A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a dynamic, evolving tool that requires continuous attention and optimization. While CRM management may not be the flashiest task for B2B veterinary marketers, it is one of the most critical. A well-maintained CRM strengthens sales and marketing alignment, provides real-time business intelligence, automates routine interactions, and identifies qualified leads to shorten sales cycles and boost revenue.
In this blog, we’ll explore advanced CRM strategies and discuss how leveraging your CRM data can maximize your media placements with Clinician’s Brief.
Establish CRM Goals
Before diving into advanced CRM strategies, it’s essential to establish clear goals. CRMs impact the entire customer journey, making optimization feel like an overwhelming task. Setting short-, mid-, and long-term goals can help focus your efforts and ensure your CRM evolves alongside your business needs.
If you haven’t documented your CRM goals, here are a few foundational ideas to get you started:
- Enhance customer relationships and reduce churn: Implement customer service modules that provide a 360-degree customer view and improve segmentation for personalized marketing campaigns.
- Optimize sales processes to drive revenue: Improve lead visibility, track opportunity pipelines, and create revenue-focused reports and dashboards.
- Streamline marketing efforts: Leverage automation, audience segmentation, and real-time performance data to refine your marketing strategies.
- Boost team collaboration: Establish a single source of truth that aligns sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
- Enable data-driven decision-making: Use real-time analytics to refine business strategies and uncover growth opportunities.
- Automate manual tasks: Streamline follow-ups, emails, task assignments, and data updates to enhance efficiency.
Quality Over Quantity: The Right Approach to Leads
Is more always better when it comes to leads? Not necessarily. The real goal isn’t just more leads—it’s more sales. Here are some key considerations for filling your CRM.
Think beyond the top of the funnel.
While top-of-funnel leads are important, bottom-of-funnel leads are more valuable. Your CRM should track lead progression through the buyer’s journey to optimize sales conversions.
Create content to support the entire buyer’s journey and ensure your CRM is set up to quickly identify a lead’s buying cycle stage.
Re-engage existing leads.
Nurturing the leads already in your database is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Develop targeted campaigns to keep your existing prospects engaged.
Acquire net-new leads strategically.
Clinician’s Brief offers data-matching services to help ensure you’re reaching truly new prospects, allowing you to focus internal resources on nurturing existing leads.
Pro Tip: Contact VetMedux to learn how data matching can refine your targeting and improve campaign efficiency.
Help Sales Find the Best Leads
A CRM can house thousands of leads per sales territory, making it challenging for representatives to prioritize the right opportunities. Use these strategies to help your sales team pinpoint the best leads in your database.
Implement lead scoring.
Define an ideal customer profile and use lead scoring to highlight high-priority prospects. Many CRMs integrate with marketing automation platforms to facilitate this process.
Pro Tip: Use your lead scoring criteria to target your ideal audience with Clinician’s Brief. Our vast database of demographic and behavioral data points can help uncover your ideal audience.
Optimize for mobile use.
Sales reps on the go need quick access to leads. Most CRMs have a mobile app; make sure you’re paying attention to the app’s user experience for sales. One of the biggest challenges with keeping CRMs up-to-date is ensuring your sales team is accurately and consistently updating the data. An easy-to-use app reduces this key friction point and will immediately impact the quality of your data.
Customize dashboards for easy lead prioritization.
Create views that highlight high-potential leads, making it easier for sales to act efficiently. These dashboards (especially if mobile-optimized) can make it easy for your team to find and connect with the hottest leads while in the field.
Use lifecycle stages to streamline lead transitions.
Customize your CRM to clearly define when a lead moves from marketing-qualified (MQL) to sales-qualified (SQL).
Set up automated notifications.
Develop a notification system to ensure sales reps receive alerts when a hot lead is ready to be engaged. Most companies use email notifications, set up tasks within the CRM that are easy to report on, or send SMS notifications or push notifications via their CRM app. These notifications make it easier for sales to take action when the lead is hot and engaged.
Enhance CRM Efficiency with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation systems empower marketers to improve CRM data quality, deliver personalized communications, and manage cross-channel campaigns more effectively. Here’s how they can enhance CRM functionality.
Improve campaign ROI tracking.
B2B veterinary marketers are using marketing automation systems to pass campaign-specific data to CRMs to ensure visibility of not only the lead but also the quality of the lead and the marketing campaign it came from.
