What to Consider For Your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform Integration
Customer Relationship Management platforms and marketing automation tools can help you define your sales and marketing processes in a more systematic fashion. However, when these two systems are integrated, you get to maximize their capabilities and transform communication and engagement with your customers.
This takes your business closer to Product-Led Growth(PLG). When integrating your CRM and marketing automation platform, here are certain aspects worth considering for results that can transform how you go about your operations.
- Make Use of Marketing and Sales Personalization
Both marketing automation tools and CRMs offer you the flexibility to personalize your campaigns so that they serve your business needs and appeal to your target audiences. And when you integrate the marketing automation software of your choice with your CRM, personalization can be done more effectively.
Integrating your marketing automation tool with your CRM allows your CRM to transfer all the crucial data and information to your marketing automation tool. Since this is an automatic process, you can skip the tedious manual task of data transfer while your marketing team has easy and instant access to all the information that they need to ensure their deliverables are highly targeted, precise, and direct.
This also enables them to support the sales team in converting late-stage buyers with content.
- Establish Accurate Lead Scoring
When your leads receive a prompt response from you, they are more likely to become a customer. However, B2B companies take an average of 42 hours to respond to their new leads, out of which many leads do not reply. If the number of leads who would have converted to customers but were lost due to delayed response adds up, the gap between your current revenue and growth increases.
Lead scoring is one of the most effective ways to ensure you don’t lose your leads. You can determine leads who are ready to pass to sales by determining the characteristics and user interactions that are crucial for your business.
These interactions could range from visiting the page with pricing models, downloading an eBook, opening an email, or visiting the contact form. Based on these key interactions, you can rate each interaction and assign them a value so that you can easily prioritize leads and reach out to them promptly to ensure maximum lead conversion.
- Eliminate Duplicate Instances
CRM and marketing automation integration is essentially carried out to unify all the data and enable efficient communication between the two systems. However, there is a possibility of having the same data on both systems when new data about a lead is available.
For instance, when a prospect downloads an eBook and reaches out to your sales rep to make an inquiry, the sales rep might enter their contact information into the CRM. If the marketing automation tool has already registered this data, there are duplicate data.
Duplicate data might lead to false reporting and compliance issues. Further, they can also lead to confusion in your outbound communication. Therefore, it is very crucial to ensure you review your account and identify duplicate records to eliminate them.
- Focus on Constant Integration
When you integrate your CRM with a marketing automation tool, the initial outcomes are amazing and useful. It enables your marketing and sales team to communicate effectively while saving time. And this results in an increase in productivity and better performance. However, it takes constant adjustments made to the systems to maintain the same levels of productivity and performance.
- Maintain Visibility into Post-SQL Activity
While CRMs are capable of delivering real-time information on post-SQL activities, this might cause a data influx which makes it challenging to identify more important data that requires immediate attention.
To avoid this, setting up certain triggers helps ensure that your sales reps receive information that is highly relevant when a lead is passed to sales. You can set up triggers for activities taking place at the bottom of the funnel, such as downloading a buyer’s guide, pricing models, or product comparison checklists. This helps create alerts for high-priority activities that enable the sales rep to decide what action to take based on lead or customer behavior.
When you take the right steps after integrating your CRM and marketing automation platform, you get to streamline and organize your company’s prospecting activities. And when your sales and marketing teams gain complete familiarity with these systems, they can take effective steps to retain customers and convert leads without wasting their time and resources on poor leads.
