Marketing Role

The marketing role within SME consists of tracking sales lead sources and progress, doing direct marketing campaigns, performing email campaign, and monitoring customer activity and satisfaction. The following sections go through typical marketing roles. Sales Leads:

For this section, marketing role is to support sales by tracking on monitoring lead sources and performance. The first step is to make sure the appropriate Lead Sources are available in the SME Lookup Lists. You should make old lead source you are no longer using as inactive and make sure all the current sources of leads are available in the list. Some examples of lead sources could be yellow pages, website, google pay per click, etc.

Business Process Tip: Make sure all sales people select the appropriate lead source when they create the lead.

It's possible the sales people do not know the lead source at the time they create the lead. If that is the case, you should go through all the new leads and select the lead source. When you do this, you should also add a note to explain that you added or changed the lead source so other people such as the sales person are aware of the change. See Views for more information. You can get a view of all sales lead without a lead source by creating a view, selecting the Lead source as one of the fields and then doing a filter on the lead source where it's blank:

Direct Marketing:

If you subscribe to a list of marketing leads, have your administrator import the list into the Direct Marketing module (table). With the direct marketing list in SME, you can follow-up with these leads. If they show any interest in your services, add some notes, assign a Sales Person and then convert them to a Open Sales Lead by selecting:

Actions>Move to Open Leads

You may also want to set an activity to the Sales Person to start to follow-up. Email Campaign:

Sending out email to Customers, Sales Leads, or Direct Marketing leads can be performed using SME Email Marketing Campaign tool or something like ConstantContact. These tools will allow you to send out many emails at once. The SME email marketing gives a basic email marketing tool while Constant Contact provides a full featured email marketing tool tracking link backs and tools for creation of nice looking email campaigns. The advantage of SME email marketing is it's easier to get the emails from SME customers and sales leads. If you plan to use an external tool such as Constant Contact, you will need to export the contact lists using the SME export utilities. See your administrator, go to the Export section of help, or use SME and Excel - Extracting Data in Meaningful ways Customers:

When a Sales Lead is converted to a customer, this is considered a successful conversion. Marketing should back track successful conversions to the Lead Source. First create a view of new customers using the Created field in customers and add the Source to the grid. Note that the Source is not always the same as Lead Source. When Lead Source is changed, it updates Source in the Sales Lead, but since Source is a freeform text field, the sales person may have changed this information. If you are not sure, look back at closed Sales Leads for this information. The lead will be closed because it was converted to a customer, which will close the lead.

Once you know which Lead Sources are producing the best conversions, invest more in these type of marketing campaigns and possible less in other non-performing campaigns. For example, you may find that natural search is producing good conversion while yellow pages is not producing conversions, so you might reduce or eliminate spending on yellow pages and invest in increasing natural search with SEO or improved website design.

Another area to look at is the revenue produced by customers. You can see the year to date sales for a customer. Note that this will not show orders in process that have not been invoiced.