Integrating CRM and Marketing Platforms Creates Real Gains and Avoids Tangible Pains

Bring Your Teams Together

The reality is, your CRM should be used for more than just sales, and your marketing automation platform should be used for more than just marketing. Both of these technologies can help you better market and sell to your customers not just when they are new leads but throughout their journey, as they become new customers, repeat customers, and brand loyalists. Using these two platforms in combination can remove pain points for your teams, foster better teamwork, and drive transformative business results.

Marketing automation tools allow you to score and rank leads based on demographics and actions. High-quality leads are then passed off to your sales team when they reach a certain threshold. An effective CRM platform plays a critical role in this workflow, ensuring lead details are logged and ranked. By collecting data such as website interactions, downloads, and past purchases, information stored in your CRM can be used to segment groups of leads in your marketing automation platform to better target future marketing campaigns.

Even better, these systems don’t stop tracking data once your lead becomes a customer. This means the interactions and behaviors tracked and stored in both platforms can help your teams on-board new customers, service current customers, and delight and retain loyal customers.

Marketing automation and CRM integration creates a closed loop between your sales and marketing teams, as well as your service teams, giving all members access to the information they need to work together and succeed. This creates a more streamlined experience for both your company and your leads as you nurture them down the sales funnel and through the entire lead-to-loyalty cycle.

Integrating and Optimizing Your Platforms

Even with both your sales and marketing teams on board, it can be challenging to integrate the two platforms smoothly because both are robust systems. Here are some important tips for creating an integration plan that goes smoothly.

Identify a single source of truth (SSOT). To see the full benefits of integrating these two technologies and keep your process streamlined, your teams need to first identify one of the platforms as the “single source of truth.” The single source of truth (SSOT) is the platform where all employees know they can go to get the most accurate and up-to-date information on a lead. Having too many siloed platforms is one of the biggest challenges to maintaining accurate data.

Every team member should have access to your CRM, which makes it the ideal centralized platform to become your SSOT.

Get the right stakeholders involved. Integrating these two systems impacts more than just your marketing and sales team. Make sure you involve any team that uses one or both platforms—such as your customer service department, IT staff, and any relevant members of the leadership team. Get the right people involved from the start, so you can identify process issues, system requirements, and customization requests early on.

Create shared processes. If you integrate the two technologies to share data successfully, but your sales and marketing teams don’t follow the same workflows or process, you won’t see any real transformation. To keep everyone on the same page for using the platforms, write shared processes that cover your way of operating and what each team is looking for from one another. This might define:

• the CRM data the sales team needs to succeed in their work;
• lead handoff policies and thresholds;
• expectations around lead follow-up time; and
• how to treat a re-marketed lead over a newly acquired one.

The preferences and processes gathered from initial process conversations can then be used to refine the best practices for your marketing automation and CRM integration.

If your teams operate out of several disjointed solutions, you can’t expect to see true business growth; business success depends on tight integration. Remember that while sales and marketing operate differently, they share the same overarching goal: to attract relevant leads and convert them into delighted customers. Integrating your marketing automation and CRM platforms is an excellent opportunity for both teams to clean the slate and begin working in a more integrated and streamlined manner.

As a result, you’re sure to see an increased ROI across sales and marketing departments. With integration of technologies and teams, you can see true business transformation.

Matt Stoyka is the founder and CEO of RelationEdge, a Rackspace company. Stoyka has more than 20 years of experience helping to grow businesses in both the technology services and manufacturing industries. Prior to founding RelationEdge, Stoyka was the chief revenue officer and business architect at a business strategy and technology consulting firm focused on the Salesforce platform.