Why integrate your CRM with your marketing automation?
You want more leads!
You want to sell more to your existing customers!
You want more sales!
But you miss the insight which marketing activities contribute the most to sales. In addition, you often miss customer insights, so you can’t communicate to your customers in a more relevant way.
Therefore, it’s very smart to link your marketing automation platform to your CRM. Because then you get a much better picture of how your target group and your customers interact with your organization, products and services.
Yes, you get insight into that famous customer journey!
From A to Z!
Ok, that’s nicely said, but let’s go over the questions that you can answer:
- Which of your marketing actions have led to deals now?
- How can you serve your customers even better? Are they all well aware of what you can offer them? Knowing this gives you good upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
- Do you see new opportunities to serve your target group and customers even better? For example in the form of new products, product features or services? Or a completely new product-market combination?
In addition, integrating your marketingautomation and your CRM optimizes a number of processes, such as:
- Renurturing hot leads that did not lead directly to a deal (and that would otherwise be placed in the proverbial refrigerator in Sales)
- Onboarding of new customers
- Giving the VIP feeling to your best customers.
Sounds good, right?
But how do you get it done?
CRM platforms
You have an advantage if you have one of the following CRM platforms:
- Salesforce
- SugarCRM
- Microsoft Dynamics
- NetSuite
These platforms usually have a standard integration with the most known marketing automation platforms like Act-On, HubSpot and Marketo.
Other CRMs like Afas Profit, Superoffice, Carerix require a custom integration. And they may be slightly different from what I am going to point out next.
Integration with CRMs
Let’s take a closer look at the integration process with the “standard” CRMs. In this example I explain how we do a CRM-integration with the marketing automation platform Act-On.
We have developed a blueprint for integrating a ‘standard’ CRM platform with Act-On that consists of 7 phases, namely:
1. Design
2. Inventory
3. Testing
4. Integration live environment
5. Segment creation
6. Lead scoring
7. Reporting
Let’s go over them one by one.
1. Design
Together with your team we set up the infrastructure framework. An important part is building a strong and relevant segmented contacts list (we call this in Act-On the Master List) based on the two following questions:
a. Who do you want to communicate with?
b. Which contacts you want more insight
2. Inventory
Marketing automation and CRM are fundamentally different: marketing automation is mainly about the individual. CRM is mainly about the organization. In this phase, we will explore which CRM database fields are interesting to sync with your marketing automation. What we are doing here is aligning the two worlds as much as possible.
After that we determine the segment conditions, we need to create the Master list.
3. Testing
We will test the integration in a staging CRM and staging marketing automation environment. Using a test script, we will test whether everything works as it should. It is often useful to have your CRM expert join the test. If we come across something during the test that needs to be fixed on the CRM side, the CRM expert can immediately investigate and hopefully fix it.
4. Live integration
After a successful test, we do the same in the production environment. We do another round of testing and if everything is in order, then it’s time to build.
5. Segment creation
What we came up with in the design phase is now going to be built. When this phase is complete, you have the segments:
a. To which you can send relevant messages tailored to those segments;
b. Where you can gain insight about those segments and thereby optimize your marketing to your target audience.
6. Lead scoring
Lead scoring is the way to provide insight into the progress of your contacts in their customer journey. With input from your CRM you can better see which activities generate the most buying intentions and assign them a higher lead score. This enables you to identify better your Hot Leads. As a joint effort, we set up the lead score. The lead score consists of a generic behavioural activities part and a specific part. For the generic part we offer you a document full of lead scoring suggestions.
7. Reporting
Act-On has a number of reports that are linked to your CRM. We help you to set up those reports.
Sales and marketing alignment
As you can see, there is a lot involved in such an integration. But you also get a lot in return. Because in addition to the insights and the chance to send the right messages to the right people as I mentioned before, it also brings Sales and Marketing closer together. This is what we call: ‘Sales and Marketing Alignment’.
What you will notice is that marketing and sales will work more closely together thanks to this integration, which of course can only be beneficial for the organization.
Because after all, success is what you achieve together, right?
‘No strings attached’ consultation
Want to know more about the integration of your CRM with Act-On? Why not schedule a ‘no strings attached’ consultation with me? It will give you the opportunity to ask your questions, so you can assess if integrating your marketing automation with your CRM is a smart move!
I am already looking forward to our conversation!
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