP of Product Marketing at Pegasystems. Jeff is a frequent presenter at industry conferences, and for good reason, with expertise in the realm of CRM, real-time marketing, artificial intelligence and more. (If you’d like to listen to the podcast, click here.)

Drew: For my aunt who is not as tech savvy as you are, what the heck is CRM?

Jeff: Well, it’s really interesting what you’re asking. What should CRM be is a very different thing from what CRM has been in the past. In the past, CRM had been sold to businesses—it stands for customer relationship management, and it’s been called that for a long, long time. The problem is that it actually didn’t do that. It was sold as this kind of relationship in a box: you just turned it on, and great things will happen. In practice, though, that “R” in CRM really turned out to be nothing more than the word “record.” They turned out to be customer record management systems in practice, and that’s part of the reason why this space is so ripe for reinvention and needs it, quite frankly. If you look at the CRM systems that have been sold over the past decade, the systems are just for managing customer contact details in querying and reporting on details, and some do a better job at managing the information than others. Many businesses actually have several different CRM systems, to make matters even worse, because it gives you different versions of the truth. So when your aunt calls that contact center or goes to the Web site, there’s a reason why her information’s disconnected. It isn’t there. As she moves across channels to a mobile app—because maybe you’re Aunt likes mobile apps—or tweets, or goes to Facebook Messenger; There’s a reason why people’s experiences are disconnected. There’s a reason why it does take so long to get resolution to the issues. And that’s because customer record management systems were never designed to solve that problem.

Drew: So where are we today with CRM? What is state of the art?

Jeff: So there’s an interesting sea change happening right now and it starts not with the industry but with the customer. All customers are empowered. You have a very slick looking mobile phone right there. Your aunt has one. We all have them. We are digital and often digital first. Where it’s getting interesting is the customers are demanding a better experience. They’re comparing the experience from every brand to the last best experience they’ve had, regardless of the brand or the industry. So the walls have come down in terms of who you’re competing with, in terms of experience. This has got a lot of businesses scrambling to figure out how they can somehow figure this out.

Drew: If you want to be cutting edge right now, what does AI mean?

Jeff: Well, if you are trying to get results right now, I think the key was almost in your question. What it means is you have to get a strategy in place now. AI in the years past has been something that has been large. It has been something that took you six months, 12 months or longer to stand up and get running, let alone getting business results. Those days are no longer palatable or practical, and frankly, they no longer are enough. If you’re a business right now that is not applying AI technologies (particularly large enterprises) you’re simply behind.

Building Beautiful Customer Loyalty

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In episode 10, my guest Ryan Linders provides a rare glimpse into the initial phases of building a customer loyalty program from scratch. You’ll learn how Linders got the program off the ground and how Sally Beauty provides value to customers and gets it back in terms of membership fees and on-going purchase loyalty.

What’s particularly instructive is how Sally Beauty uses email with a genuine sensitivity to customer needs. While the tendency of the direct marketer is to push out offers at a heavy frequency, Ryan and his team temper their efforts to make sure they aren’t overwhelming their valued customers and or interrupting their natural purchase cycle.  Part of the solution here is to make sure in addition to email address, you have purchase data that will allow you to segment the database and increase the relevance of each interaction.