My Custom CRM

Salesforce lets you keep track of your promotions through the built in Campaigns feature. Have your System Administrator create campaigns (email mailers, snail mail mailers, trade shows, advertisements, etc.) for each of your marketing efforts. Attach a contact to an email or snail mail campaign so that your team is aware of who is being reached out to, for what, and when. Be sure to include how much is spent on each campaign. As you get feedback from each of the marketing ca...mpaigns, connect a sales opportunity to the appropriate campaign (or vice versa) and watch Salesforce let you know the value of that particular marketing effort. Salesforce also works with select third party applications (often for a fee) like ExactTarget for (email marketing) and Cloud2You (for snail mail marketing) that will help you gain even more analytics and automation.

Empower your employees to create their own quotes and orders in Salesforce by attaching products with pricing details to sales opportunities. If you have several different products and services but are not interested in manually entering each one into your Salesforce database, have your System Administrator use the DataLoader to import all of your products/services. Using the DataLoader will allow you to import items like the product name, the product description, and a standard sales price. You can even have your System Administrator set up different price books, for example, a National Price Book vs a Local Price Book. If the actual price differs from the standard sales price, the sales team has the option to override the amount. Appropriate editions with Opportunity and Product features are required.

Keeping track of your most popular products/servicesand your least popular. Monitoring the popularity of an organization’s products/services is crucial in business. Knowing which products to nurture and push and knowing which products should be abandoned. But how do you determine the popularity of a product?... Salesforce allows you to attach various products to each opportunity (which could be a quote or an order). You can then run a report to show all of the products that have been a part of a quote/order. To keep track of why a product on a quote did not make it to an order, I recommend getting your sales team into the habit of explaining why a quote did not make it to an order. You can help them do this by creating a custom text field on the opportunity and then including that field as a column in your product report. I also recommend including a chart like a pie chart (either above the report or on a dashboard linked to the report) to paint a picture of the more popular products.

An article by Bob Liodice was published on AdAge and covered a growing trend for a consistent and measurable marketing technique called Integrated Marketing Communications. Bob goes on to write that although many of the firms they surveyed said they are using IMC approaches, few of them rated the quality of their IMC programs as "excellent" or "very good" -- underscoring the need to identify best practices and address the barriers that can impede IMC efforts including a lack of strategic consistency across communication disciplines, the absence of a common IMC measurement process, and the existence of functional silos. http://adage.com///essentials-integrated-marketing/127599/

Using an Integrated Marketing Communication strategy to generate short-term financial returns and build long-term brand value. How does it work? IMC takes into consideration everything from the way your sales team is selling your brand to all of the various ways you are promoting your brand. It then incorporates a measurement process to determine how efficient and effective all of the efforts are.... The Salesforce.com platform is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database on the Cloud that can help with an Integrated Marketing Communications approach. With Campaign, Report and Dashboard features, Salesforce.com can help organizations keep track of which marketing campaigns, products, and sales reps are bringing in the most clients and the most deals. The CRM then produces functional reports and dashboards to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your Integrated Marketing Communication efforts.