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Simon Washbrook

Prospect Relationship Management

Bringing Better Business

What is prospect relationship management?

Prospect relationship management, or PRM, is a subset of customer relationship management, or CRM. CRMs take a holistic view of all your contacts—leads, loyal customers and all. But PRM focuses specifically on your prospects as individuals; it puts emphasis on your contact and how to nurture them. Working with PRM in mind means focusing your efforts on your contacts that have shown signs of engagement, and qualifying them as a customer. For contrast, a lot of businesses sometimes take a ‘cold-marketing-to-all’ approach, but this does not guarantee success. PRM allows companies to be more selective with their marketing efforts by targeting contacts that are showing signs of engagement. By doing this, you will typically increase sales conversion by x%!

What does prospect relationship management require?

For your prospect relationship management to work, you need to know exactly what a prospect looks like. What do they buy from your company? Why do they buy from you? What can you talk about that they would find relatable? In an ideal marketing world, this is where you’d know your buyer personas and already have aggregated data. But in the real world of a small business, it means using bringing all your data together into one place and being able to identify the contacts that have stated to engage with you. This includes your social media, email marketing, website and who you have spoken to. Once you can clearly see these, you can tag and target them with specific messaging to suit them.

What are the benefits of prospect relationship management?

The logical step from prospect relationship management is that if you’re getting the right people coming through, your ROI (Return On Investment) is going to go up. If you’re a bigger business, you’ll probably have the time and resources to get away with scooping up huge amounts of cold leads. If you’re a small business, then PRM will give you that extra edge, by allowing you to identify the golden nuggets in your database and quickly follow up on them with confidence. PRM also gives you the chance to personalise the process. You’ve already been noticed; now your relationship with them is front and centre, you can work your charm. By personalising your efforts, it will be easier, and quicker, to cement that trust. That also means you have more time (typically saving a day per week – so you can take your Saturdays off), more money (typical ROI of £185 for every £1 spent), and require less effort, so that you can direct these to other areas of your business.

‘60% of a customer’s buying decision is made before reaching out to sales. Identifying and nurturing your prospect at this stage, means you can influence their buying decision.’

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The process of prospect relationship management

You can use popcorn to focus on your prospect relationship management. The software automatically highlights the golden nuggets in your database—that is the contacts who have started to engage with you.

Prospect

Use your CRM software, such as popcorn, to pull all of your contact’s information together, score it and present them as hot, warm and cool prospects. These can then be segmented further and targeted with email marketing, allowing you to nurture and personalise your communications, increasing engagement levels and intelligence.

Relationship

You can put your contacts into an easily adjustable sales pipeline, which keeps everything you need on show, but alows you to dig down into the detail in just one click.

Management

Depending on how well your communications are going with a prospect, you can adjust where they go in the pipeline. If they’re new prospects, or existing customers that are indicating they might want to leave, you can track them and change their position in the sales pipeline. You can better suit their needs, be more likely to convert prospects into customers, and keep loyal customers loyal. Having a visual pipeline is the first step, but you’re not going to be watching your pipeline all day long. This is where automation and reminders come in. You can set up reminders to better time your responses and make sure you keep relevant. With automation, you can implement these rules without you having to be there. For example, someone clicking on a price plan on your website could trigger an email to be sent to them or move them into an email Marketing nurture campaign or simply have popcorn send you an email letting you know what they have done…

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