Daily Record Success Story

We are featuring a new success story on Daily Record, out of Ellensburg, Washington. Suzanne Williams, their Advertising Director spoke to us about how their newspaper relies on Relationals. The biggest takeaway we got from her was that because they are a critical component in their community and that they have a small, multitasking team, information and activity sharing between her reps is crucial.

It's something many smaller and suburban newspapers face on a daily basis. What happens if you have rep turnover, or someone is on vacation, or if they call in sick? For most small companies, this can have a huge impact on productivity.

The other takeaway is that for small and suburban newspapers to maximize their efforts, they need to be able to find, target, and reach advertisers under every rock and bush. Some of the datamining capabilities in Relationals definitely help.

For suburban newspapers publishers, you can certainly learn more about Relationals at the SNA Fall Publishers' & Advertising Directors' Conference in Philadelphia this week.

Taking the (Web) Lead

Scenario: A potential advertiser visits your website looking for your rate sheet or a media kit and would like more information. They go to your "contact us" page and are faced with a list of reps or email addresses. They call, maybe their English isn't great, they try to give you the name of the business, already you're three minutes into the call just getting their contact info.

Solution: Did you know that you can using a quick web form that adds links directly into Relationals as leads? An interested party can quickly provide their information, it immediately gets added into Relationals, and whatever lead assignment policies you have apply. Capture their name, email, phone number, business, address, even a product type their interested in. They can fill your lead sheet for you! Your rep can just pick up the phone, contact the customer, and provide that extra bit of service to close the deal.

To build your Web Lead form, you'll need rights to customize the Relationals lead object and a little help from your web content team.

1. Go to Setup and under Customization, select Standard Objects.
2. Click on Leads.
3. Click the Web Leads Sub-tab.
4. What you'll see is a form where you can select fields from the Leads tab that will be included in your form.
5. You can also specify a landing page after someone submits a lead. Usually, this is a thank you or confirmation page.
6. You can also specify what will be entered as the Lead Source value. The default is "Web Lead," but maybe you have a specific campaign you want to identify it with such as "Job Fair (Web Lead)." You can enter that as the lead source.
7. Click Generate HTML. This produces HTML code which you can give to your web team to include in your "contact us" page. They can customize the code to fit the styling on your website.

You can have as many web leads as you want on as many pages of your website as you want. If you want to identify where they come from, change the Lead Source accordingly.

Creating HTML Email, the Relationals Way

Relationals generates quite a few campaigns to inform its customers about its services or new features. Email campaigns provide the best facility to convey lots of information, and HTML emails are an attractive, finished-looking tool that can really have an impact.

Below is an outline of Relationals very own processes for creating HTML emails. This is best suited for your graphics team, but you may find some value in it when you guide them during the design process.

• Start with a message and goal in mind - Know who you're mass emailing, what their level of interest is, and what will drive their next level of engagement.
• Write the copy first - Be concise. Anything longer than 500 words and you risk overloading the email. 250 words is a great goal.
• Graphics & layout - Adobe Photoshop is used to layout the initial page. Usually we stick with about a 600-700 pixel wide layout. The length of the page should be designed to be dynamic so that it can adjust based on the amount of content you have. Once the initial design is mocked up in Photoshop, slice it up so that you have a minimum set of graphics and that certain columns are properly sliced so when the height changes it will not affect the overall design. Once sliced in Photoshop, save the file as HTML with images which produces an HTML file and a folder of associated linked images.
• Upload images to public website - Next upload the images to a public website (either your corporate site or depending on how many you have, you can also upload it as a Document in Relationals and set to to "Publicly Available"). Also make sure you know what the absolute link is to retrieve each graphic. This is the full URL: "http://www.something.com/..."
• Web Layout - Next, we load the HTML into Adobe Dreamweaver (you can use any HTML editor). When you open the file in Dreamweaver, you see the entire email as a web page and a table with the cells sliced accordinly. My next step is to replace the graphics that are currently linking to my local drive to link to those that are publicly available using the URLs from the previous step. For sections that you want to put text on, remove the graphic entirely. When you do this, some of the layout may get skewed. To remedy this, set all the cells to align to the top, and set the cell width to the same size as the graphic you just removed. Everything should be corrected. If you have an image that is in the background with text in the foreground, make sure you adjust it accordingly.
• Adding Text - Once you've cleaned out the cells and adjusted cell alignment, add the copy. It's a simple copy and paste with some addtional formatting based on what you want the design to look like. Again, the benefit of having true text copy like this is you can also customize and personalize it once it's in Relationals as a Global Template.
• Testing - Save the file, open it in a web browser to make sure it's picking up all the linked images, and test the links. Once that's solid, copy the web source code directly into the Relationals HTML Email Body Field. Make sure you click the HTML checkbox before you paste the code in. Once it's embedded, send a test email to yourself to make sure it looks good.
• CSS Styling - Formatting can be touchy when combining it with HTML email, so a note about referenced CSS style elements. When you copy the raw HTML to the editing window you need to make sure you click the HTML checkbox. You also have to save any editing you do while still in the source mode. If you switch back to preview mode, you will lose the CSS definitions. Alternatively, you can use inline CSS styling.

