What is Smarketing?

What is Smarketing?

Smarketing refers to the practice of aligning Sales and Marketing teams in order to achieve a common organizational objective. This helps reach a synergy between both teams which work together as one team instead of treating each other as separate departments.



Why do organizations need Smarketing?

As per conventional organization structure, Sales and Marketing are organized under different departments. Due to this, both teams tend to work in siloes. When related teams work in siloes, it leads to a lack of effective communication leading to lower overall productivity. 

If the Marketing team is not aligned with the Sales team’s requirements, then this can lead to lower conversion because of low-quality Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL). Similarly, if the Sales team is not aligned with the Marketing team’s approach then this can lead to situations such as the loss of qualified leads due to a misunderstanding of client’s requirements or leads lost due to non-timely follow-ups, etc.

This necessitates that both teams work together and align their efforts toward their common objective for the benefit of the organization, be it increasing revenue or improving branding in order to increase better brand recall in the market.


How to align Sales & Marketing?

  • Improve access to information: Teams tend to be misaligned if both of them do not have shared understanding and information. Lack of communication happens when teams do not have the appropriate information and insights needed to support each other. Organizations should bring together both teams under the same umbrella with shared information. Using smarter tools such as CRM can help teams achieve that since they can get quick access to information they need to support each other.

  • Cross-functional teams: Instead of making Sales and Marketing operate independently under separate leadership, try to bring together professionals from both teams to work in smaller teams together. If this is not possible, then leaders can try to build a matrix structure where resources tend to experience working together with cross-functional teams. This helps build better bonding with team members and they tend to align their efforts toward common goals.
  • Communicate the Vision: Leaders should constantly communicate the common objective to both teams in order to keep the Sales and Marketing aligned. Communicating the goal and letting them know the expectation goes a long way in aligning two different departments.
  • Measure and Analyze regularly: Leaders should measure and closely analyze the efforts and performance of both teams. The best practice would be to have common meetings with both teams in order to keep everyone on the same page. 
  • Use good collaboration tools: Try to use good collaboration tools which improve communication with both teams. Tools such as cloud tools like Google Docs, Google sheets, Cloud-based CRMs, Instant chat messengers, etc, can help with that.


I hope this article helped you gain a better understanding of Smarketing, its importance, and some ways to achieve that.  By the way, if you are looking for a smart CRM for your team, do check out ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM.


What is Lead Nurturing and How to do it?

Lead Nurturing refers to the act of engaging with the your leads in order to develop a relationship. The purpose of lead nurturing is to create brand awareness and create a positive brand image of your organization in the minds of the prospect. 


Lead nurturing may not lead to immediate improvement in sales revenue figures. The objective of lead nurturing is not outright sales but to play a long term game of building brand trust and loyalty. 


Most of the leads which usually fall on the top of the marketing funnel are usually not ready to make a purchase immediately. Nurturing them helps to build an everlasting relationship due to which, whenever the prospect is ready to make a purchase, they shall choose your organization's products or services to make the purchase.



How to Nurture Leads?


Nurturing leads usually means engaging with the leads at various stages of his buying journey. This can be achieved by providing them the much needed information to solve his pain points. 


Buyers may have a needs of different types of information depending on the stage of his buying journey. Top of the funnel leads might be looking for information about his specific pain point awareness while the bottom of the funnel leads might have already done their research and would be in the stage of evaluating and comparing different products which may include yours as well as competitors' products. The goal of nurturing should be to quench the thirst of information for various leads depending on the stage of their buyer's journey.



Some of the ways by which you can nurture your leads are preparing contents around the pain points you are solving, the challenges faced in the Industry to which you are catering to, and the solutions which you offer to solve those pain points and challenges.


You can write blogs, prepare whitepapers, ebooks, social media posts, email newsletters, run sequence based email marketing campaigns, etc. One of the simplest approaches is also to create user guides or knowledgebase of your products which are available in the public domain or can be accessed easily via an email opt-in form. 


You may also try out by writing on topics which lead your customers to succeed. For e.g. ToolsonCloud is Sales CRM which helps to improve sales productivity of sales teams. This motivated us to write on topics which help our customers to improve their sales and sales productivity.



Sharing contents regularly to the leads serves two purposes. Firstly showing up regularly ensures that leads feel you are alive and they can trust you for a long term engagement. Secondly, when they find the content to be helpful for them to make purchase related research and decisions, it builds much needed brand awareness and builds loyalty.



I hope you liked reading this article, do let me know your thoughts on this.


