Peanut butter and jelly. Cheese and crackers. Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Automation. What? Okay, maybe it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but, like these favorite combinations, CRM and Marketing Automation are complementary. Playing off each other’s strengths and covering up weak spots, these tools have the power to make any marketer or salesperson’s life exponentially easier.
Customer relationship management software, when it came around, was an innovation sorely needed in an industry still dominated by rolodexes and business card collections. CRM revolutionized the sales industry by putting leads at salespeoples’ fingertips, with important information already annotated.
With CRM, conversations became easier, less repetitive, and more productive. Salespeople became more efficient, able to get more sales in the same amount of time. For small- and medium-sized businesses (SME’s), CRM was a godsend: finally, they could hope to compete with sales teams twice their size, establishing a larger market presence and enhancing their resource base.
What CRM did for sales, marketing automation software promises to do for marketing and the entire integrated sales process. Each has different strengths and weaknesses, but these are complementary, combining and multiplying at important points and building off each other. Together, the entire funnel of sales and marketing, from the beginning to the end, is nurtured and maintained. Indeed, the integration of CRM and marketing automation promises to combine the processes of marketing and sales into one seamless process from lead acquisition to eventual conversion.
One of the biggest strengths that marketing automation software suites promise is the ability to score and rank leads by quality. This helps salespeople know which leads are worth pursuing and which are, unfortunately, unlikely to be productive. Many leads are promising but need to be nurtured and grown with additional marketing before they are primed for sale. Many leads are followed up on too early, an approach that risks scaring them away and losing the sale entirely. Marketing automation software allows marketers to warm up the leads subtly without getting sales involved until the right moment.
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And the beauty is that once sales is involved, they’re more prepared than they’ve ever been before. Marketing automation software gives sales access to individualized personal data that it collects over the course of the lead-nurturing stage. This information can be very effectively used by the savvy salesperson to guide their sales call.
For SME’s, leads management can be the difference between an overworked sales team and one operating at the peak of efficiency. By better distinguishing between low and high quality leads, a sales team with limited personnel will be able to focus only on those prospects most likely to result in sales, boosting efficiency tremendously.
Indeed, in the context of marketing automation, CRM now seems like just a perfectly-fitted puzzle piece in the picture that is successful conduction of business. Marketing automation has provided a framework for integration of the entire sales process, a framework that accommodates CRM perfectly.
