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Defining your CRM strategy—and how to implement it

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A robust customer relationship management (CRM) system can help optimize your media organization’s marketing and sales efforts by fine-tuning touch points throughout your customer lifecycle. The tool can have a powerful impact on streamlining your sales processes, improving your ability to retain customers, and ultimately, on increasing your revenue and profits.

However, simply having the technology at your fingertips isn’t enough to make your CRM successful. You need a strategy to support adoption and use of your system to its full potential so it can support you in achieving your business goals.

In this article, we’ll explore common challenges media companies face when it comes to CRM technology, and we’ll offer a few ideas to get you thinking about how you can make better use of your system through a solid strategy.

A high CRM failure rate

Even when publishers choose the right CRM for their media organization’s size and objectives, oftentimes many don’t take the next step to properly articulate a CRM strategy. This could be because they may not realize they need a strategy, or may not fully understand the crucial role it plays in growing revenue and profits.

Among the publishers who do develop a CRM strategy, many still fail to get their sales teams on board with the new processes that the plan requires. Publishers don't always consider the impact of not having a strategy that is clearly communicated and supported by the new tasks they’re asking their sales team to do, and the broader impact those actions will have on their organization. This disconnect between the “what” and the “why” of change management can lead to low CRM adoption rates or a lack of useful data from the tool itself.

“Research shows that while more businesses are implementing CRM systems, when it comes to achieving business growth, the failure rate is startling. One expert estimates that the CRM failure rate may even be close to 90%,” according to this article by Monday.com.

6 key questions to shape your sales strategy

Your CRM strategy should outline how your media company will foster customer relationships and increase sales, using the technology to achieve your goals. The strategy should include details like when and how you’ll communicate with advertisers, and what you consider to be a successful interaction.

It’s essential to articulate your sales strategy and define how your team will implement the plan. This includes figuring out how your CRM can enable you to fulfil the strategy and where the technology fits in the entire end-to-end sales process in a way that supports the strategy. Keep in mind that this shouldn't be a one-and-done process, as your strategy will need to evolve with your business as you grow.

Here are six important questions to ask yourself as a publisher, and to discuss with your team, to inspire constructive thinking about your CRM strategy — and to challenge the status quo:

  1. How do you currently assign value to each of your customers?
  2. How can you identify the most appropriate sales effort-to-value ratio?
  3. How can you get your sales team pulling in the direction you want as a business?
  4. How can you determine whether you should change your strategy (e.g., in situations caused by the impact of COVID-19 on audience and advertiser behaviors)?
  5. What steps do you need to take to reach your ultimate goal?
  6. How will you measure success?

When thinking about your objectives, consider the context in which you’re starting out. If you don't currently have a CRM, it’s unlikely that you’ll become a CRM ninja overnight. You may need to find low-hanging fruit that will make your sales team’s role easier as a first step so they’ll be excited to expand their use of your CRM system later down the road.

Knowing what is most important to your business means you can focus on tools and processes that support those needs, and disregard those that don't add value or simply create excess noise. Your team could have access to the best CRM in the world, but they won’t leverage it unless it adds value to their day-to-day.

Explore Adpoint CRM

The technical minds behind Lineup Systems’ Adpoint CRM solution for media sales have recently re-engineered the way publishers can manage opportunities in the system. This enables you to better support and embed business processes in your CRM.

When you choose Adpoint for your company, it will prompt you to have a conversation with your team about your CRM strategy, including what data you want to capture and why, how you can support sales staff to gather this data more efficiently, and how Adpoint can help drive your entire sales strategy forward.

Nearly 5,000 publishers worldwide are leveraging Adpoint to supercharge their CRM strategy and increase their revenue and profits. Find out how the technology can work for you.