CRM Wins with Marketing and Public Relations

One benefit of bringing a public relations background into marketing management (like I am) is that you're unlikely to either a) drive too hard for an immediate sale that misses opportunities for long-term brand loyalty, or b) linger on facilitating good relationships that never quite influence the behavior of your audience in the intended fashion. Of course, it is ideal for both sides to work together; culture wars between marketing and PR can lead to low morale or uncertain goals as I have learned in the past, to my chagrin. One great way I've found for both sides to work together is through relationship marketing and the adoption of a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Such a tool can help marketers identify and segment potential customers for campaigns with strict, shorter-term sales quotas, while public relations has the ability to develop data for more challenging audiences that require more strategic engagement, loyalty-building touch points and activities that share value and increase the attractiveness of your service offerings.

At Gelman, Rosenberg & Freedman, we began collecting and segmenting business prospects into ACT by Sage, a fairly well-known CRM tool. It's taken a mental leap on my part to get past thinking of data entry as only a mindless administrative task and the process has been assisted by two items. First, from a process point of view, our marketing team commits only a limited period of time to data entry so there is never the sense that we are neglecting more strategic duties (and in fact, developing the knowledge about business prospects that can result from research and data entry has become aligned with such duties). Secondly, though, we are already seeing immediate results on new engagement opportunities with nonprofits and government contractors we otherwise would not have had otherwise.

CRM was the topic of a recent post by Tina Lewandowski on the Association of Accounting Marketing's LinkedIn group page. She asked for recommendations of various CRM tools and among those mentioned (and praised) were Microsoft Dynamic's CRM, Interaction and ContactEase.

As greater numbers of business operations move toward the realm of cloud computing, there is a similar shift as well from license-based CRM tools such as ACT toward software as a service, which allows for easier user access and more affordable services; software services are delivered over the Internet, often using a pay-as-you-go model. Salesforce.com is developing a good reputation in some circles.

No matter which tool you utilize however, CRM can satisfy both the shorter-term goals of sales and marketing campaigns while also allowing public relations teams to identify and reach out to higher-value prospects who cannot be engaged so quickly or easily. It can keep marketing and PR working together in a friendly way as they pursue their distinct goals while keeping helpful information about your desired customers or stakeholders always in front of you.

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Do You Want Management to Think You Are an Expert?

I just came across a list in a communications textbook that identifies four types of public relations professionals. The first, a "communications technician", is an individual responsible for process-oriented tasks--writing newsletters and copy for collateral, producing and distributing news releases, maintaining a contact database, etc. The role is purely tactical and more often than not represents the first role in a young public relations practitioner's career.

The third and fourth classifications of professional reflect strategic roles in which they understand their clients' business and industry, and are capable of making informed recommendations based on environmental scanning, risk assessments and relationship-building opportunities with key publics. Yet it is the second classification of professional--the "expert prescriber"--that most interests me as a potential danger to the client organization and the practitioner.

I was once hired by an organization to generate publicity for projects the company believed had newsworthy value within its target industries. Fair enough. If you haven't proactively done this before and if you believe you are doing newsworthy work, why not pursue this? I was hired as the public relations expert and, as such, was expected by management to build relationships with and deliver visibility in tier 1 media markets.

There were warning signs even at the beginning which, if I'd been more experienced at the time, I would have recognized as dangers-in-waiting. First, in this role I had no access to top management, and therefore lacked insight into key issues impacting the organization. With this knowledge, I might have had the tools to make more strategic decisions about which media markets to focus on. My new role also included responsibility for producing internal publications requiring significant communication with employees to develop accurate and in-depth copy; this essentially brought an overwhelming overlap of technical and strategic responsibilities. Finally, representatives of middle management often did not attend meetings to discuss activity in their departments.

When I was hired, it was as the public relations expert and, as such, little corresponding sense of responsibility remained with management to participate in the public relations process. No champion for PR existed in the suite of top management professionals. Any and all PR within the organization fell in my lap, no matter how essential collaborations were to success.

My relationship with the organization did not end well. I was an "expert" who ultimately was not deemed an expert. The failure was not entirely that of the organization, but a failure of my ability to lay out (at the beginning of my tenure) realistic expectations and an explanation of resources needed to attain the success the organization wished to achieve.

The dangers of being an "expert" were apparent almost immediately; without the participation, buy-in and endorsement from top management public relations can accomplish little. Of the four types of public relations professional, the role as "expert prescriber" has the potential to present the most danger.