If you’ve ever gone through the vendor procurement process, you probably received sets of documents including sales decks and promotional materials from each potential vendor. Although sending standard documents to every prospective client after a call is quick and easy for sales teams, they can set themselves apart from the competition by delivering customized materials instead.
Providing customized documents to potential clients involves more than just great design work, however. Sales teams also need to track who they should send information to, what materials should be sent, how they should be customized, and what information they’ve already shared with the prospect. They also need to track what kinds of materials potential clients have responded to since this can help drive their content strategy and lead to faster buying decisions.
Capturing and organizing this kind of information is the purpose of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. In this article, we’ll discuss how a well-managed CRM can affect more than just your email inbox.
What is a CRM?
In its simplest form, a CRM is where all the information about your prospects, partners, clients, and other relationships lives. It captures contact information for individuals, business information about the organizations they work for, past and present communications with them, and any requests or complaints they may have made.
This is helpful on many levels, but is particularly useful for your sales team. A CRM allows them to easily look up information about who they're speaking to, review notes from previous meetings and sales calls, and track the progress of deals. It also ensures that they’re aware of any communications between the prospect, partner, or client and other employees of the organization.
Some CRMs include features for forecasting revenue, profit, and other financial metrics and creating dashboards to track the success of your overall sales efforts and that of individual reps. They can also provide a place to store sales materials so they can quickly and easily be edited, sent, and tracked. The insights provided by a well-managed CRM can be critical to making big-picture decisions and setting organizational strategies for products, design, and marketing.
How Does a CRM Connect with DAM?
While many of the other pieces of your tech stack (CMSs, PIMs, and MRMs) may connect directly with your DAM system, allowing users to pull standardized and enriched content without having to log in to the DAM, the CRM-to-DAM connection is often less direct.
This isn’t always the case, as in organizations with a headless DAM system or a more integrated CRM that also serves as a PIM and/or CMS. However, if your CRM isn’t directly connected to your DAM system, you’ll need to make sure that your DAM management team, or those governing the program, has clear processes in place to notify the sales team when new versions of sales materials are created and used. This ensures that your sales team always has access to the right materials, can quickly edit and customize them and that prospects always receive the most up-to-date materials possible.
Both CRM and DAM systems serve each other, as insights provided by the CRM lead to better content creation strategies and the DAM program allows that content to be efficiently shared with prospects. With this in mind, it's important to connect the teams managing each system and make certain they're on the same page as to what needs to be done regularly to ensure that the sales team has all the materials they need at their disposal.
Conclusion
If you need help getting your DAM program up and running so that sales materials and other valuable content that drive purchasing behavior can be accessed more easily, contact Stacks today! We love facilitating growth by making DAM easy.
