How to manage a direct mail campaign?

[ljbutler]

Hope someone can help!

I am trying to work out how to use Sugar to manage a NON email campaign. Our marketing process goes something like this:-

1. Gather a list of target companies.
2. Phone each company to identify the right person to deal with.
3. Send that person a direct mail piece.
4. Follow up the mailer with phone calls. (this can go on for several months)

I have been 'playing' with the community edition demo's and can't seem to understand how I should manage this process for several reasons.

1. There seems no way to log calls, tasks, notes or any kind of history against a 'Target'.
2. Nothing I do to a 'Telemarketing' or 'Direct Mail' Campaign (i.e. marking it as complete or sent) generates any history in the 'Campaign Log' list of a target.
3. There is no 'Status' field for a target.
4. If I use leads instead of targets so that I can generate a history of calls etc., that history gets lost when I convert the lead to a contact.

Could anyone please help me understand how to manage non email based campaigns so that I have a recorded history of how we have marketed ourselves to a new prospect? I have found very little help in the user documentation or wiki (which seem to concentrate exclusively on email campaigns), and all the similar posts asking for help seem to go unanswered.

Thanks in advance for your time and input.

[jhill10110]

I have not found a way to do this either. This seems like such a basic function of a CRM I didn't even look into this before choosing SugarCRM over Salesforce.com. We have no interest in running email campaigns but desperately need to track our direct mail campaigns. I think we may be switching to salesforce.com if I can not find a way to do this.

[ljbutler]

jhill,

I've 'developed' a way around this now which gives me a (so far!) workable system. It's very early days but I'll explain what I have done in the hope that it might help. So you understand a little of the 'why' I should explain that we are dealing with business to business services in the engineering sector. Have a look at my post above for a simple description of our marketing method.

So, here's what I did:-

I abandoned the 'targets' module entirely. I now put all targets into leads. So, throughout this post when I refer to a 'target' they are a a prospect, someone who we are trying to market to, but they are actually entered into Sugar as a 'lead'. They get entered initially as "Mr. Not Known" (we obviously know the Account name and other details of the target company). I have created/modified a 'status' field for leads which has the following options - Target, Assigned, Send mailer, 1st follow up, Ongoing, Converted, Recycled, Dead. Initially Mr. Not Known is a target. We gather targets as and when we have time throughout the month.

Once a month I search all leads by status and pick out all the 'Targets'. I choose those I wish to send mailers to this month and mark them as 'Assigned' to one of my staff. I've set up their 'My leads' dashlet on their homepages to show assigned leads, so once they show up each staff member knows to phone their assigned target companies, find the contact name of the person we need to send the mailer to, add that information to the record, and log their call in the leads history. As they get contact details for each company they change the status to 'Send mailer'. A week or so later I again search leads by status, print out labels for all those with a 'Send mailer' status and post the mailers out.

A week later I change the status of all 'Send mailer' leads to '1st follow up'. Again this is set to show up on my staff's dashlets, so they then know to start following up each target by phone. It is then their responsibility to schedule later follow up calls for each target, and we have guidelines for the timescales for doing this. Some targets will obviously get converted or marked as dead during this process.

Each month I also create a 'campaign'. When I send out the mailers I also add the campaign name to each targets record, and add those targets to a 'target list' for that month. At the moment this serves no purpose, since it has no impact on the management of the direct mail campaign. However, my thought is that we may move in to email marketing some day, and having the targets grouped by month may prove useful in the future. Because I name he campaigns with the month/year name it also forms a quick check as to how long we have been pursuing each target.

I hope that gives you some ideas. If your business model sounds similar to ours I'm quite happy to send you my configuration (I think that's possible!) if you think it might help. Or by all means ask questions and I will do my best to help.

[gtony]

Hi Lucy,

I know you wrote this a while back, but just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write this post and offering your business process. I found it very useful and agree with what you say.

Many Thanks
Tony

[kuske]

We used different TargetLists in the campaign as a status indicator.
So during the telemarkting campaign the targets were migrated through different target lists.
e.g. target lists like "not interested", "wants paper", "wants meeting", etc.

Perhaps anybody could start a WIKI article for Campaigns and esp. Telemarketing Campains in the Sugar Support Wiki

[ljbutler]

Tony - no problem at all. Did you get something working?

Kruske - sounds like a good idea but I'd have no idea how to go about doing it. The main concern for me would also be that I feel that I have found a way to 'work around' the system, rather than using it as it is supposed to be used.

[paragontrailer]

I am also terribly confused about the direct mail process. We have created a Target List from both our own Contacts and from a database we purchased. That part was easy. We developed the mailer and our printers sent them out on Fiday without a hitch. Now we want to see the process work as a Target becomes a Lead and then a Contact/Account or an Opportunity.

Problem: There is not any easy way to search for the Target from within the list except to scan the complete list 10 Targets at a time. We have over 3,300 Targets so there are 330+ pages to scan for the Target. If you are on the phone with them, you want to be able to retrieve quickly, ask questions about missing info, answer questions and document the conversation. A quick search does not exist.

How can a search field be added to this panel and how can a Page Number selector be added?

Kevin
kevin@paragontrailer.com

[cristina5448]

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[jaqlene]

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[pedror414]

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