Microsoft Dynamics CRM – It’s Year End! How effective were your marketing dollars?

You want to know how much revenue your marketing efforts generated this year.  Can you find out quickly?  More importantly, your boss wants to know.   Can you provide a summary of the data in his office, right now?  If you have ever felt the pressure to generate information you ought to know but couldn’t possibly track in your head, the disconnect between you and your activities can be terrifying when asked to account for results.   As we approach year end, marketing budgets are being planned for next year.  Can you easily find out how many leads and new opportunities resulted you’re your marketing dollars?     It is also more important than ever to look beyond the marketing campaign and measure the overall customer experience.    Do you know how you rank with customer satisfaction?  Can you prove it? You can do all this and more with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

As the Director of Sales and Marketing for The TM Group, a Gold Certified Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in Michigan, I appreciate having this critical information easily accessible within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  Whenever, I participate in marketing workshops the speakers always seem to share the same advice to ensure your marketing efforts pay off.

#1  Set Measurable Goals - Always establish concrete revenue, lead and specific new customer goals with your marketing plan.

#2 Measure and Test - Successful marketing campaigns include rigorous data management and testing. Try messages on coworkers, current clients and 100 or more targets if the target audience is large enough and see what is most successful before rolling it out to the whole list.

#3 Repeat What Works and Ditch What Doesn’t - If you don’t measure your results, you’ll never know what worked and what might be worth repeating or revising.    It is equally important to know how you wasted resources, including the time and money spent with the marketing campaign.

In the past, small and midmarket companies often thought these basic rules of marketing didn’t apply to them and tracking results was too much of a burden.   Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives these small and midmarket companies the tools that were previously thought of for bigger organizations with a large marketing staff and budget. In any sized business, marketing is often treated like a necessary evil, a cost center, for creating nice-looking brochures and websites. Today’s businesses realize that in our lean environment, every dollar has to count and sometimes count twice. Savvy companies, small, medium and large, know that the right marketing mix can have a big impact on growth, profitability, and competitive advantage.

If you are a small or medium sized business looking to get more out of your marketing dollars, the versatile, easily customized marketing modules and free accelerators in Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help you.  We have helped in many examples where we implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM and  our clients, especially those with a limited budget and staff, have benefited tremendously.  Marketers have long relied on their indispensable Microsoft Office tools — Outlook, Word, and Excel – and they quickly learn how to leverage Dynamics CRM, with its tight  integration to Office, powerful Microsoft SQL Server database, and flexible workflow wizards. The learning curve is fast for marketing pros to start using the solution and to tap into CRM’s rich potential.

Written by The TM Group, Michigan Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner