Are your CRM and marketing automation solutions working in concert to deliver greater business results?
In this article, you will discover five ways to enhance sales and marketing effectiveness with CRM/Marketing Automation integration.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is critical to effective management of a sales funnel and forecast in business-to-business (B2B) companies. CRM systems track and store activities and information throughout the sales waterfall as leads advance to sales opportunities and to closed deals.
When marketers fully integrate CRM with marketing automation, they are able to significantly improve sales and marketing processes, which in turn drives better business results.
Here are five examples of how integrating CRM and marketing automation systems can increase sales and marketing effectiveness.
Enhanced Segmentation
By sharing CRM contacts, company, purchasing, and activity data with the marketing system, well-defined audience segments receive highly relevant campaign messages that increase engagement and conversion.
Enhanced Lead Scoring
Sales activities, such as correspondence, phone conversations, face-to-face meetings, and online demonstrations are sent to the marketing automation system and included in the overall lead engagement score. Conversely, marketing sends the CRM system information about each contact’s marketing engagement and lead score. View the lead scoring infographic.
Enhanced Lead Management
When each lead meets prescribed criteria, such as reaching a score threshold, visiting a particular web page, or taking specific actions in a campaign, the marketing system sends a real-time alert or task assignment to the corresponding sales representative via the CRM system (Get our whitepaper, Action Guide to Lead Management Success).
Enhanced Lead Assignment
Rules configured in the marketing system govern how new leads are transferred to sales in the CRM platform, including account-based assignments, geographical, product category, and other types of assignment criteria.
Enhanced Campaign Management
Marketing campaign information synchronizes with the CRM system to keep the sales team up to date on marketing interactions with each lead and customer. Behaviors and activities captured in the CRM system synchronizes with the marketing automation platform and trigger campaigns and/or internal tasks based on configured criteria.
These are just a few of the ways to get CRM and marketing automation systems working together for maximum impact on business results. Looking for more specifics? Read the article written by software maker PERQ that details how leveraging their CRM/marketing automation integration is getting more out of both systems.
