Episode 10: How to Optimize Your Enterprise CRM to Drive Digital Success | With Joseph Kahn

Full transcript:

David Bain  00:00

How to optimize your enterprise CRM to drive digital success - with Joseph Kahn.

This Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals - providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands in a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at insightsforprofessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. How effective is your enterprise CRM at silently and effectively pulling the levers behind your essential digital activities? Today, we're gonna be focusing on how to optimize your enterprise CRM to drive digital success with a two-time Microsoft Pinnacle Award-winning leader who speaks about connecting all that matters to your constituents for maximum potential. He’s a harmonic growth hacker and he's the founder of the digital marketing agency Hum JAM. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show - Joseph Kahn.

Joseph Kahn  01:03

Hey, excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

David Bain  01:06

Great to have you on Joseph. Superb. You can find Joseph over at humjam.com. So Joseph, how much impact can the CRM that you use, and the overall setup of your CRM, have on your digital success?

Joseph Kahn  01:20

Literally, I've been implementing CRM for well over 20 years now. We were just talking behind the scenes about a trend about CRM coming into play now. Because, back in the day, we only had maybe one or two channels. What do I mean? The inbound we had a phone call, we had a billboard and a yellow page ad, right? So, the CRM may not have been as important 25 years ago, but today, how many channels do we have?

David Bain  01:49

Yeah, I mean, back then internet marketing was one channel, wasn't it?

Joseph Kahn  01:53

One channel, yeah, that was just one channel. Now, internet marketing is how many channels? From the SEO, to the paid versions, to all kinds of things that you can do. Imagine, back then you just had to connect your fax machine, to your billboard, to your inbound from your yellow pages. Now, you need to track your Facebook engagement, your Twitter engagement, anything that's happening on LinkedIn, anything that's happening if you're doing a call like this, or anything where you're going live. And then, you have to have of course you've heard of squeeze pages, or opt-in pages, or lead magnet pages where you're collecting people in. Now, those people are expecting you to continue the dialogue. 

So now, your CRM is responsible for that dialogue and connection. The CRM now is meant to be, what I call, an ‘omnichannel’ connector. And, if you're looking for that term, that's the big keyword term right now for CRM: it’s ‘omnichannel’. What does that mean? That means that, if I'm connecting with you as a business, that CRM has to text me, email me, message me on Facebook if I'm connected there, respond to me if I'm actually responding to a tweet or a post, and, when I go Google it and I'm looking around and going ‘is so and so for real?’, you need to show up there also, meaning your knowledge panel needs to be there.

Those social medias need to be connecting, but when they do connect those things - if I click on that listing, that needs to track back in the CRM. We’re going to talk about Salesforce, but that's kind of one of the ‘cat's meows’ there is being able to track, even all the way down to your search engine listing, back to the client who's looking and interested at maybe your product, or something that you're working on even as a sales team. Meaning, your sales team is another channel, you know what I'm saying? You’ve got the sales team, you’ve got your outbound email, you’ve got your outbound, inbound, you even got the television ad - you're tracking television on the inbound - you got all these kinds of things. How do we do it in today's day? The only way we connect all that back to the customer through analytics and analysis and figuring out what our strategy is, is through our CRM. So that's how important that is, to answer your question.

David Bain  04:10

Obviously, every enterprise is using a CRM to some degree, and most enterprises probably think that they're using CRMs effectively at the moment, but in your experience, where are some of the missed opportunities that enterprise brands are generally not taking advantage of with their CRMs?

Joseph Kahn  04:29

The biggest one, and this is the easiest one because, as you said, it can be as easy as a Chrome extension CRM, it can be as easy as a WordPress plugin CRM - if you just Google WordPress plugin, Chrome extension CRM, any of those types of things - but the key here in CRM, in my opinion, is engagement. In social media, as you know, the EdgeRank - the algorithm - rewards engagement. It rewards that because that's eyeballs, right? And eyeballs is money, as we know in advertising.

You get rewarded on the engagement, so your CRM, the best thing you can do with these free plugins - or even with Salesforce or with HubSpot - they all include what I call click tracking, or open tracking. Meaning if you send me an email and you get, ‘Hey, he just opened your email’, guess what? The quickest, easiest way to get that sale, get that whatever, is the engagement. That's how the algorithm works in social media. Meaning if I post, ‘Hey, do you want this?’ and somebody says, ‘Yeah’ and I go there quickly to say, ‘Here it comes, it's coming in your inbox’ and they say, ‘Okay, cool’. If I can keep that going as quickly as possible, Facebook will keep showing that to the feed. That's called EdgeRank.