By the way, If you run a startup or a small business and are looking for a Sales CRM software to track your leads better, then do try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. You will definitely love using it.



What is ATL, BTL and TTL Advertising?

If you are into Marketing, then you will surely come across the 3 terms ATL, BTL and TTL advertising. Do you know what exactly these 3 terms are and how they work?

By the way, these three terms were initially introduced by Proctor and Gamble (P&G) in the 1950s when they started paying differential rates to their marketing agencies based on the different categories of advertising being undertaken. 

In this post, we shall discover these three categories or strategies for advertising.


Marketing Image by Freepik


1. Above the Line (ATL)

Above the Line strategy primarily involves promotional communications which are broader in nature and have a large reach. The goal of this approach is widespread brand awareness in order to build a good Brand image and Goodwill in the market. Since it is done on a large scale, It is usually not targeted or focussed on any particular market segment.

This strategy may not generate any kind of instant sale or an instant intent to buy among the consumers but may generate awareness and interest over time.

Some of the examples of this strategy include Nationwide broadcasts on TV, Newspapers, Radio, Magazines, etc.


2. Below the Line (BTL)

Below the Line (BTL) promotional approach is more focussed and is targeted towards a particular segment. This strategy is used when the primary goal of advertising is to increase conversion. This is more aligned with a direct approach to marketing.

Some of the examples of this approach include Geo Localized Ads, Direct Marketing, PR, etc.

Here, Geo Localized Ads may include Billboards, Fliers, etc. In the case of Direct Marketing, it may include Targeted Email Marketing, Social Media Ads, SMS, Telecalling, Pamphlets, etc. 

PR may also be adopted in this case, but it has to be targeted and focussed Press releases.

In addition to the above examples, Sampling, In-store promotions, Visual Merchandising is also widely practiced. 


3. Through the Line (TTL)

Through the Line (TTL) approach is more of an integrated approach. In this approach, both ATL and BTL strategies are combined to generate interest and drive conversions. This strategy aims for 360-degree marketing. The brand tries to be present at every touchpoint in the customer's journey throughout their buying process..

Some of the examples of this strategy include TV, Newspaper, Social media posts, Contextual ads, emails, etc.

Hope this post will help you plan out your advertising strategy. Do let me know your thoughts.


By the way, If you are interested in trying out CRM software for your team, do check out ToolsonCloud CRM. It's free!

 How to prepare a Marketing Plan?

As a Marketing Manager or a Chief Marketing Officer at your organization, periodically you may be required to prepare a Marketing Plan presentation to various business stakeholders as well as your team. If you are not sure of how to go about it, then read this post to learn about the key elements of a perfect Marketing Plan.

Typically, your presentation should include these 10 pointers with each one in a separate slide.


Image credits - Get2Growth


1. Business Information

Include a brief summary of the business, your products, the industry you cater to and type of customers you sell your products to. This slide may appear redundant at first, but if you are a CMO presenting the plan to a group of Investors or board of directors who have been onboarded recently, then you may need this. Also if you are a Marketing consultant or an agency hired to do marketing for another business, then you may definitely need this slide so as to keep your team on the same page.


2. Define Goals

In this slide, try to define your long term and short term marketing goals. Ensure to keep reasonable yet challenging goals. You may use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) framework for creating goals. Having a clearly defined goal helps other business stakeholders and business unit heads to be aligned with your Goals and they shall align their departmental activities accordingly. 


3. SWOT Analysis

Before you go big bang executing any marketing plan, you should do a deep dive of your internal and external situation as well as current and future potential. Keep a slide with SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of the business from a marketing perspective.


4. Competitive Analysis

Before planning out your marketing strategy, you may want to do a deep dive on the competitors who work in the similar space as yours. Explore what they are doing for Marketing, their standing in the market, comparison against your offerings, etc. In short you may want to have a summarized SWOT and key points you want to highlight to the stakeholders about the market competition.


5. Target Market

Often, marketing teams put a lot of efforts on marketing yet fail to get any traction or interest from prospects. Most of the time, the root cause of this problem lies in incorrect targeting. They tend to choose the wrong marketing channel which appears cool yet has little or no one from your ideal customer profile. Define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and then commit to your Target Market. Include this slide in your marketing plan presentation to keep everyone on the same page.


6. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

When you start executing marketing campaigns, you may start getting a flow of leads who might be interested in your offerings. But often the deciding factor which helps your sales team to close the deal is a unique selling proposition which is attractive from the buyer's perspective. Define your USP and include it in the marketing plan. This will help the stakeholders from the Sales team to stay aligned and they would be able to provide their inputs during the presentation to iteratively carve out a perfect marketing plan.


