Why You Need To Connect Your CRM & Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation systems and CRMs are thought to go together: they have multiple connection points or APIs to feed off each other constantly and provide useful information to connect marketing and sales efforts in a very simple way. If your systems are outdated or disconnected, upgrading your sales and marketing stack can make a huge difference in your team's workflow and efficiency.

So to answer the main question, let's start by asking it the other way around:

What happens when the two aren't connected?

• By only having Marketing Automation Systems, depending on the chosen system, you'll be able to send email blasts, create forms, send automatic emails and drip campaigns, and so on. But you won't have information on your action´s ROI and you'll have to manually follow up on sales to know their results and efficiency.
  
• By only having CRM systems, you'll see sales information, activities, reminders, etc. but will lack key insights from marketing and may even end up duplicating efforts and creating friction between your teams.
  

The main benefit of connecting your Marketing Automation tool with your CRM is the intricacy of the information and creating new processes to benefit and align both your marketing and sales team. This integration will provide visibility of processes, to understand what has already been done and how to keep moving the leads forward in the sales journey.

Here's an example of the level buyer's journey intelligence we have with our all-in-one CRM and marketing automation system.

Your sales team will be able to know, for example, what content your leads have been interacting with, analyzing their interests, which campaigns they've received and reacted to, so they can better communicate with them in the future. Sales enablement can help the inbound marketing team to determine what content contacts are interested in and what they'll need to nurture conversations, so they can work on creating the proper content and format. 

Marketing should have the goal to get sales reps in the best position, to do their job as effectively as possible. Creating automatic actions based on your lead and opportunity's status, to reduce sales' time on repeatable and simple actions.

Another way you'll benefit from the connection of the two systems is by understanding and being able to recognize friction points in the sales process. Where are leads staying the most? Are they effectively going from MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)? What is the average time you need to close a deal? This unified reporting will give you the tools you need to follow standard information and avoid double efforts and inconsistencies.

This complete understanding of sales process issues and marketing strategies will not also combine efforts, but bring important information in which to create new hypotheses and effectively compare results.

In conclusion, these two integrated tools will bring you the best collaboration possible between Sales and Marketing, creating new unified goals between the two areas, new processes between them, with a better understanding of your lead's interests and profiles.

If you find it too frustrating or impossible to get a seamless connection between your CRM and marketing automation software, we offer a marketing automation strategy and implementation service. Book a growth consultation to demo our system and grow services.