Connect Your CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms for End-to-end Campaign Performance Measurement

Long gone are the days of having to spend hours aggregating data from various sources to get the full picture of the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams. Marketing and sales are two arms of the same revenue machine. They should work together, talk to each other, influence the total outcome together, and have a follow-through measurement model that shows the whole picture. If you have a marketing automation platform and it’s not linked to your CRM… you’re missing out on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 

A diligently maintained CRM is a wealth of knowledge for a marketing team. Likewise, a marketing automation system can offer the perfect talking points to a sales representative. The reporting capabilities alone, for a holistic view of what works and what doesn’t, is enough for a serious business case. But most importantly it’s the connection of both platforms that ensures the customer is being put first and that their journey matters. 

The benefits are many, but let’s go over a few that are standouts.

Lead Scoring

Scoring leads based on digital activities is a huge benefit to using a marketing automation platform. You can set criteria to classify leads as they reach a Marketing Qualified Lead threshold or to filter for the most appropriate activity to match the messaging they receive next. But what about offline activity? That’s where connecting the CRM comes in to connect those. When utilizing the features available in a CRM, the lead or contact’s score can be adjusted even further. Completed a call and logged that task? Add 20 points. Successful meeting and logged a task for it? Ticket submitted via the support system? Created an opportunity? Adjust the score accordingly here as well. 

Ensure seamless communication

What happens when a lead enters your marketing automation platform but they already exist in the CRM? You can run the risk of sending conflicting messages. Connecting the two systems allows for both sales and marketing to see who is talking to whom. If a contact is already owned by a sales representative, their marketing communications should be suppressed. Otherwise, you’re running the risk of offering them a discount, rebate, or special that contradicts what the sales team is negotiating. Further, the customer’s journey should be streamlined as much as possible. Receiving marketing messaging and custom sales messaging can lead to being offered the same assets or multiple messages per day, neither scenario is appropriate. 

Personalization

Digital tracking can only provide certain information that can be used for personalization, but based on conversations with sales, support ticket details, chat data or opportunity parameters, messaging can be personalized to offer your contacts information about exactly what they want to know. No more having to generalize your emails with only a “first name” to personalize with. Now you can send birthday communications, product update information, or even calendar invites to schedule calls. Personalization is the standard in marketing communication and no one has a better chance to gather more personalization information than sales, into their CRM. Connecting that data into your marketing automation platform opens new doors for bottom of the funnel content.  

Reporting Capabilities

How successful are the leads that interact with your social media posts? How many deals were lost after the press release about your ransomware attack was published? What about the revenue generated from leads you met at a tradeshow? How do you decide if you should allocate budget to going back to that tradeshow again next year? All of this can be measured when you combine all of your digital and sales data between the two systems. Utilizing a sourced and influence attribution model along with closed deal data gives insight into the full picture of which lead sources actually resulted in revenue, or even if they just influenced a sale… or the loss of one. Just getting a lead to an MQL or SQL threshold isn’t enough. You need to understand which marketing programs are actually providing your sales team people who are considering a purchase and not just people who are active online. 

There are so many reasons to connect these two data powerhouses. Enquire Solutions lists a few others here including strategy tips. Technically, making sure all implications are considered and that all users are trained on how to utilize the connected data and processes, as a result, will be essential to a functional sales and marketing ecosystem. But your customer journey improvement will be immediately apparent. The bottom line is, connecting your marketing automation and CRM platforms improves your bottom line.