7. Marketing Strategy

Use this slide in your deck to write about your Marketing strategy. This slide should be in line with the classic 4Ps of Marketing which are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. In case you are involved in a Service Business, then you may want to include another 3Ps of service marketing which are People, Process and Physical Evidence. Having a marketing strategy clearly defined under these heads prevents you and your team from getting misaligned and going off the track in future.


8. Marketing Channels

Distribution plays a crucial role in marketing execution. You may have the best product in the world with the best marketing content, yet it may fail due to bad distribution. The organizations who invest in building marketing channels and distribution tend to sustain longer in the business. Keep a small slider with your plans around marketing channels you want to pursue. 


9. KPIs for measuring progress

Lots of execution without performance measurement prevents you from getting to know what works and what doesn’t. Having a defined set of KPIs to measure your efforts and outcomes will help you deep dive into what works for you and where you may need to pivot in order to get expected outcome. Have a plan to monitor the KPIs frequently, say weekly, biweekly or monthly as per your context. Keep these KPIs in your slide so that your team will commit to meet those KPIs and align their efforts accordingly.


10. Conclusion & Summary

At the end, you can have a short conclusion and summary about your marketing plan to close the presentation.


Hope you found this post useful to prepare a marketing plan presentation. 

If you are looking for CRM software to help you track and manage your leads, deals, contacts, then do check out ToolsonCloud CRM which also comes with a free plan for startups.


 How to generate B2B Leads organically?

If you are into a business involving B2B clients, then you have landed at the right post. In this article, we will explore how you can generate B2B leads for your business via organic approaches.

Here is what you can do to get organic B2B leads…

    


 

1. Linkedin Outreach

Join Linkedin groups in your similar domain or groups having people with similar profiles as your ideal customer profile. Next, send them a connection request to add to your network. After a few days of the connection, you may send them a cold message for a short discovery call. You may be required to warm up your connection a bit for a few days with your LinkedIn posts to avoid getting ignored when you send a cold message.


2. Business Marketplace/Forums

If you sell a known B2B product that is not too complex to understand and doesn’t require an elevator pitch, then you may try this. Look out for joining various online marketplaces and forums dealing with B2B businesses. You will find B2B buyers and sellers in these marketplaces who are genuinely looking for both buy and sell business opportunities.


3. Join professional networking platforms

If you are a startup or building any B2B products for startups, then you may join professional networking platforms such as angel.co or other startup networking platforms. Try to network with various startup founders and executives to create a connection and get business opportunities.


4. In-person Business conferences

You may look out for various offline/In-person business conferences being organized in your Industry domain by various media houses, industry bodies, trade unions, government, etc. These conferences are attended by the leaders and executives of various companies with the sole motive of networking with fellow business leaders for business opportunities.


5. Cold Outreach like Cold Emails, Cold Calling

You may reach out to various businesses via Cold emails and Cold calls. If you are dealing with small and medium businesses, then you may get their contacts from various online business directories as well as their websites. If you are dealing with a large organization, then you may have to work a bit more to get the contact details of their stakeholders. 


6. Inbound Marketing/Content Marketing

Create the content on the topics around your business. This will attract readers who might be interested in your business. You may create content on Blogs, Social Media, Youtube, write Industry research papers, Whitepapers, Case studies, ebooks, etc. Ensure to write content that is useful to the readers having your ideal customer persona. 

Also, an important element of content marketing is to build distribution. If you do not plan out distribution well, then you may create high-quality content, but there won’t be anybody to read those contents immediately. This creates a longer feedback loop. So, whenever you create content, try to distribute it at more and more channels in order to reach more readers instantly.


7. Short Video Marketing 

In recent years, usage of short video apps such as Tiktok, Reels, Youtube shorts has skyrocketed making them yet another largest marketing channel. Short video platforms were initially apt for B2C products, however, in the recent past, it is becoming equally good for B2B business opportunities. You can make short video clips about your products to attract more B2B leads.

Also, read- Instagram Reels Ideas for Small Businesses


8. Tender Marketplaces/Portals/Blogs

There are some marketplaces that regularly publish tenders of government as well as public companies. This brings you a good opportunity to directly go ahead and bid on existing business opportunities without going through the hassles of business development efforts. 

Also read one of our case studies on How to get Organic leads using Social Media


I hope you liked reading this post. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for your business to track your leads, do check out ToolsonCloud CRM. It comes with a free plan for startups.



