In addition to generating brand buzz and creating campaign collateral, your marketing teams are working hard at contact management—actively securing leads, routing prospects to appropriate personnel, and ensuring timely follow-up and customer support. These activities are not simply add-on job functions— they’re just as essential, if not more so, as traditional advertising in securing brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, repeat business.
Successfully performing such tasks requires deep insight into customer behavior, including real-time updates as prospects turn to leads, leads turn to customers, and customers turn to support cases and repeat business. Marketers must be able to precisely and accurately distribute and track opportunities across every step of the customer lifecycle, and then use these insights to create tailored messages aimed at specific touchpoints in the customer journey. In short, they need the level of functionality and visibility only afforded by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
