CRMs have been around a long time now — in martech years at least. But they’ve had to withstand some challenges. For some brands and organizations, marketing automation is at the core of the martech stack; for others, a CDP is the single source of truth. This is the second part of our look at the state of CRM in 2020.
The onset of COVID and its urgency brought many realizations to marketers about their operational processes, but one fundamental one stood out – their sales pipeline and prospect data was not nearly as deep as they thought.
To respond to this, Pipedrive, a decade-old CRM platform used by nearly 100,000 marketing and sales teams worldwide, decided to expedite the launch the newest version of its LeadBooster product, a lead generation and management tool-set.
“It was the first time many clients had ever seen their revenue dry up, and they needed answers fast,” said Pipedrive VP of Product Krishna Panicker. “They were feeling isolated and needed a better customer connection because it was now even more important to maintain and build upon their relationship with existing customers.”
The Pipedrive team looked online to Facebook communities as well as marketing and sales communities on Google to identify the current needs of their client demographic, as well as observing their need for a sense of connection in an unparalleled time for business development and marketing. They observed conversations involving marketers and sales professionals across the globe, including Germany, Mexico, Spain and the U.S., to understand the space they needed to fill in the CRM world.
“We were blown away by the people and how desperate they were to connect to try to start finding solutions,” said Panicker. “These are vibrant communities that needed answers, and they needed them fast.”
The link to leads
B2B marketers gain value through LeadBooster’s Prospector tool, which allows users to search through a deep B2B database of 400 million business profiles and 10 million companies that are high-quality outbound leads based on the user’s profile of the ideal consumer.
Users then can utilize credits to discover verified information, including direct phone numbers, social profiles and emails of their most compatible matches. Prospector updates 800,000 profiles on a daily basis while being compliant with domestic and international data regulations.
More than just a database of profiles, Prospector also features a chatbot that is designed to be customized for a client’s preferences, and a live chat function to assist in qualifying leads in real-time. The chatbot qualifies leads instantaneously while pushing them to an available sales representative, if necessary. For web functionality, LeadBooster has intuitive web forms that capture lead data, and can be distributed across teams along with a web visitors add-on that monitors web activity.
“We had trialed [LeadBooster] for a long time, about four months, with an isolated group of people, because getting it right was our top priority,” said Panicker. “We focused on deeper and tighter integrations with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, especially in the chat function because we really wanted to make sure it was optimized for remote work.”
Remote reality
With 230 implemented apps for remote work, LeadBooster is taking the new norm of COVID as a long-term situation to be addressed, and not a temporary problem.
“We really started to focus on what the customer needed by adding apps and not stripping them out,” said Panicker. “So far LeadBooster has been surprisingly successful because the extra trial time created a comprehensive product that saves time in this fast-paced environment.”
In 2021 Pipedrive is focusing on launching a more deeply integrated campaigns app along with more integrated email marketing services, a nod to the fact that the current work environment may become the permanent work environment.
“We are looking at how we can complement the full revenue cycle,” said Panicker, who was part of the leadership team that spearheaded the acquisition of Mailigen, an email marketing automation solution, in March in the midst of the COVID outbreak. “Covering the full revenue cycle will mean enhanced function by our Pipedrive apps and continuous improvement on our top job of capturing information and turning it into revenue.”
This story first appeared on MarTech Today.
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