In order for your business to operate smoothly, you need the various departments within your company to work together to generate revenue and attract new customers. For example, your marketing team and sales team need to work together during the sales process to successfully promote and sell new software. Likewise, providing those teams with the right combination of tools can make the difference between success and failure.
By combining marketing automation and CRM software, your company can leverage data from platforms that allow your marketing and sales departments to collaborate better. These two programs are indeed different platforms, but they serve the same underlying purpose. According to CRM Switch, both are designed to increase sales by improving the ability of your company to communicate with customers, both current and potential. What are the benefits of combining these two platforms?
Exploring Marketing Automation
Marketing automation software is focused on creating leads for your business and personalizing the communication between both parties based upon the data collected during tracking. The benefit of marketing automation is experienced during the sales process. The software improves the efficiency of both your marketing and sales team during the sales process by automating tasks which were once done manually, such as making SEO easier using PosiRank or other software programs.
For example, New Breed Marketing says that marketing automation can be used to send emails containing e-books to visitors that signed up on your site for an inbound marketing webinar.
Exploring CRM
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is used by your sales team to help convert leads discovered by the marketing department into paying customers. CRM tools allow your sales team to manage the interaction between the business and its customers, both current and future. The goal of CRM software is to collect meaningful data on your existing customers, manage new customers, and cultivate sales opportunities generated by the marketing team.
Benefits of Combining the Platforms
When used separately, marketing automation and CRM software provide your company with many benefits. Viewed separately, CRM is a database of customer data that can be utilized by marketing automation tools to execute marketing plans and convert customers into leads. So what are the benefits that come from combining the two platforms?
1. Generate More Significant Leads
CRM solutions help you develop a strong database with information about current and prospective customers. Similarly, marketing automation platforms allow you to collect the information you need about prospective customers by tracking actions on social media, emails, and webpages. Combining both systems provides you with access to marketing intelligence that is centralized in platform. You will be able to better track information about competitors, potential clients, and other market denominators that impacts your business operations. You’ll have an edge of the competition and maximize your sales potential.
2. Streamline Promotional Processes
Using these two software platforms together as one system, you can speed up the marketing process. There are a number of repetitive tasks that take place on a given day, ranging from sending similar emails to different customers, answering queries from different customers , and employ better content marketing as a result. Not only will you be able to do these things quickly, you’ll be able to adjust your promotional processes as time goes on.
3. Get to Know Your Leads
Email programs and newsletters need to be tailored to match the stage that your prospects are in in the sales process. Have they interacted with your brand once, or multiple times? If you have just made contact, your combined programs will tell you that and make it easy to send accurate information that pushes them toward the next stage in the process. With a clear idea of the stage your customers are in, you’ll be able to increase conversion rates without running the risk of missed opportunities.
4. Let the Program do the Legwork
Perhaps the greatest benefit of a combined marketing automation-CRM approach is greater awareness. Before your sales leads ever contact the sales team, members of the sales team will know what type of content the customer has been engaging with and identify which leads represent potential buyers. Automated lead nurturing can determine which type of content customers should be reading at each stage of your sales funnel, and provide the sales team with a road map for converting leads to sales.
If you don’t have a marketing automation or CRM software program in place already in your business, there’s no better time than the present to integrate the programs and improve collaboration within your company.