What is AIDA model in Marketing?

AIDA is one of the well-known advertising models in Marketing which identifies the journey of the buyer across different stages of the buying process before he or she actually becomes your customer.

AIDA stands for

A - Awareness

I - Interest

D - Desire

A - Action.

AIDA model


Let us explore all these 4 stages in detail:

1. Awareness

In this initial stage, the brand's goal is to create awareness about its product or service among its target audience in order to generate potential interest in the future. In practice, it may involve exposing your brands, multiple times in front of the target audience. This is because nowadays consumers are exposed to a lot of content, so in order to generate interest, a brand may have to retarget its audience with multiple touchpoints in order to be able to generate qualified interest.


2. Interest

At this stage of the buyer's journey, brands try to create an interest in the benefits of the products & services they offer. The goal in this stage is to generate sufficient interest among the customer so that can get started with researching further about the line of product or services you are offering.


3. Desire

During this stage of the buyer's journey, the buyer has already done some amount of research on the similar products or services available in your line of business. In this stage, they express a desire towards your brand and they express an intent to engage with you. This may be the result of your unique brand personality with which they are able to connect. This is usually due to a combination of multiple factors such as your product features, unique selling point, brand positioning, past credibility, etc.


4. Action

At this stage, the buyer is ready to take an action leading to the purchase. In this stage, the buyer is also considered to be a HOT lead. The buyer usually takes the next step such as the purchase of your product (in case it is a standalone product available for outright purchase without any help), or they may connect with you for a callback, meeting, demo, etc.


I hope this article makes the AIDA model clear to you. 

If you are looking for a CRM with lead management features to help you track your leads through various stages of a lead funnel, feel free to try our cloud-based Sales CRM tool.

Try ToolsonCloud CRM today, It's Free!


See you in the next post!



Attention Grabbing Advertising - Huawei Style
With so many similar products down in the market, it's difficult for Sales and Marketing Managers to grab customer's attention. Time demands innovative and attention-grabbing advertising approaches to get a share of customer's attention.

One such strategy can be learned from Huawei where it bumped in front of Apple store in Singapore and created an everlasting memory in the minds of the people there and everywhere in the world because of the news going viral.
Complete guide to Social CRM

What is Social CRM?

Social CRM refers to approach of managing customer relationship by using Social media as the channel to listen and engage with Customers.

In CRM Software context, when a traditional CRM is integrated with your social media channels to help you manage your customer relationships from social media channels, it is termed as Social CRM.


Need for Social CRM:

Marketers tends to make mistake of thinking Social Media platforms as the place to only broadcast their social media posts and drive traffic. 

But there is more to it. Social Media should be used for more for listening to the customers or prospects and engaging with them. 

Social CRM Landscape


Some associated facts:

As per a 2017, Techwire Asia article 
  • 95% of customer complaints on social media don’t reach companies.
  • 1/3rd of all customer complaints on social media are ignored.
  • 80% of surveyed companies said they deliver exceptional customer service on social media but only 8% of their customers agreed on the same.
  • 63% customers expect companies to offer customer service on Social media channels.
  • 90% of social media users used social media to engage/communicate with a brand.
  • When people get responses on social media, they are 30% more likely to recommend a brand to others.
  • Implementing a good Social CRM could help improve annual revenue by 81% through referrals as well as reduce customer churn by helping you improve customer retention up to 92%.

Benefits of social crm for sales teams:

  • Increase in Lead Inflow: Sales teams get to generate more leads from Social Media.
  • Hot Leads: The Leads from social media are mostly comes from referrals via viral posts or comments from their friends thus they are far more likely to convert.
  • Reduced Sales Cycle: The leads from Social Media are informed prospects, hence the sales cycle duration reduces thus helping in faster sales conversion.
  • Multichannel Selling: Modern Social Media platforms are also equipped with sales store front. Thus Social CRM helps track the sales or leads getting generated from multiple social media channels and bring it together inside one single CRM, thus enabling the organization towards multi-channel sales.

Benefits of social crm for Marketing team:

  • Better Customer Segmentation: Social CRM contains a lot of customer demographic information from social media. It helps the Marketers in better customer segmentation and enables them to create more contextual and personalized marketing campaigns.
  • Instant Feedback & Sentiment Analysis: Customers find it easier to interact on social media comments and messengers compared to usual email or ticket based communication on website. Social CRM is helping the Marketers get more up-to date real-time customer sentiments and feedback about their products and services from social media. This helps them improve their product and service offerings. Also it helps them optimize & improve their marketing communications.

