Managing the Success of your Campaign

In my last blog, “Interactions, a Sales Rep’s Diary”, I discussed using Interactions to document the touchpoints you have with your Contacts.  It’s an easy and powerful way to record the interactions with your leads and clients so you don’t have to remember everything and can recall them when needed.  In prior blogs, I’ve written about Contacts, Segments, Opportunities, Sales Cycles and Interactions.  Now, it’s time to talk about bringing all these features together under the umbrella of a “Campaign” and learn how to equip your team for target marketing with Campaigns and Segments in Business Central.

Campaigns

Want to sell the right products to the right leads? A Campaign blends a group of Contacts and a group of activities to focus your Sales Staff on your Contacts that meet specific requirements.  With a focused approach on who they should be contacting, their efforts should be more productive.

A Campaign is much more than a targeted list. Campaigns allow you establish Sales Prices or Sales Line Discounts for promotional Items included in the Campaign, and you can set Effective Start and End Dates.  The Campaign Prices and Discounts can be activated after the Campaign is set up so you don’t have to worry that someone will offer the promotion before you’re ready. Should circumstances arise during the Campaign (like out of stock conditions on a one time buy), you can deactivate the Campaign Prices and Discounts before the planned End Date.

When I was a user, our company would be offered promotional buys from our vendor based on projected sales.  Knowing that we could get an additional discount on specific products, we would create a Campaign offering our customers price incentives for those products. The promotional buys guaranteed we wouldn’t erode our margins and we could focus our sales efforts on those products.

Segments

In conjunction with a Campaign, the Segment allows you to pinpoint the Contacts on which you want your Sales Staff to focus.   In my blog “Adding Rocket Fuel to Your Segments in Business Central”, I discussed all the different ways we could filter the Contacts we select for our Segment.  You can create multiple Segments for the Campaign, segregating the Contacts in each Segment by Sales Territory, by Sales Rep or Product Line for example.  If these Segments will be used again in a future Campaign, you can save the filtered criteria, making it easy to replicate successful Campaigns. This flexibility is shown below, where you see a sample of Segments for different products tied to a Campaign.

Sales Reps could be assigned to each Segment, but we were focusing on Product Lines and we let each Sales Rep work from the same Segments.  Sales Reps were evaluated on actual sales and we evaluated the Campaign in total.

Measuring Your Campaign Success

When you’re ready to evaluate the success of your campaign, take advantage of Dimensions, which can be assigned to the Campaign.  This means Sales Documents created from the Campaign and posted to the G/L will be posted with that Dimension Value.   This will allow you to review sales generated from the Campaign and dive into the margin analysis to evaluate the financial results of the Campaign.  That’s powerful stuff!  Using a different Campaign Dimension for each Campaign, you can see which Campaigns throughout the year are the most profitable.

While Dimensions give you a financial measurement of the Campaign, you can realize impressive insights from Campaign statistics related to the activity generated.  For example, you can see how many of your targeted Contacts were reached and their response rate.  But more importantly, you can see how many Opportunities were created from the Campaign.  Since this is all tracked by Sales Rep, you can also evaluate the activity each rep generated who worked on the Campaign.

But wait, there’s more! You can see the individual Opportunities created from the Campaign and view critical information such as the Current Sales Cycle Stage, the Estimated Closing Date and the Estimated Value of the Sale.  As you are getting closer to the end of a Month, Quarter, or Year, you can view this information quickly and make decisions that may assist the Sales Rep in closing the deal.

Let’s recap: At a high level, you can create a Campaign, setting prices or discounts for products that you want to push in your promotion.  Then you define the criteria for those companies and contacts you want your Sales Staff to focus on.  Once you’ve activated the Campaign, you let your Sales Staff create and manage their Interactions and Opportunities.  As the Campaign progresses, you can view and direct as needed to ensure everyone succeeds. Imagine the increase in sales and targeted profitability!

Be sure to check out my next blog in which I discuss Profile Questionnaires, which allow you to define the segmentation you want to capture for your Contacts in Business Central.