The key in this is that when anybody responds you need to know and have a person, or you, or a robot able to respond to that response. That's what your CRM will do. If I send an email outbound through Salesforce, it'll let me know ‘so and so opened’, ‘so and so clicked’, ‘so and so opened’. Then, I can set automated activities in Salesforce that make it so that if I do click it, it will put me on another campaign that will do a whole other set of things. So, if you want to automate this, that's the way. It’s that click tracking - it’s being able to see who's opening, who's interacting, and being able to engage on that as quickly as possible.

David Bain  06:25

So, you say that many enterprises are missing out on revenue and profits, and that's the number one reason: it's because they're not connecting every micro activity that the customers are going through.

Joseph Kahn  06:36

That's correct. And as quickly as possible.

David Bain  06:38

As quickly as possible, absolutely. Even though you dislike the microphone, as quickly as possible.

Joseph Kahn  06:45

As quickly as possible, because as soon as that happens - as soon as they engage or whatever - they're going to move on. Remember the attention span of the user, right? That's what the CRM is for, it’s to keep the engagement, keep them hot and ready. That's what we call leads in the CRM: ‘cold’, ‘warm’, ‘hot’. 

To keep them hot, you have to engage with them when they're hot, when they're the hottest - they're coal, they’re burning. So if they engaged on an email, you're going to find out that they just clicked on that email, or opened that email, and guess when you should send them another email? Right now. Because they just opened the email.

David Bain  07:22

Now, one of the go-to enterprise CRMs is Salesforce, and you've done a lot of work integrating Salesforce with WooCommerce to deliver more customer connection and greater technological engagement. So, tell us a little bit about that.

Joseph Kahn  07:35

One of the clients that we've created this Salesforce engagement for was with Bugs Bunny artist chuckjones.com. One of the biggest things is - we're kind of responsible for the lower selling $200 to $1,000 range, using SEO and using the online, but they have a full-time Art Gallery sales staff that sells art in and upwards of $250,000 per painting.

We're talking high-class, high-dollar art, but these high-dollar artists spend 20/30 minutes, sometimes, on our site that we've created - these really highfalutin people - but they don't buy it on our site, they engage with a live salesperson. But, that live salesperson wants to know what? What did my prospect do? Where did they spend their time? We have video of the prospect looking. If my sales guy can watch the video of the person who is their client looking at art, my salesperson knows what that person is interested in.

They can see this just by connecting those dots, meaning the salesperson in Salesforce who's working with the client can see when their client goes over to a section in our website, okay, and go, ‘What is my client looking at?’ They can see that right in there. They can see what they've clicked on, what they're looking at, and when they reach out, they go, ‘Hey, I can do a good deal on that Daffy Duck portrait you have been looking at’.

The sales connection is where - a lot of online marketers and a lot of SEO, and a lot of different marketers, are only into that online digital connection of ‘we're interested in the WooCommerce’. But, the WooCommerce is: we're happy to make that sell, but we're also happy to track the Salesforce integration, with that tracking on that product, so that a sales guy can now pick up the phone and we can basically - together - close that sale.

David Bain  09:28

There are wonderful insights that you can glean through CRMs, if you set them up properly, but I guess you can also overstep the line.

Joseph Kahn  09:37

Yeah, you can overstep a line. But also - sorry to interrupt you there - but this social media also gets integrated with that, because you can see if they're engaging in the social media on certain posts. As a salesperson, to then look up the client to see, ‘Oh, man, they just went to the Chuck Jones gallery and were looking at some of the products there.’ That's an instant phone call for that salesperson to reach out to that person: ‘Hey, I noticed you were looking on chuckjones.com.’ Or, ‘I noticed you bought something’, because that's the other thing that we're doing.

Not to give away our secrets here, but here's a really killer secret from a sales perspective, it’s what you call a tripwire product. We're creating these tripwire products - these $200, Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes kind of things - in order to get interest to the salespeople. Now, if somebody buys this $200 Daffy Duck, they get forwarded right to the sales guy who's in charge of the Daffy Duck gallery. Because, what do we know? We know that that person's interested in Daffy Duck, and then that salesperson is going to reach out and say, ‘Hey, I noticed you're interested in Daffy Duck, do you want to see the full catalog? I got some secret Daffy Duck portraits here in the back that I'm holding back’ - kind of thing. The salespeople have their own little secret pad that they sell from.

