User Review
( votes)To reach your target accounts, you need the right tools. Marketing automation and CRM (Customer Relation Management) solutions are powerful tools and effectively integrating your marketing automation with your CRM allow you to maximize the capabilities of both.
Marketing automation has the potential to take your leads and conversions to new heights and open the way to increased profits and growth. Integrating marketing automation software with your CRM system can multiply your results, convert more marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs), and drive more sales.
Two are better than one
With CRM plus marketing automation tools, you can:
- Guide the customer journey
- Unify efforts between marketing and sales
- Organize and streamline your marketing pipeline
- Capture and optimize customer data to prioritize efforts
- Avoid time and resources wasted on non-productive leads
When marketing automation and CRM work together, your team can analyze captured data to understand better how your prospect or customer is engaging with your company’s website, products, and services. Then you can serve them valuable content that will inform their buying decisions and promote sales.
Ensuring data hygiene
Your sales and marketing success depends on targeting the right buyers. If your marketing database contains errors such as unverified names, changed addresses, or uninterested contacts, your mailings, emails, or phone calls will be so much spam, which reflects poorly on your company. A unified system for monitoring your data will ensure that your messages reach their target.
5 tips for integrating CRM and marketing automation
Here are five best practices to make sure that you’re getting the most from your CRM and marketing automation integration efforts:
1) Make it personal
The advantage of integrated marketing automation is that it allows your team to personalize campaigns to target audiences at company and individual levels. Integrating CRM automatically delivers important data (company size, deal stage, deal size, deal status) to your marketing automation tool. That eliminates tedious work, and your marketing team can use the information to make their efforts more effective.
2) Establish accurate lead scoring
Your team needs to respond quickly to leads. Research indicates that businesses that respond to leads within five minutes are 100x more likely to connect and convert opportunities. Sadly, it usually takes B2B sales teams 42 hours to respond to a new lead, and 38% of those leads never reply. After 30 days, 90% of those leads are entirely unresponsive.
An effective strategy to determine which leads are ready for the sales team is lead scoring. Key indicators will vary, but opening an email, downloading an eBook, and visiting a pricing page are common lead scoring actions. Assign point values to each interaction and automatically be alerted to priorities.
3) Maintain visibility
The way a lead interacts with your marketing team is a good indication of how they will interact with your sales team. Also, the way they interact online will determine your sales team’s next move. Reps all along the line need to have a clear picture of all those activities.
Your CRM can provide up-to-date information on these post-SQL activities to ensure that sales reps react appropriately based on lead behavior. But reps must receive only relevant information. So set up triggers for promising activities such as downloading a product comparison checklist or buyer’s guide. This will alert your sales team that it’s time to accelerate their approach.
4) Unify your data
A benefit of CRM/marketing automation is the ability to unify your data. Prospects may reach out to your company in more than one way. For instance, a prospect may download an ebook and then call your company and speak with a sales rep. The sales rep might enter the prospect into the CRM. But this could lead to duplication if the prospect was already registered in your marketing automation tool.
Duplication is a problem if it leads to false reporting, compliance issues, and mixed messaging in your outbound communications. Be sure your sales and marketing teams regularly check for and delete duplicate records.
5) Integrate with agility
Integrating your CRM and marketing automation will be amazing. Your sales and marketing teams will connect in ways they never realized were possible. You’ll likely see a pronounced increase in productivity and performance. To maintain this edge might require adjustments over the lifetime of your tools. To adjust with agility, you’ll need a platform that integrates easily without heavy coding expertise.
Integrate your CRM with Act-On marketing automation software
Many marketing automation platforms require complex, lengthy CRM integrations or make it difficult to migrate your data if you terminate your relationship with the vendor. Choose a platform that integrates natively with the most popular and powerful CRMs – such as Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Zendesk Sell. Whether you’re creating awareness, driving demand, nurturing leads, or extending the customer lifecycle, Act-On’s automation tools help you achieve phenomenal value from your marketing program
Integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms has many advantages. When you align these systems, you align everything your sales and marketing teams work on. You’ll achieve synchronicity and drive productivity and success.
Learn how Act-On’s growth marketing platform can help you address your most pressing challenges while delivering tailored campaigns that drive meaningful engagement around your offerings. Contact our experts at Act-On for a free demo.
By Act-On, act-on.com
The post CRM and Marketing Automation: Better Together appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.
