When it comes to marketing with CRM you have plenty of choice, from basic marketing functionality like sending bulk email campaigns to much more advanced functionality such as no-code workflow and website tracking. Keep in mind, the systems are priced accordingly, so you need to ask yourself – “How much functionality do I really need?”
Marketing automation means different things to different people – from bulk emailing to full forensic analysis of website traffic – plus some lead generation and lead scoring in between.
How then do you choose what is best for your company? The solution is to take a close look at your customer interaction strategies and choose technology that makes it simpler for staff to effectively carry out their responsibilities and carry out your goals.
Why combine the two platforms?
When someone asks us the age-old question – ‘what is CRM?’ – we tell them that CRM provides all the tools needed to Acquire, Develop and Retain your customers. Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service – three key pillars for any business. Marketing being what I will be focusing on in this article, your salespeople will need people to sell to and that’s where marketing comes in.
CRM companies realised this a long time ago, so over the years many of the big CRM providers have expanded their functionality by purchasing marketing automation platforms to integrate into their systems, which is why if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Marketing Automation you’ll see a lot of familiar names.
What does Marketing Automation bring to the CRM?
So, why would you want to have marketing automation in your CRM? There are plenty of reasons, but the main one – tracking the customer journey.
If you can see exactly where a customer has come from, which content or activity converted them and everything that happened in the sale process, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t which will help you improve your entire sales and marketing process.
As a Marketer, if I see someone convert on a specific page and not on another, I can look at both pages and see why one worked better than the other, which campaigns are working best and so much more.
The Sales team at Collier Pickard can see which content on our website a prospect has looked at before they make their initial call. They know if someone has looked at our CRM Pocket Book or the Sales Director’s Guide to Selecting CRM, they know what product page someone has been looking at and using this information they know what to talk about with the prospect.
Having all this information in one place means that the company directors have a bird’s eye view of Marketing and Sales whenever they want, they can build dashboards showing key information, or run searches to see where in the Marketing/Sales process a particular lead is, or which stages all the leads are in.
Having all this data in one place means that everyone in the company is on the same page.
What next?
What a great question! If you’re not sure what functionality you need from your CRM and Marketing platform, then get in touch with us and we’ll help you out. If you already know what you need but aren’t sure which platform is best, then get in touch. If you know what you need and know what platform you want but want someone experienced to talk you through the process, then get in touch.
What I’m saying here is that we know CRM and we know Marketing Automation – we are not software peddlers, we are solutions architects that work with cherry picked solutions that will deliver ROI, so get in touch and give us the opportunity to prove it to you.
