Laura’s Winning Ideas

Brian Carroll of B2B Lead Generation Blog said:

“I came across a recent report by Aberdeen Group entitled, “Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization,”…

Aberdeen found, “Companies that adopt closed-loop marketing processes are more than three times as likely to report a greater than 50% return on marketing investment (ROMI) than those that do not.”

Closed loop feedback is often touted in CRM software and often relied on to be the single source of sales and marketing collaboration. However, collaboration does not spontaneously erupt from software. Aberdeen concludes: “Lagging and average companies are not ill-equipped with technology products, rather they lack the integration and sophistication to realize higher results.”

Simply put, it’s not about the tools it’s about the process and the people. To develop an effective closed-loop-process you need to start with your people first.”

Teams with less than stellar results lack effective process. They hesitate to adopt process for a variety of reasons. The reasons (excuses) range from a lack of political authority to lack of time.

But you never get off the hamster wheel of rushing from one disaster to another until you adopt a process.

One element of my process is a “closed feedback loop” or proposal debrief. Once the proposal is out the door, we take some time to talk over what worked, what didn’t work, and what might have become a problem but for ____. Each time we would pick one or two items to change/prevent/re-train so we could improve with every proposal.

That is why we had databases that screamed, backup procedures that kept us on-line when the power went out, and a hit rate that was considered suspect because it was “too high.”