If you're responsible for a sales team, you've probably been frustrated to see qualified leads disappear into thin air. Your marketing team is generating leads, but your sales team can't follow up fast enough.
The secret is marketing automation combined with your CRM system. The combination and integration will change the way businesses attract, nurture, and convert prospects into customers.
Marketing automation is the technology that automatically coordinates marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels. Instead of recording every interaction from a prospect manually, it creates effective and consistent ways to manage leads.
Important features of marketing automation:
Automated email campaigns nurturing prospects over time
behavioural tracking to see if a prospect engages
Lead segmentation by demographics and behaviour
Personalized delivery of every prospect's interests
Automated posting and engagement on social media
For example, when a prospect downloads a pricing guide, marketing automation software can automatically send an email with additional resources or let your sales team know about prospect that is a highly engaged lead based on behaviour.
This personalization creates much better engagement than simply marketing.
Marketing automation software is built on four foundational components that offer a complete marketing process:
Singular marketing database to store all lead and customer information. Keeps track of communication preferences by tracking behavioural patterns and also tracks recorded interactions.
Engagement marketing metrics to build and manage the automated marketing process.
Analytics tool to measure results of campaign performance and ROI. This identifies best performing content and channels.
Marketing Technology Stack integrations with CRM systems and other relevant tools to allow unified reporting on all marketing activities across the board.
Lead management solutions offer tangible value that leads to increases in sales performance:
Companies usually report conversion rates that are 10-15% higher on average in the first year because of personalized content, timely follow-up, and messaging that addresses problems of prospects.
Lead scoring and behavioural data reveal the high potential prospects and could be used to filter out unqualified leads and demographic targeting can narrow to your ideal customer profile and qualification can be automated to ease the workload of the sales team.
Marketing automation eliminates manual effort and saves you time by providing prospect data. Not to mention automating the routine follow-up. It gives your sales teams more time to build relationships.
Lead nurture allows for touch points between conversations through automated messaging to address common objections of prospects. By delivering the right information at the right time you will build trust through providing consistent touchpoints keeping the sales process moving forward.
The shared data provides teams with a single view of prospects, uniform messaging throughout the buyer journey, offers a transparent process, and gives measurable attribution to marketing and their activities.
When you connect your marketing automation with your CRM, you effectively create a formidable tool that bridges gaps between marketing and sales initiatives. There are a range of integration advantages. Here are some highlights of the benefits:
Closed-loop reporting gives you total visibility into what marketing initiatives result in sales. Furthermore, attribution can track from first touch to closed deal and offer you ROI for different channels and help optimize your spending through data-driven analysis.
Advanced lead scoring uses historical data from the CRM on leads that have been successful combined with real-time engagement monitoring from marketing automation. Lead scoring creates better lead prioritization so that sales teams focus on opportunities with the highest potential.
Seamless hand-offs use automated lead routing that is based on predefined criteria to transfer the entire context of the prospect to a sales representative with consistent messaging throughout the prospect's customer journey as they reach out quickly which results in improved closing rates.
Step 1: Prospect visits your website and downloads a resource
Step 2: Marketing automation captures their information and behaviour
Step 3: CRM system creates a lead record with complete context
Step 4: Automated nurturing begins based on their interests
Step 5: Lead scoring increases as they engage with content
Step 6: Sales team receives qualified leads with full interaction history
Several platforms successfully combine CRM functionality with marketing automation capabilities:
All-in-one platform with seamless integration
User-friendly interface and natural data flow
Email automation
Comprehensive analytics and reporting
Enterprise-level automation and customization
Advanced sales pipeline management software features
Good integration capabilities
Scalable for complex sales processes
Streamlined approach with essential automation
Intuitive sales pipeline management
Focus on simplicity and usability
Affordable for growing businesses
Integrated sales and lead management tool designed for growth
Enterprise features with small business accessibility
Comprehensive automation and CRM capabilities
Excellent value for growing companies
When choosing a CRM with marketing automation, it is very important for your business to choose the right platform, and there are a few things to consider before selecting a platform. First, you must check the ability to integrate CRMs into your organization without encountering interruptions to workflows. Think about how easy it will be to implement a new CRM, how well your team is going to adapt to it, how well it will fit into your current tools, and what the challenges will be in moving data from your current system. Second, you should consider scalability; this examines whether the platform will be able to grow and scale with your business in the future. Assess how much room for growth the platform has, what options are presented at price points of different tiers, and whether there are certain limits on things like data storage and the maximum number of users. Finally, evaluate the support system. Support systems will be one of the most important factors in evaluating CRMs with marketing automation. These will include the level of customer support you will receive, whether there are tools available for training, and if there are any expert services available to you when needed. Sites will evolve, or your organization could change, so it is essential to carefully evaluate all these factors to find a CRM platform that meets your current needs, but that doesn't hinder you from working towards a future growth or expansion.
Marketing automation with a CRM system is a requirement for companies serious about maximizing efficiency and scaling revenue. The amalgamation of integrated marketing automation and CRM leads to competitive advantages not achievable through independent systems. In fact:
A lean and more efficient automated process with lead nurturing and scoring
Better lead quality with more sophisticated lead qualification processes
Increased sales productivity with little to no manual tasks involved
Consolidated data that leads to alignment with sales and marketing functions
You can track and report your overall ROI
The best lead management tools easily integrate automation with relationship management to create seamless experiences for customers. Regardless of whether you use an integrated solution or an assortment of tools that work well together, the best first step is to simply get started.
Identify the biggest challenges in your lead management processes, evaluate sales automation software to address those key challenges, and consider how to structure your future use of sales automation software with your company's growth in mind.
As companies are now competing more against each other, those companies using and leveraging integrated marketing automation and CRM systems should be able to better attract, nurture, and convert high-quality leads that are beyond the reach of companies still using manual lead management processes.
The tools and strategies are here today to allow your sales and lead management processes to succeed and create the predictable revenue growth your company needs to grow.
