At least a couple of decades have passed since the CRM movement really began. It was supposed to make everyone happy, including the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Management departments, as well as the customer! However, I gotta wonder if the gap between marketing & sales has grown even deeper & wider than before.

The truth is, Marketing continues to be ticked off at the Sales team for not closing the leads they have worked so diligently to generate. Sales is just as POed because the leads they receive aren’t nearly as qualified as they should be, resulting in longer sales cycles and all the other issues that come up when trying to close prospects that aren’t ready yet.

In medium and big businesses, it’s a much harder problem to solve. It should (and could) be easy, but it’s not. Call it beaurocracy, politics, ownership, turf, ego, budget, or a myriad of other crapola, it ensures that a big ol’ crevasse remains costing thousands, even millions of dollars. Now THAT’s an expensive opportunity cost!

Fortunately, for a small business, it’s MUCH easier to bridge, or completely eliminate, the gap between marketing and sales. Small businesses tend to be more nimble and can implement ideas/concepts very quickly. One proven way of bridging the gap is to implement a multi-hoop lead management system.

In a multi-hoop lead management system, think of your marketing and sales as creating hoops the prospect needs to jump through in order to progress. Marketing influences the first jump by getting a prospect from a list or some other source to visit your site, register for a white paper or free report, or take some other action. After that is where most business go wrong: Marketing calls it a lead, ships it over to sales, and sales tries to close the sucker! HUGE gap!

What SHOULD happen is that after the initial lead is acquired, it goes through a personalized and automated sequence that educates and follows up with the new lead (without human intervention). The sequence encourages the lead to jump through a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) hoop BEFORE being passed off to the sales team for one-on-one follow up (and probably more hoops in the “sales funnel”).

So, who is responsible for creating the initial lead follow-up sequence? Your marketing and sales directors/managers. Throw ‘em into a room with a sack lunch and lock the door for the day. You’ll be amazed at what they come up with.

Why should you do it? #1) It costs hardly anything to do. #2) It reduces costs. #2) It speeds up sales cycles. #3) Sales reps become harvesters instead of hunters. #4) Sales numbers go up because sales reps are focused on closing deals instead of prospecting, qualifying, and wasting time. #5) Marketing is jazzed because something is finally following up with all the leads they are generating.

Shall I continue? Suffice it to say that it’s a proven model for bridging the gap between marketing & sales.

So, what’s holding you back?

At Ken McCarthy’s System Seminar, Lloyd Irvin, Brazilian World Jiu Jitzsu champion, successful info-marketer and Infusion CRM user got up to share his story. Several years prior, he had shown up to a System Seminar as a newbie… didn’t know a thing. He told the story of how he had gone from completely green to where he is today.

I watched and listened. Many people sat back in awe at what he had created. I heard someone say that “It is so clear for him… it seems so easy… he knows exactly what to do!”

Lloyd finished off with a great statement. He said: By the way, there were no “special rooms” that I went into at that seminar. I sat there in the audience next to a whole bunch of other people just like you and we all listened to the same speakers.”

Thanks Lloyd… I like that. Now, I suppose there actually are special rooms somewhere where special people get advantages over us regular people. But for the most part… for the rest of us… we live in a time where the playing field is more level than it’s ever been. Every single person on this earth wakes up and has 24 hours to use up for better or for worse.

I have to wonder if we spend too much time looking at “successful people” and trying to learn from what they are doing TODAY. Shouldn’t we actually be trying to learn what they did BEFORE? Can’t we learn the most from the decisions they made along the way that got them to where they are now?

Next time you’re tempted to look at someone in awe and wish you had it as good as they do, please do yourself a favor and stop. If you REALLY want what they have, figure out what they did to get there, and go out and get to work.

I was talking to the sales guys today, and they helped me realize why Infusionsoft is so cool. I’ve taken it with a grain of salt because sales guys could probably convince Steve Erkel that he’s cool…

But anyway…

Most database software programs out there follow the repository/retrieval paradigm: I put something into you (the software), then later I get it out. It seems to fit, since that’s pretty much what a database is, but what does that do for a business?

Well, for an enterprise, it’s HUGE! It puts millions of records into one place so reporting, mining, and accountability can be managed. It allows managers at the tops of massive org structures to get a peek into what’s happening in their world. It allows you to forecast, track, report, search, and mine the data. And that’s why they pay huge amounts of money to get it.

But what does it do for a small business?

Not much.

Yes, it organizes their stuff, and helps them locate information easier. And it helps them to stay on top of their tiny little staff. But what’s the motivator for them to implement? And how much money is it going to make them?

Really, what’s the most important thing for any small business? A solid marketing and PR plan, right? (I didn’t come up with that on my own. I did a little research on the internet)

If there is any software out there that automatically creates and executes a complex marketing and PR plan for you given little or no investment, we could all be put out of business. But since there’s not anything to date, I’ll continue…

Who has time or money for a marketing and PR plan when you’re struggling to make ends meet running your small business? And if you don’t have time or money for a marketing plan, then the most important thing in your business just became — time and money.

How do you get more money? You either spend less, make more, or get funded. Except that you can’t get funding without a good marketing and PR plan. And you can’t spend less because then you have to fire people and then you can’t get the work done to pay the bills. So you only option is to make more money.

And how do you get more time? You can’t hire someone else to do your job because you have to make more money to pay them, and it sets you back in the money department. And you can’t just spend less time because then you won’t get the work done to make money. And you can’t work more because you are already working 18 hours a day. And time really is money.

What a small business really needs is an infusion (rim shot) of time. Time to spend working on the thing that really matters: the killer marketing and PR plan.

Which brings me to my robot.

Let me be clear that I hate the word robot as much as you hate this picture. But the word starts with an R, and everyone knows what a robot is.

The difference between what we offer and what other people offer is that our cool robot can perform human functions. For example, I could tell this robot over here that whenever someone’s credit card is about to expire (15 days before expiration) to email them that their card it about to expire and provide an online form for them to update the date (form coming soon).

How much time did I have to invest to have this piece of work done? $0.00! Well, technically, I had to pay $2.30 per hour - which is far below minimum wage - more like Indonesian sweat shop. And that’s if it’s the only thing he did!! What if in addition to handling 300 expiring credit cards, he also executed 91 individual marketing pieces going to over 1,000 prospects and customers, including mail, fax, email, and manual tasks! And then he kept track of everything he’d sent so he could continue to execute the sequences. And kept track of opt-out requests, and additional information requests that would cause people to jump from one marketing sequence to another? And all in one day! For $18.00? It’s hardly legal.

And it’s not just about time. The opportunity cost for a small business owner to NOT work on his or her business is nothing compared to the peanuts they pay themselves. What we offer is much more - and it’s less tangible than money or time. It’s the freedom for people to create lasting value in their business.

Oh yeah, and we also have a pretty sweet repository.

Quickly, can I rant about the term SaaS?? I just don’t like words that have two lowercase letters squeezed between big letters. Yes, it’s very symmetrical, but it’s practically just a sentence with the first letter of every word, like we used in our notes in 8th grade (INVU4URAQT). And SaaScon bugs me more, because it breaks the logic of lowercase-articles-only. Instead of SaaS, they could have used these:

StrorW
Software that runs on the Web

StraS
Software that’s really a Service

SnotD
Software not on the Desktop

Was there really anything wrong with ASP? or On-Demand? or Web-based?

I think we should come up with a new name.