But, if I can sell 10 Daffy Duck paintings with SEO at the $200 level, there's a sales guy that’s gonna be calling you. That's because we're hooked up with our CRM. It's not just online sales. We also have a deep sales engine person that's looking at that psychology, looking at what they're doing online, looking if they're going to Facebook or going and clicking on the Instagram photo or whatever - the salesperson can see all that. And that's why this is ‘omnichannel connecting’.

David Bain  11:22

My initial question, or thought that I had, about overstepping the line - related to a salesperson being very personal with someone and phoning up and demonstrating that ‘I've been following you.’ But, I guess I should probably park that thought because that’s maybe even another conversation to have. We need to focus in on how you can optimize the use of your CRM at the moment. Obviously, two areas that you've been doing that a lot is with SEO and social. So, how can Salesforce specifically really assist with your SEO and your social campaigns?

Joseph Kahn  11:57

Believe it or not, this integration starts at the products. Inside of Salesforce, you have something called products, opportunities, etc. Salesforce will even manage inventory, and we even have some plugins.

The cool thing about Salesforce and other neat tools out there is that all of the images are handled by another really cool image level, where you can see the gallery images in really high quality - and that's coming through Salesforce too. How it helps with SEO is that those images from that plugin are also unique and they're optimized to go down to our level. We're using Zapier to push this, from that plugin, through Salesforce, into our WooCommerce. 

Everything is handled. The product descriptions - that type of stuff - is all done through the product features inside of Salesforce - so a lot of that SEO stuff. Then, from the WooCommerce, we're using another plugin called Rank Math - if anybody's familiar with plugins - that then hones in more descriptive keywords on top of what comes from Salesforce.

Salesforce sends us the data as an import in, and then once we update that data using our plugin, it will then backfill that back to the Salesforce database - to update descriptions and different things, if we have to add other keywords or stuff. We do bump up all of these descriptions with some SEO metrics as well, but Salesforce connects the images, connects the titles, the inventory - even if somebody rates the product through the Salesforce engine (because they have a little tool that does ratings) - that will go back into schema into our store. That'll come up. You can see some products, that’ll have stars in the Google search engine listings - that also comes through Salesforce. How they do it is through their schema that comes through when you do the import.

David Bain  13:56

Many departments aren't even actively using CRMs within their organizations, and many companies obviously aren't maximizing the use of their CRM. I think it's important to ask the question: If you're actively using data on an ongoing basis, how can you integrate this with your existing CRM and tie things together and then better harness the data that you're gathering in other sectors in your business?

Joseph Kahn  14:23

The easiest way, again, is to use tools like Zapier because there's a lot more data that's coming – we’ve got the internet data coming in, we’ve got the person talking data, we’ve got connections to social media coming in. You’ve got a lot of different data coming in, just through all the various connections. Salesforce just has API and connections all over the place, and then you use a tool like Zapier - Zapier is meant to just push data. It's to take data from one resource, and match it, and say ‘Hey, can we all be unified and together and the same?’ and then push the data, so that you are not missing anybody or leaving anybody in the cracks.

The reason why you do this - and in Salesforce and I use other tools other than Salesforce - is they have analysis tools. You want to know the analysis tool so you can, what we call, ‘segment’ with CRM. You want to segment your list into the hottest, warmest, coldest - who's the one who's clicking on all the Facebook ads? Who's the one looking at Daffy Duck all day long? You want to be able to segment who the low-hanging fruit is. You don't want your low-hanging fruit going stale or falling on the ground.

In Salesforce, you can pull up all that analysis data. Once you’ve got all this data coming in, you can, in Salesforce, see all the data and run all kinds of crazy reports. There are all different kinds of reports, depending on the KPIs - the key performance indicators - that you're after. How many people are coming to your website to how many people are buying a product - if that's a KPI, you could pull that up on your Salesforce. We have traffic data coming in with a pixel, because we track with a pixel, so we're getting all kinds of data using that pixel tracking that's using the Salesforce pixel, if that makes sense?

