Manoj Ranaweera - Latest Comments

Re: 5 Stages of a tech startup – Stage 1: Product Development

edocr — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:09:39 -0000

More appropriate name for Stage 1 would have been "Setting up", but as in the case of edocr.com, this has taken nearly 5 years, I prefer to call it Product Development

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:39:55 -0000

Martin Eley Thanks for your contribution. In your experience, are leads exported directly to CRM or filtered (first line of filtration to remove non business users) before importing?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:38:15 -0000

Will Cobbett many thanks for your comment. What tools do you use to filter your list before importing to CRM? Who undertakes this function, marketing or sales?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Will Cobbett — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:39:12 -0000

Typically lists are loaded into CRM systems as leads, which are then qualified by sales users or a dedicated team (depending on volume and/or business). Prior to loading the lists a basic level of deduplication / spam removal should be carried out however this is often overlooked.

Once a sales opportunity has been identified, leads can be converted into contacts (and accounts in the case of salesforce) - at this point it's worth automatically search for existing contact records to avoid creating a duplicate. In addition leads and contacts can be related to a specific campaign or multiple campaigns to track the influence and revenue generated from marketing activities.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Martin Eley — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 06:34:37 -0000

In typical terms marketing are responsible for the PR and campaigns that will hopefully generate leads. Leads are then qualified by criteria determined by the sales team. Once qualified the sales team will begin their process. What I think you are attempting to create is a lead capture/qualification tool. Let's talk soon as I think we share some similar ideas.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:50:10 -0000

@Scarter interesting way to look at the problem. Thanks for sharing your thoughts

Re: Overcoming challenges

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Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Scarter — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:53:36 -0000

The best sales leaders are those who have marketing sometime in their background. I think that marketing should be about managing the pipeline one quarter out and sales focuses on the closing of the pipeline as well as progressing. Progressing to me should be a joint responsibility.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Guy Fraser — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:44:35 -0000

So, we've never considered getting raw contacts as it seems like a lot of hard work for little gain. As the company grows it might be something we do in the future but over the past 6 years we've only ever dealt with confirmed leads. Until 2 months ago, we didn't even have anyone in sales or marketing. :)

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:20:20 -0000

Guy Fraser Wow! that is clever marketing. Do you not bother with collecting raw contacts from social networks, etc based on your interactions? Do you have enough solid leads not to bother with noise coming from social media?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Guy Fraser — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:11:12 -0000

Well, that's kind of my point - we don't get raw contact details. We design our marketing efforts to only get suspects or prospects.

Example: We give away loads of free plugins, licensing over 15,000 of them per month. But in order to get that free license user has to fill in a survey = we already know they are a suspect (they wouldn't want the plugins if they weren't using tech we work with) and based on the survey it's immediately apparent which responses are prospects.

By marketing this way, we are getting hundreds of new people opting in to our mailing lists, hundreds of surveys (properly filled in) giving us lots of information about the market, and a whole bunch of sales leads.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Clair Chapman (Calling Crew) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 07:22:47 -0000

Add a field/column in your CRM/spreadsheet where you can specify what kind of contact they are: friend, prospect, supplier, client etc etc. That way you can filter on who you want to contact.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:40:57 -0000

Hi Tom Cheesewright if you are at TechCentreMCR today, love to grab a coffee. I will be there by noon

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:39:40 -0000

Hi Tim Price I used the most simplest funnel I could find - you could extend this to many layers, and get yourself lost in the process. Yes, would be interesting to discuss the best places for sourcing raw contacts

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Tim Price — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:25:33 -0000

I like the concept as we are in this void with the furst AssuredSale campaign. There may also be another cone layer above 'Hot Leads'....i.e. how and where do y ou go to build up the leads and network

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

bookofthefuture — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:23:29 -0000

It's hard to comment intelligently here because of the breadth of ground that has been covered. I have been in marketing of one form or another for twelve years and if nothing else have learned that the customer journey is always more complicated than you think. To try and sum the whole field of marketing and sales theory up like this seems a little pointless to me (sorry Manoj), and I'm afraid most of the debate that has followed has been as confused as the original post.

As marketers we have done a terrible job of professionalising what we do (sorry CIM/CIPR) and the result is that everyone thinks they understand it. I blame us as marketers for that but it doesn't make it any less frustrating to see the practices and processes that I have worked hard to understand presented in such a confused manner.