Obviously, these steps can require both graphic design and web publishing skills. That is probably far more than you should expect from a busy rep or sales manager. So we thought that you might find some value in getting pre-made HTML templates. There are several available on the web. With these starter templates, it's a matter of replacing the graphics, color and content to fit your brand. 

We're hosting this topic as part of our Success Series webinars on August 7th @ 12PM Pacific. To sign up, click here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/252020925

On Demanding Sales Automation

There was a great, in-depth article by Jean Thilmany called "Custom Fits" (Copyright 2007, CRM Magazine/DestinationCRM.com) on the different ways Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions are being delivered. But in trying to balance the tide between on-demand, on-premise and open source solutions, we think they neglected some key advantages on-demand solutions provide:

• Many businesses don't have the IT bandwidth to manage and customize systems to their teams and even if they bought a system outright, they would still have to learn and be trained on them to service them properly in-house. This can be doubly true for open-source tools.
• Organizations that are tapped in just their ability to support their core business strengths and values, may not have IT as the top of their list. And visa versa, sales automation might not be the top of the IT concerns either. So getting support for SFA initiatives can be challenging.
• For businesses that are in fairly dynamic markets (virtually any market that's competitive is dynamic) and require a sales team to adapt with those changes, you can change processes fairly quickly and easily with on-demand solutions. There aren't many on-premise providers who can do that without significant consultation and customization fees.
• On-demand SFAs/CRMs are more than just renting. Vendors are constantly updating and improving the service so its customers instantly get new features whereas on-premise solutions require staged upgrades, testing, budget allocation, maintenance, deployment, etc. So you have to think about software more as a utility than as a ownership. You don't own the electricity you use, you pay for what you consume.

Thilmany makes one great point, however, that with a little bit of work tuning the the right SFA solution to your business processes, a great SFA can be created. It's one of the areas Relationals prides itself on.

Building a Simple Call List

There are times when you want to contact accounts or leads because you know they have specific, non-filterable criteria -- for example, you know they are hiring and are primed for an offer to support their hiring process.

Within Relationals, you could build a telesales campaign, but if you just need a quick list, you can easily create a call list for yourself (or if your a manager for someone else) and add it to your tasks as activities. Here's how:

1. From either the Lead or Account tab, pick the check boxes for people you wish to call (highlighted in yellow in this example).

2. Select Group Actions from the side menu and select Create Call List.

3. In the Create Call List dialog, give the call list a subject (in this case, "Hiring Companies"), set a due date for the task, and if you want indicate the type of activity (for example, "Outbound Call"). If you're a manager, you can also assign a call list to someone and track the progress through a notification.

4. Once you click Save, the tasks will show up on your Activity Console as tasks to be completed.

Now you can track who you're calling, log the calls as you normally would, and add additional call lists as you want to. And for as a sales manager, you can push call tasks to your team.

Globally Warm Up Icy Leads

Situation: You have a thousands of contacts in leads and accounts in the system gathered from years of prospecting. Most have sat on ice for awhile. It's a very common problem because contacts come from a variety of sources (marketing events, list purchases, website inquiries, contact managers, account databases, etc.). Are those leads dead? Maybe, but the hard work you and your marketing team took put in the get them in the first place is not all lost. One way to identify bad, old, and otherwise no-longer-relevant contacts is to use an email marketing campaign. It's also a great way to simultaneously stimulate your pipeline.