With that, we get all kinds of data, from the traffic to the views. That comes in and will attach to the client. If the client is actually going and viewing, or whatever, they'll actually see what they're doing, see where they're going, or whatever. Then, that can be pulled into reports: How many people are coming? How many people are closing? How many people are looking at clients that are coming to the website and closing? You can do analysis down on your sales team.

This is for managing multiple channels. For a big business that has a sales team, where you want to integrate everything together - that's what the CRM is doing. And, all the data in Salesforce is in the reports, and you can construct these your own way. You can add your own data, you can do Boolean searches, you can say ‘add this’, ‘filter’ this. There are all kinds of filtration processes.

David Bain  17:19

Let's move on from what we need to do to improve our CRMs right now to planning for the future. So, in your opinion, what's the biggest marketing trend or challenge for marketers over the coming year?

Joseph Kahn  17:32

The biggest challenge or trend is finding a good omnichannel connector that will do everything. There's a lot of stuff coming on, and it's going to be a challenge coming into the CRM market. Even companies like Salesforce and HubSpot, and different ones, are really struggling to try to keep up with everything because everybody does want to be an omnichannel connector. And, they need to be, to fully be connected to your constituents - to the searcher, to the looker, to the product buyer.

We want to know everything about them, and in order to meet their needs, we need to know their pain points - we need to know everything. In order to collect that ‘everything’, you've got to have a system to do it, and that's going to be the biggest challenge.

The biggest challenge is finding one that has that range, where people are building. There are several right now, new ones, where - if you see an ecosystem building around it, that's what I would be looking for. If I'm heading towards 2023/2024, I'm going to be looking for a CRM. My agency is now implementing CRMs, we're implementing not just other digital marketing channels such as SEO - but I'm not going to implement SEO unless I know there's a great CRM behind my work. That's where we draw the line now, so that's going to be a trend.

I'm not going to do email automation, SEO work, anything, unless I know you have a CRM that's going to track that incoming - that's going to be able to connect the dots. If I’ve got a searcher coming in, I need to know that they're going to be taken care of, that there's going to be an email nurture campaign coming out, that there's going to be memes that they're going to connect with on social media. That's what the CRM is designed to do – it’s to connect all this, it’s to make sure that the client is being taken care of.

Finding one that has all those things - even the one that we implement and promote just added the ability to blog. So, not all of them have the abilities to do everything and that's why you may have to piecemeal it around. You'll have to just pick stuff, and then use Zapier to connect it all, until there's one solution that handles it all.

I haven't seen one that will handle everything, but they're all trying to be - from Salesforce to HubSpot to GoHighLevel - they're trying to be, and they eventually will be. That's the future. The struggle is to pick the one that you're going to stick with, that’s going to be there, and that’s going to take you to the next level. CRM is going to be the way to get all these channels connected together and be able to make those decisions in order to do it. If you're not doing it, you're not going to be able to compete.

David Bain  20:12

You've mentioned omnichannel a lot, so I just thought it was worth taking a moment, probably from my perspective, to actually share what I understand and feel is the difference between omnichannel multichannel - and I guess you'll probably add your thoughts as well. So omnichannel is every single channel or touchpoint around the customer, and multichannel is each touch point that is required in order to drive traffic towards a product or service.

Joseph Kahn  20:41

Correct. That is absolutely correct.

David Bain  20:44

Well, there we go. I thought you were going to add something to it or disagree with me in some way.

Joseph Kahn  20:47

You nailed it. The omnichannel is that one pipe, it's that one experience that connects all the dots together. That's why we call it harmonics because, if you really want to get that omnichannel resonating with your client, then you harmonically tune all those channels together in that one omni experience. It's not multi. Multi is like ‘I got a whole bunch of things’ - it’s a buffet. A multichannel is a buffet. That's when you hear people arguing with you. ‘I don't like Facebook. I'm not gonna participate there.’ ‘I don't like Twitter.’

I don't care what you like in an omnichannel. Omnichannel is not about liking the channel. Omnichannel is about providing what the customer likes. Omnichannel is about providing their experience, their connection, their love, their harmony - that's the omnichannel. That's not multichannel. Those are options. This is not optional. 

David Bain  21:43

I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Joseph Ken over at humjam.com. Joseph, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Joseph Kahn  21:50

Awesome. Thank you for having me on it. It's been a blast.

David Bain  21:53

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP, our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems, all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com