The Benefits of CRM & Marketing Automation Integration

What makes a company excel at selling? An essential element is the value it places on CRM and marketing automation. And on knowing how to deploy them together.

By joining forces, the sales team and marketing department can use their respective marketing tools to provide an exemplary customer service – and increase profits.

Make the most of marketing automation

It’s all about software. And tactics. Armed with these, a business can capture and mature prospects, convert a percentage of those leads into clients and, over time – and thanks to the efforts of the sales team – encourage customer loyalty and satisfaction. To achieve this, it’s essential to provide those customers and prospects with valuable, personalised content.

Marketing teams working with a programme that automatically integrates the digital marketing tools necessary for growth, obtain higher revenue and an excellent return on investment. The system allows for optimisation by generating better-qualified leads. Thanks to Lead Scoring you can evaluate different business opportunities.

And here’s what Lead Nurturing campaigns can do:

• identify leads ready to make a purchase
• convince undecided prospects by sending them valuable information
• win back users considered lost and reintegrate them into the process.

Add value through CRM

Customer Relationship Management, on the other hand, is software which, as the name suggests, helps you manage your relationship with your customers. It’sused by the sales force to gather as much information as possible on users, building long-term relationships based on a high degree of satisfaction. The process is also referred to as relationship marketing.

Working with a good CRM – and knowing how to maximise its potential – helps toincrease the value of your offering. The software is designed so that the customer is always at the centre of the strategy, thus enabling you to understand and respond to his needs.

In this way you increase sales productivity, recording and studying the behaviour of your sales opportunities as they progress further down the sales funnel.

CRM + automated marketing: more than the sum of their parts

The difference between good and brilliant sales management depends on whether you decide to integrate automated marketing and CRM. For a business to be productive and profitable, these two elements have to work together. Time and financial resources invested in intelligent technologies help salespeople improve customer experience, and multiply sales.

• Working in a team reduces the number of tedious tasks and avoids wasting time pursuing leads that are too immature to close a sale. This happens because improved organisation, data and follow-up gives you invaluable information for making decisions in real time.

There’s a great opportunity here for increasing the value of your database by recording the reaction of prospects to your offering, detecting problems right away, and knowing the total number of sales impacts made (phone calls, emails, sales calls) by the entire sales team.

• When you combine both systems, you’re literally removing ‘rocks’ (tasks that reduce your agility) from the path, increasing the flow of communication between the two departments. Sales and marketing staff can quickly identify which actions resulted in the most profitable solutions, making it much easier to prioritise sales activities.
• All these metrics combined can then be demonstrated in sales coaching. Sales directors can take decisions that determine the direction of the business, and train their teams by showing actual results (e.g. sales revenue), the next set of objectives (e.g. a new product launch) and forthcoming sales activities (e.g. cold calls).

It’s also important to work with a team used to dealing with figures and statistics. A business can’t depend entirely on automated systems. Whether it’s in sales or marketing, you need to be present and check every result obtained. Automation simplifies processes and makes them more agile, but it’s the rationality and common sense of the people involved that determine business success.