Content Management and CRM: Two great technologies that taste great together

As you might imagine, it's not always easy to come up with a column on content management every single week like clock work. Some weeks an idea just pops into my head fully formed, while others like this one, I had to give it some thought. This week's idea came to me just this morning in the nick of time while lying in bed right after my alarm went off at 6 am.

Just yesterday I had written a story about CrownPeak's [1] new Landing Page Manager [2] (LPM) with its feature for exporting prospect information to customer relationship management (CRM) tools. I also wrote about Clickability's integration with Salesforce.com [3] and last week I wrote about Salesforce.com's [4] new content packaging feature [5]. And there it was: The link between CRM and content management, two great technologies that should work more closely together.

Why CRM & CM taste great together

If you're not familiar with CRM, it's a tool for managing customer information, used mostly by sales people. Some of the bigger names are Salesforce.com, Seibel CRM [6] from Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics CRM [7]. The CRM tool, not unlike content management, uses a database to organize information for sales staff (and you will note that each of the vendors mentioned also sells a content management tool).

If you think about it, there are some natural intersections between the two systems. Marketing gathers information from the web and needs to pass this onto sales. Further, many times the sales team needs to locate resources (content) for prospects, and rather than reinventing the wheel, make use of existing content. Unfortunately, these activities typically involve leaving one system and opening another, making it more difficult for busy staff to complete a job. When employees can make use of this information without a thought, within one tool, it provides a single convenient place for doing a job. And that's why it's important to find ways to build connections between the two systems.

Web content management connections

Tools like CrownPeak's LPM and Marqui [8] content management have links to major CRM tools like Salesforce.com. A marketing team comes up with a campaign, generates a landing page for it, then (one hopes) watches the prospects come. As the team gathers information about prospects, it can pass this information along directly to the CRM tool where a sales person can follow up with prospects and (one hopes) generate some sales. To make it even simpler, the tool enables a direct connection, automatically exporting leads to the CRM tool, providing a natural bridge between the two technologies that requires little extra effort after setting it up.

ECM connections

When sales personnel are working with prospects, they very often need to gather content to send to prospects to help them evaluate the products and services the company sells. Salesforce.com's integrated content management component enables staff to access related documents marked with tags to make it easier to find, then create a package of documents for prospects to review. What's more it includes analytics tools to let sales staff see how many people have viewed various pieces in the package and learn which content catches a prospect's eye. Instead of jumping between two tools, the content management component is incorporated into the CRM tool, making it a simple activity to find and distribute the related content.

While it sounds good to make connections between CRM and CM, historically the two systems have lived in silos unable to communicate without building expensive software bridges between the two tools. But vendors like the ones mentioned above (along with others) have recognized there should be built-in connections, and are making it easier to move information between the two systems. After all, if it simplifies the workflow and makes it more likely to reach more  prospects and generate more sales, it would seem to be a match made in heaven. - Ron [9]