The Carrot: First, you need compelling content. Perhaps you have new information you want to push to your customers -- price reductions, special offers, event notice, etc. These are ideal opportunities to touch your marketable contacts because you're not actively selling and they can benefit from the information. Company newsletters also make great inbox stuffers.

The Campaign: The campaign we chose to offer up to these petrified prospects was a newsletter -- mainly because it is gives a lot of value in terms of information, a friendly presentation, and gets a lot of bite-sized messages out to a very diverse group. Because it's a compendium our blog, content to these leads is fresh and varied. It wasn't a hard sales message; just useful information. With a little help from Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the HTML content, we used Relationals' email marketing campaign feature to send the newsletter to a targeted list.

Optimal Targeting: One of the most powerful features in Relationals is the ability to build highly filtered views and use these views within targeted campaigns. Why not just hit everyone on the list? Let's say you only want to target known cold leads, or you have multiple lead sources and want to exclude one, or you have accounts that aren't customers yet, but you only want to reach those. Trust me, everyone has their reasons for slicing and dicing up the contact pie. And here's a little secret: you can speed up campaigns by doing as much filtering as possible beforehand.

Below is an actual set of Advanced Filters we use to send out our newsletter to non-users and contacts (leads and accounts) that haven't signed up with Relationals. Why they haven't, who can really say, but we wanted to use this as a way to (A) clean out some of the bad contact data or (B) get them interested in thinking about Relationals again.

The way you'd set up your filters depends entirely on how you've set up your processes within your organization. For this situation, we used:

1. The first filter is Email. Because I know there are likely bad email addresses due to a poor merge job some time ago, I only want records that have an "@" symbol. It's not a perfect filter, but it'll do for now. This also eliminates any blank email addresses.
2. Next I've set Account No. to equal blank. We have some accounts in our database that are not customers yet, but we transitioned them into an account. But our internal policy is that if you become a customer, you get an account number. Thus if you don't have an account number, you're not a customer.
3. The next line is interesting. Related To is how we identify a contact that has a company associated with it. When we synch with Outlook, all our contacts are copied to Relationals. But we each have personal business contacts that I don't want to send to, so I make sure that this field has to have an entry. So if it's blank, I know that it won't send.
4. The Hard Bounce Count filter identifies contacts who have bounced less than 2 times. It's an arbitrary value I'm comfortable using. I could easily set it to 1, but 2 lets me know the first bounce wasn't a fluke.
5. Next I want to make sure I target users who are not opted out. The email processing engine does this automatically, but by adding this filter, I can save it a little time. In fact, the more filters you can put into the view, the shorter time the email engine will spend processing which will improve email delivery time.

The Afterglow: As the results came in from the campaign, Relationals tracked opened emails, hard bounces, click-throughs, and opt-outs. This information was invaluable because now we could create another view in contacts to clean out bad emails (those that are deader than dead). The opt-out list was automatically updated so we can reduce the number of emails needed to send in the future (and the number of people we bother). And (probably the most important), we got great visibility for our blog, webinar, and 2-day summit. The best thing is, the next newsletter we send will offer yet another opportunity to hone that list.

WEBINAR: Avoiding a CRM Hangover

Introducing the first of our monthly webinar series where we provide users of Relationals the opportunity to discuss their strategies for implementing CRM into their environment.

Our first session is entited: Avoiding a CRM Hangover -- Putting a Successful Culture in Place

Businesses think that just investing in a CRM is going to get them better targeting, more accountability, more accurate intelligence, and ultimately greater revenue, but organizationally, it can be a major culture shift. Our first ever monthly webinar series opens with a great topic a lot of CRM vendors don't want you to know: there is no magic bullet. A successful CRM implementation means there's work to do from organizing information, getting buy-in from the field, and establishing best practices.

Our guest host is Robin Smith, the Director of CRM Projects for Gannett, the largest US newspaper group in circulation.

Robin will discuss approaches to:

• Integrating sales data for a full view of the business
• Driving adoption from sales reps to push data up the executive levels
• Strategically putting campaigns in place to generate new revenue

He will also field questions from you the audience.

Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Time: 11AM PT / 2PM ET