CRM can help in filtering and selecting a well-defined target population using advanced filtering and segmentation features on a clean and up-to-date data repository. It can select the prospects based on demographic data such as purchase history and responses to the previous campaigns, which will profile campaign distribution and significantly improve campaign performance. CRM can be easily integrated with other lines of business applications, which can help create intelligent marketing lists in CRM from various sources. For example, it can integrate with ERP and other financial software to segment customers into various marketing lists that target very specific customers and prospects. Workflows and automations supported by most of the CRM platforms can be used to build the logic for segmentation and creation of qualified lists. Targeting with CRM can help create groups that are likely to respond to certain types of campaigns and help marketers target customers with right campaign types.

The CRM applications can help create, manage, and measure your marketing campaigns. It can track current status, messages sent, and responses received against each member of the list and measure real-time performance with reports and dashboards. The CRM systems can be used to plan and establish the budget for a campaign, track the expenses, and measure ROI. The steps involved in campaign execution and message distribution can be defined along with the schedule. Message distribution and response capture can be automated with CRM, which can help in running multiple promotions or performing nurture campaigns.

CRM can help perform marketing tasks in parallel and track which prospect is responding to which campaign to establish the effectiveness of a campaign. With powerful integration with other marketing automation platforms, marketers can create and customize the message, create landing pages for the campaign within CRM, and then use the built-in e-mail marketing engine to distribute the message, which can embed tracking tokens into the e-mail to capture and relate the incoming response. Integration of CRM with popular e-mail clients avoids switching applications and errors in copying data back and forth. The CRM system can capture preferences, advise on the best time and channel to engage with the customer, and provide feedback on products and services.

Close loop marketing is a practice of capturing and relating the responses to marketing messages in order to measure the effectiveness, constantly optimize the process, and refine your message to improve its relevancy. This, in turn, increases the rate of conversion and ROI. This also involves an inherent close looping between the marketing and sales teams who collaborate to provide a single view of progression from prospect to sale.

The division between the marketing and sales departments leads to lack of visibility and efficiency as they are unable to support each other and cannot measure what works and what does not, eventually reducing the overall efficiency of both teams put together. Close loop marketing has gained great importance because companies have started perceiving the sales and marketing teams together as revenue teams who are jointly responsible to increase revenue.

Close looping enables us to compare the outcome of multiple campaigns by multiple factors such as the campaign type, number of responses, type of respondents, and response time. CRM can track various parameters such as the types of messages and the frequency of marketing, which can be compared against prior marketing campaigns to identify trends and predict customer behavior.

In order to achieve close loop marketing, we need to centralize data. This can bring together the customer's profile, customer's behavioral data, marketing activities, and the sales interactions in one place, so we can use automation to make this data actionable and continuously evolve the marketing processes for the targeting and nurturing of customers.

CRM can be the centralized repository for data and can also automate the interactions between the sales and marketing teams. Also, the social CRM features allow users to follow specific records and create connections with unrelated records, which will enable free flow of information between the teams. This elicits great details about the customer and supports actionable use of information to increase revenue efficiently without resorting to marketing myths and assumptions.

The marketing and sales teams together are the revenue team for an organization and are responsible to generate and increase revenue. It is imperative to align the sales and marketing teams for collaboration as the marketing team owns the message and the sales team owns the relationship. CRM offers an integrated approach where the lead can be passed from the marketing team to the sales team based on a threshold lead score or other qualification criteria agreed upon by both the sales and marketing teams. This qualification of the lead by the marketing team to the sales team retains all the previous interactions that the marketing team had with the lead, which helps the sales team understand the buyer's interests and motivation better by getting a 360 degree view of the customer. CRM tracks the status, qualification, and activities performed against the lead. This provides a comprehensive history of all the touch points with a lead and brings in transparency and accountability to both the marketing and sales teams. This ensures that only fully qualified leads are sent to sales, resulting in shorter sales cycle and improved efficiency. This strategic collaboration between the sales and marketing teams provides valuable feedback on the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns as well as the sales process. CRM can enable interdependence between the marketing and sales teams to share a common revenue goal and receive joint credits for achievement to become the organization's RPM system.

To summarize, as a marketing automation platform, CRM can create marketing campaigns, identify target customers to create marketing lists, associate relevant products and promotional offers to the lists, develop tailored messages, distribute messages by various channels as per schedule, establish campaign budget and ROI forecast, capture the responses and inquiries while routing them to the right team, track progress and outcome of the sale, and report the campaign ROI.

CRM has evolved from being a passive data repository and status tracking system to a tactical and strategic decision support system that provides more than just a 360 degree view of the customer, which is not limited to just tracking opportunities, managing account and contacts, and capturing call notes. CRM can be one of the key applications for an active marketing and revenue performance management that can help relationship building with customer by personalized communications and behavioral tracking, enable automation of marketing programs, measure marketing performance and ROI, and connect the sales and marketing teams to let them function as one accountable revenue team. We will now explore the stages involved in the progression of a lead to customer using a lead funnel.