The Secret behind Successful Marketing in Business Central

In my last blog, Managing the Success of your Campaign, I discussed using Campaigns to set prices and using Segments to provide your sales staff with a more targeted list on which to focus their efforts.  The Contacts you select for your target list are based on attributes you or Business Central has assigned. But where do these attributes come from? Let me show you how to get more from your Contacts in Business Central with Profile Questionnaires.

Profile Questionnaires

The Profile Questionnaire gives you the ability to identify the information you want to collect for each of your contacts, so you can pinpoint your marketing efforts.

This is a robust feature of Business Central that provides a significant leg up for your sales team! Of course with any sales or marketing effort, the more selective you are with your target list, the more likely your message will reach those contacts who are interested in hearing your message and thus – you guessed it - more favorable interactions.

Say you are marketing a new fuel additive specifically designed to make vehicles running on unleaded gasoline more fuel efficient. You sure don’t want to waste time contacting companies who only focus on diesel- or electric-powered vehicles: Your sales staff will be frustrated by the lack of positive responses from their efforts and the companies you’re needlessly bothering will be annoyed and may even report your emails as spam.

Profile Questionnaire Setup

Let’s take a look at what setup options you have with Profile Questionnaires. Questionnaires store demographic or other types of information you want to collect about the individuals with whom you correspond.  The answers can be binary (such as male or female), or they can support multiple answers (like hobbies, such as if the individual is a football fan and an avid reader).  The answers to these types of questionnaires can be updated by the Sales Reps in your organization whenever a touchpoint occurs.

While questionnaires for Companies can be simple and maintained by your Sales Reps, Business Central also provides a powerful tool for highlighting strategic insights.  Below you see systemically generated responses for questions, like which of your customers comprise the Top 25% of Profit Dollars last year and this year.  Because Business Central is our fully functional ERP system, it knows the Contacts associated with our customers and it knows the profit we make on every sales transaction.  As new transactions are posted, Business Central tracks the related information and automatically updates the relevant questionnaire answers.

Developing a targeted sales list

A groovy feature of the Questionnaire is the ability to drill into the No. of Contacts field to quickly see which Contacts have “that” answer.  As soon as an answer to any question from any Questionnaire is assigned to a Contact, the count in the Questionnaire is automatically updated.

Another powerful feature is the many-to-many relationship between Contacts and Questionnaires. Person and Company Contacts can have answers from multiple Questionnaires.  For example, a Person Contact may have answers from a Questionnaire that asks personal information like the one above as well as answers from another Questionnaire that asks business related information like length of time with the company or their job responsibilities.  A Company Contact with answers from an Auto Contact Classification as shown above may have answers to general business information like Type of Engineering Company, number of employees, or annual revenue.

The more you know about the people and the companies they work for, the better you can focus on what you do that meets their needs so you drive more business.  When it comes time to develop your target list by building out a Segment, use the Contact Profile Answer filter to tap into the critical information you’ve gathered about your Contacts and you’ll build a very specific target list!

And as you learned in my Adding Rocket Fuel to Your Segments in Business Central blog, you can run the Add Contacts function multiple times using the Answers from any number of Questionnaires to add or remove the Contacts in the Segment.  You can even save the specific contacts in this Segment for use in future Campaigns.  Knowing how many Contacts meet the criteria you are using to build your Segment, you also know ahead of time what the total population should be for your targeted market.

A happy sales team

Knowing how to get more from your Contacts in Business Central with Profile Questionnaires will make a significant difference in your close rate and with your sales team’s energy. At a high level, you can create Questionnaires to gather information about people and companies.  The answers to the questions can be manually or systemically maintained.  The answers to the questions can be utilized when you are selecting the Contacts you want in your Segment.  The more information you have about your Contacts, the more you can fine-tune the Contacts you target.  If you have a well-designed target list, your Sales Staff will be more efficient, more motivated and more productive.  They win and the company wins!

Be sure to check out my next blog in which I discuss “Why Do People Spend So Much Money Acquiring Functionality They Already Own?”  We’ll take a look at what you already own – Contact Management, Outlook Integration, Interactions, Opportunities, Sales Cycles and Tasks in Business Central that already integrates with your Customers, Sales Quotes and Sales Orders – and why you should look there first before investigating additional solutions.