Combine this data with a well-maintained sales deal pipeline and get clear visibility to campaign-level ROI.
Marketing automation systems can also enable marketers to create visibility into channel-specific performance, so they can evaluate the ROI of email, social media, and campaigns with media partners like Clinician’s Brief.
Use cost per lead (CPL) by promotional channel to level the playing field and evaluate where your most productive leads (at every pipeline stage) are coming from.
Tailor communications to your recipient to improve engagement.
A marketing automation system allows you to easily tailor communications to your recipient as long as your data is clean. Turn your personalization up to 11 by mapping your customer journey and automating timely and relevant messages at each stage of their purchase process. You can even make these communications look like they came from their sales representative.
Schedule, review, and monitor social media performance.
Social media integrations enable marketers to schedule organic posts, view paid social ads, and monitor real-time performance from a single location. These integrations also allow marketers to reply to comments across all social platforms in one place, making it easy to engage in high-value conversations on social media with customers and prospects.
Historically, organic social media has proven to be a significant time investment for marketers because of the constant need to monitor each social property on its individual channel. Not anymore! These integrations can also allow real-time lead generation and data passing directly from social media ads into your CRM.
Enable micro-targeting by audience niche.
As the veterinary industry has gotten busier, B2B veterinary marketers increasingly favor micro-targeting.
Automation systems enable very narrow targeting. For example, you can email people who visit your pricing page but don’t fill out a form when they are browsing.
Or you can add prospects to a social media advertising audience based on their content engagement behavior to more quickly nurture them into becoming a sales-qualified lead.
Create your ideal customer profile and identify opportunities for precision marketing.
Automate repetitive marketing tasks.
Of course, marketing automation systems can also…well…automate. It’s a common misconception that marketing automation just means “sending drip emails.”
Here are a bunch of automation tasks that are helping B2B veterinary marketers do more with less:
- Improving CRM data integrity by performing automated data updates
- Reducing repetitive tasks to improve efficiency and reduce manual errors
- Lead scoring
- Internal notifications
- Adding prospects to CRM campaigns
- Removing or adding prospects or customers to advertising audiences
- Sending SMS messages
Don’t Forget About Existing Customers
Sometimes, we get so focused on acquiring new business that we forget that CRM stands for customer relationship management. Your CRM should serve as a centralized hub for key customer insights, including:
- Products owned and purchase history
- Renewal and warranty dates
- Product-specific data (eg, serial numbers)
- Customer satisfaction survey results
- Service tickets or complaints (flag unhappy customers for suppression from marketing lists)
- Key stakeholders and affiliations
By maintaining this data, you can personalize customer outreach, improve service, and enhance overall satisfaction.
Elevate Your CRM with AI and Integrations
As AI becomes more mainstream, there are tools for almost any CRM task you need help with—advanced analytics, predictive lead scoring, data augmentation, trend predictions, chatbots, AI assistants, and forecasting tools, to name several. AI-powered tools and integrations can expand your CRM’s capabilities in numerous ways:
- Predictive lead scoring to identify high-potential prospects
- Chatbots and AI assistants to streamline customer interactions
- Advanced analytics for trend prediction and forecasting
- API integrations with accounting and inventory systems to automate reordering and customer outreach
Explore your CRM’s app marketplace to identify tools that align with your business objectives.
Pro Tips for Maintaining a Healthy CRM
Data cleansing isn’t fun, but it’s essential. Start by creating rules, like:
- If a sales deal is x number of months old, it gets listed as closed-lost
- If a prospect hasn’t engaged with 50 emails, they get removed from the email list
Without rules, making these kinds of data changes is very difficult. Many stakeholders have opinions that can slow down the data cleansing process. Establish rules and make sure they are well-documented and automated, if possible.
With the evolving regulatory environment, ensure your CRM practices meet current data regulations and protect sensitive information. If you plan to text or email prospects, ensure you collect and store proper SMS and email opt-ins. If you’re using a marketing automation system, there should be built-in options to collect opt-ins.
Let’s Achieve Your CRM Goals Together
A well-optimized CRM is more than just a database—it’s a dynamic tool that can align sales and marketing, enhance operational efficiency, and drive revenue growth.
Success isn’t just about generating more leads; it’s about managing and nurturing the right ones. Contact the VetMedux team today to learn how we can help align a strategic campaign to fill your CRM with high-value leads.