Benefits of social crm for service teams:

  • Customer Issue Resolution: Sometimes Customers use social media channel as an escalation mechanism if they are not happy with the resolution provided by your usual service help desk. This shall help Service teams take the issue on priority and shall help them transfer the ticket to a more experienced customer service rep to take it to satisfactory closure. 
  • Process Improvement and Knowledge base Development: With social media sentiments on the issues, you get to understand certain frequently occurring issues which are painful for your customers. This data helps you do deep dive towards improving your customer resolution process better and improves you’re the knowledge base documentations for your service teams to serve future similar issues better.
  • Ease of Connect: Whenever customers are unable to get certain help with your product and services from available public sources, they find it easier to interact with their brands via social media or on your social media community to find answers to their queries.

Things to look for in a social crm:

  • Integration: Features such as Integration with top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
  • Analytics & Insights: The platform should be equipped to extract data from your social media channels to give you reports, analytics and actionable real-time insights on what is working out versus what is not working.
  • Social Media Management: It should let you manage your multiple social media accounts from one single platform such as post scheduling, comment and message notifications. Primarily it should equip you with Listening, Publishing and Engagement on your social channel.
  • Team Collaboration: It should offer a collaborative way of working so that you can add your team members in the application and work together.

Advances in Social CRM:

  • Automated Chat bots for answering to user messages, product enquiries, frequently asked questions sent on Social Media messengers.
  • Follower tracking features which lets you track lost followers in addition to new followers. Source of followers such as organic vs paid.
  • RoI Insights such on Organic Impressions vs Paid Impressions.
  • Budget based alerts and controls on Paid Social Media campaigns.
  • Integration with Video meeting platforms such as Skype, Zoom, Slack , etc, to take up instant product demo, calls or meetings with prospect.
  • Integration with document storage platforms to automatically sync and store artifacts related to key client conversations.
  • Social media sales workflow for automating many repeatable sales processes associated with new lead capture and nurturing via social media channels.
  • Ability to pull contact and other information from Prospect’s social media public profiles such as LinkedIn, Public databases, etc.

If you liked reading this post, Do comment below and let me know your thoughts. 

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Looking for a Sales CRM? Try ToolsOnCloud CRM for free


What is Net Promoter Score and how to calculate it?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an Industry recognized benchmark score for measuring Customer Engagement and Loyalty. Compared to conventional customer satisfaction survey scores, NPS helps you more, by giving a measure of Customer Advocacy. 

You can scale up your business at hyper scale growth if your customer does your sales and marketing for you instead of you going behind prospects to win deals. An Ideal Marketing strategist should build the product and the ecosystem around it in such a way that the customer should like using your product and in addition to that customer should recommend your products & services to other customers in their network. When your customers become your army of influencers or advertisers, your growth is going to be 10X. Customers are more likely to buy something recommended by an existing user than by blindly going on the words of a sales rep. 

NPS tells us how likely is your customer willing to recommend your product & services to another colleague or a friend.


How to calculate Net Promoter Score?

Follow these steps to calculate NPS,

  • Administer a Survey. It can be an online survey via Google Forms or other Online Survey tools. 
  • Keep one simple question: "How likely would you be willing to recommend <your Company name/Brand Name/Product Name> to a colleague or a friend?"
  • In the answer option, you should have a 0 to 10 pointer likert scale where score 0 represents Highly Unlikely while the score 10 represents Highly Likely.

 

  • Based on the scale responses, you may categorize your customers into 3 types:
    1. Promoters: Those who rate your product between 9 to 10 are called Promotors and are the real advocates of your products. They are highly likely to recommend it to others.
    2. Passives: Those who rate your product between 7 to 8 are Passive customers and are neutral about your offerings.
    3. Detractors: Those who rate your product between 0 to 6 are called Detractors. They are not at all likely to promote your product, instead they may detract others from your product.


  • Based on the survey response, make a count of number of responses in each category i.e.
    1. Number of Promoters  (a)
    2. Number of Passives (b)
    3. Number of Detractors. (c)
    4. Total Number of responses (a+b+c).
  • Net Promoter Score is calculated as, 
NPS = ((Number of Promoters - Number of Detractors)/Total number of responses)x100 


  • NPS ranges from -100 to +100. Here -100 represents all your respondents were Detractors while +100 represents all your respondents were Promotors.

Check out this Free Net Promotor Score Calculator on our website.


Hope you liked reading this post. Do let us know your thoughts...