The media is under fire! Cries of “Fake News” are hurled at stories to cover a myriad of possibilities including completely fabricated articles, articles from opposing viewpoints and even satire.
So this seems to be the perfect time to talk about my own newspaper called the Purple Patch and confess that a little of it is fake news. But only for fun – I’m not trying to rig my local parish council election here.
If you have been following and applying this series from the start, you will have evolved your CRM to be an asset of significant value to your business. However the steps are a little laborious, so I’m always on the lookout for little hacks that can be used to automate some of these tasks. I have found 3 that I really want to share – but would love to hear from you if you have come across others. There are free versions of each of them that are perfectly usable, but even the paid-for versions are inexpensive and can save you hours.
In the first two articles of this series, I looked at how to devise a Hubspot CRM strategy and how you can import data from your most critical sources. In this post I’ll look at how you can massage and manipulate the data you’ve imported, so that it is coherent and valuable for you.
By now you probably have quite a large number of fields that you’ve added to your default set within Hubspot. Now we need to start cleaning!
To clean and manipulate my CRM data I used a combination of spreadsheet functionality and the ability to create customised views within Hubspot.
In the first part of this series I described how I wanted to build a CRM system for my business based around the free Hubspot CRM. In this part I’ll walk you through the steps I used to integrate data from 3 critical sources: LinkedIn, Google Contacts and other third party sources such as Lead Forensics or Event attendee lists etc.
Are you using Hubspot for your inbound or outbound marketing? If you are, I wonder if you are making best use of the pretty handy CRM that you already have as part of your license. In this four part “How-To” series I’ll share with you my Hubspot CRM journey that has helped my take my client and prospect records a strategic asset rather than, well, a bit of an embarrassment.
Even without a crystal ball, I can confidently predict that much of the marketing data you use for your marketing campaigns is rotten. In my corporate career at IBM it was a constant area of frustration, as it has been in almost every client I’ve worked with over the last 4 years, irrespective of size.
In the years since I established Purple Salix, I’ve been fortunate to work with CMOs and marketing leaders of large global companies through to small startups, and across the tech sector and multiple industry sectors beyond – including Finance, Oil, and Green chemicals manufacturing. However, irrespective of size and industry, the areas of challenge are remarkably consistent. Without wishing to betray any client confidences, here are 4 of the questions that every marketing director most frequently asks me to help them address.
Last week I had the privilege of chairing the B2B Marketing InTech conference at the Brewery in London. The agenda featured some great brands (Cisco, Oracle, Aruba amongst others) with some great content. My overwhelming sense was that B2B Marketers are becoming a little more cynical about chasing the latest shiny software application and instead are starting to think about how it might impact their customer and prospect relationships, or improve the engagement of sales teams. There was a lot of discussion about the challenges of moving the needle on the company culture, and how we embed some of these best practices around social selling etc.
There is a a common and powerful chart that is used in change management circles that describes the various factors that need to be aligned in order to manage complex change. You can find an example here.
I thought it might be useful to attempt to borrow this approach and apply it to the question of why so many marketing campaigns fail. Of course the model is simplistic, but I have found that it helps many of my clients recognise that just addressing one isolated factor, is not going to automatically generate a step-change in marketing campaign performance. A successful campaign comprises (at least) 7 factors that must all be aligned if we are to maximise the revenue and enhance the internal reputation of marketing.
Yesterday I joined a webinar hosted by Laura Ramos of Forrester Research in conjunction with Idio on the topic of Predictive Analytics. Predictive Analytics is not a particularly new term – I first bumped into it several years ago with a case study where the social media analysis tools were being used to predict the outbreak of ‘flu epidemics across the US (turns out that before people retire their sick bed the last thing they do is to tweet their friends to tell them all that they’re feeling a bit snotty). The business benefit of this was that the analysis allowed you to predict an outbreak several days before people made an appointment with their doctor. For a drugs company or a medical supplies company that could provide vital intelligence to ensure that supplies were prioritised to the most-needed locations.
