Marketing Success with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - Begin with Marketing Campaigns

Whether your company has a mature CRM program fostering growth and managing relationships or your company has recently decided to add a CRM solution to support your business model, we are finding that customers are starting to increase their focus on marketing capabilities. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides users with a great starter set of tools for virtually all aspects of marketing and business development - from managing marketing campaigns, to building dynamic marketing lists, to tracking and analyzing the productivity of your efforts.  It also opens up many possibilities for add-ons and enhancements to optimize your company's sales and marketing capabilities.

The success of most marketing efforts is based on an individual interaction's ability to achieve an end goal.  In the example of new product introduction, there are many steps to the process of introducing a newer, better replacement to a legacy product.  The more basic steps can be implemented easily with capabilities of Dynamics CRM and as the process becomes more complex, more advanced features and enhancements can be introduced.

In this article and a series of follow-ups, I will walk through the steps to design smart business processes to manage a new product introduction campaign while mindfully visiting a successful CRM roadmap for marketing success.  It all starts with understanding the effort and understanding the marketing tools you already have in Dynamics CRM.

Step 1 - Determine the Marketing Effort

Before you do anything in any CRM application, you need to understand your marketing effort and the desired goal or direction.  This likely includes the scope of the effort, budget, start and end dates, expected response or success measurement and who is the target is.  In Microsoft CRM, the out-of-the-box Campaign Management functionality is ...