Rant over, to the point. Is there a gap between sales and marketing? Yes. But the gap is different in every organisation. To use an analogy, in some companies marketing decides that horses are the customer, finds the horses, and leads them all the way to the water. They even write the script for the sales people to help them convince the horses to drink. In others, marketing just makes the surroundings of the water as pretty as possible and hopes that will attract a few horses while the salespeople do the wrangling.

Understanding where your organisation fits on this scale - and where you want it to fit - is probably not a bad start to addressing the problem. The answer will depend on your culture today, your product, your price, your industry sector, your competition and many other factors.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Stephen Dyson — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 03:04:57 -0000

Everything is put onto the HMG System by our Sales Managers PA, who also assists the sales rep, she will then confirm details via looking on a website or other methods. Once its a confirmed company she will then decide which industry area/geographical area the contact belongs in which will determine which of our sales team will make initial contact. The reps will then be notified via email and on their own page within the HMG system that a new prospect has been added.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:44:44 -0000

Hi @Clair Chapman (Calling Crew) Do you add raw contacts sourced from social media into CRM without first level of validation? How do you deal with non-business folks?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:42:40 -0000

Hi Stephen Dyson, good to here marketing is not working in isolation with sales. Do you add all your raw contacts into your custom built CRM? Who undertakes the first level of validation, before contacts are elevated to prospects? Is this the role of marketing or sales?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:38:02 -0000

Hi Steve. Thanks for highlighting the subject of "social commerce". Do you add facebook fans into your CRM?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Manoj Ranaweera — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:35:50 -0000

Guy thanks very much for sharing your thoughts. What tools do you use to identify whether raw contact details are suspects?

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Guy Fraser — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:49:31 -0000

I don't think marketing is about promotion. For us at Adaptavist, marketing is all about understanding the market so that we can deliver what it needs when and where it needs it.

Advertising is about promotion, and you can't do a successful advertising campaign until you've gone through the marketing piece.

What most organisations call "viral marketing", we call "viral advertising" - because unless it's giving you insight in to the market, it's just advertising (like Cadbury's gorilla) and not marketing.

As for what to do with raw contact details, you first need to identify if they are a "suspect" - specifically do they have any interest whatsoever in what you offer, or can what you offer help them in some way. If the answer to both of those questions is "No" then the contact should never enter your CRM.

Once you've got a list of suspects, you need to determine which of them are prospects - those that are likely to buy something from you if you play your cards right.

Advertising primarily delivers you a list of raw contact details, some of which may be suspects. Marketing, on the other hand, tends to deliver mostly suspects and prospects. By getting clever with your marketing, you can have it result in a list that consists almost entirely of prospects.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Steve Downes — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:42:14 -0000

The convergence of sales and maketing, even direct marketing, is happening right in front of our eyes. It's called social commerce. This is mostly Facebook commerce at the moment, but that will develop.

Building engaged social communities is pure marketing. Your list of fans is data capture. Putting a shop inside the community is selling. And the cycle continues. More sales = more recommendations or reviews = more marketing = more fans = more sales. And so on.

An over-simplification I know - but it's not my blog!

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Stephen Dyson — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:53:15 -0000

Similar to Stuarts point, our marketing starts very early on and we work alongside our sales team to analyse the markets and segments where we can break into with new products or existing products into new markets. One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is keeping sales & marketing separate both need to work hand in hand.

As for sourcing leads we use a variety of tools from old school knocking on doors, to modern arenas like Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. However this is only the first step, we have a custom built system which assigns reps to the 'prospects' who will then contact then and find out more about them and their needs. Working alongside myself we put together bespoke packages/presentations to introduce ourselves and the products/services we offer, helping the customer get to know us and us to get to know them.

On the funnel I'd perhaps add a loop back to the start, even after a sale has been completed you still need your sales and marketing to keep engaged with the customer, we work very close with our customers and that has led to many new leads & opportunities within a company, which has arisen from getting to know them and engaging with them. Marketing and sales is a continuous circle if you don't continue the process you will more than likely lose a customer rather than getting repeat business from a customer.

Re: Intersection between marketing and sales

Clair Chapman (Calling Crew) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:41:01 -0000

I would suggest adding everything to the CRM, and then editing the record in the CRM as more information is gained. That way you can always report on the results, or even see which records have data that needs updating.