Closing leads into customers is one of the primary objectives for any business. To achieve this objective, the perfect sync between the sales and marketing teams is required. Just imagine, if your value proposition and product messaging are presented differently by your sales and marketing executives, it will only confuse your buyers. Your sales and marketing team should communicate the same story to buyers to maintain consistency and trust. To manage this communication seamlessly, your business needs to integrate marketing automation software with CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Your sales executives primarily use sales automation tools of CRM to streamline and automate their sales activities and building relationships with customers to increase retention and drive loyalty. Meanwhile, your marketing executives use marketing automation software to produce and promote the content of your products and services. Since you want to align the product messaging and value proposition presented by marketing and sales teams, you should integrate marketing automation with CRM software.
How Does the Integration of Marketing Automation Software with CRM Work?
To explain this integration process, let’s consider how your marketing team attracts and converts visitors. Any person or a user might reach your website through a blog, click a CTA (Call to Action) button on that blog, reaches a landing page, fill out a form and download a gated content offer. Once the contact information of a lead is received and verified by the marketing team, it is classified as MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and then passed to the sales team where sales executives guide these leads through the sales process.
So, with the help of this integration, the information of a lead entered on the landing page form gets automatically transferred into a contact record in the CRM software that helps the sales team to build relationships with leads effectively and instantly. In this way, the purpose of integrating marketing automation software with CRM is to track each lead. It helps your sales and marketing team to be on the same page and this transparency helps them to know what sort of interactions made with lead so far and accordingly they can nurture and convert leads.
If CRM fails to integrate with marketing automation then it causes a huge disconnect in your business, the message your sales and marketing team delivering will be different. Your sales and marketing team may end up saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and deter promising leads. By integrating marketing automation with CRM; you can at least lay the groundwork for linking your teams. Many businesses try to do this process manually by entering information in spreadsheets to establish seamless communication between the teams, but that’s difficult and time-consuming. The manual approach is almost impossible to scale, and it doesn’t let your teams to effectively record interactions made with leads. It has been also found that many businesses are using sales automation tools to streamline their sales process and marketing automation software for marketing activities but when it comes to integrating these two together, businesses face a hard time.
To solve this issue, nowadays, CRMs are more advanced and acts as a one-stop solution that is capable of not only streamlining the sales process but also gets integrated with marketing automation software to build impeccable relationships with leads and existing customers that enhances customer retention and loyalty. However, this integration needs to go further. Your sales and marketing teams must share information. They should help each other understand what to look at and what to care about. Your marketing executives can recommend how sales executives follow up with promising leads based on previous interactions. And your sales executives can help marketing executives in determining what content leads want. Hence, if your sales and marketing teams work together towards the same thing and pursue common goals, the integration can strengthen the relationship of your business with customers.
