Five ways integrating CRM with marketing automation will help you boost sales

By Limesh Parekh, CEO of Enjay IT Solutions

In present times, with the customer-buying-cycle swapping back-and-forth between both activities, another action has gained as much importance as sales and marketing itself. I’m talking about setting systems up for each activity. Increasing customers and revenue no longer falls under the ambit of just the sales department. The success of customer acquisition doesn’t just depend on marketing automation, but also integrating it with related systems like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

Here are five ways in which this singular step will help boost sales:

Swift action on leads
Leads get collected from various platforms today – social media, digital campaigns, trade shows, and so on. But in today’s hyper-competitive world, no lead is longer exclusive to a single business. Research has shown a negative correlation between a salesperson’s ability to qualify a lead and the time it takes to receive the handoff. Thus, follow up speed matters as much as the speed to capture a lead. Our clients who integrated their CRM and marketing automation software dropped their follow up time with leads by over 60 per cent. The result was an increase in conversion by up to 55 per cent, even with all other factors remaining the same.

Customising sales pitch
Tracking the source of a lead is as important as tracking the lead itself. It doesn’t just highlight the effective sources to capture qualified leads. It also empowers your salespeople to customize their pitches accordingly. Another advantage of a CRM is de-duplication of leads. It’s not uncommon for leads coming from multiple sources today to get duplicated. This duplicate data causes confusion in communication among teams and with the prospect. The result is mixed signals sent to the prospect, which doesn’t convey a professional image of the company. De-duplication enables businesses to have more control over sales and marketing interactions with their prospects.

Building deeper relationships
Times have changed in the last decade. Ten years ago, you could be aggressive with your marketing and get rewarded with customers. Today, customers have more access to options and information. Large spends on advertising are no longer enough to increase market share. Think about the brands you’re loyal to. Are you loyal to them because of their advertising? Or because you trust them? Business today is growing at the speed of trust. It’s easy to inundate customers with automated messages today, but maintaining relationships is tough; and, ironically, it’s what keeps customers with you. Customers who stay with you give you more orders and references. These activities don’t just increase your revenue, but also bring down your marketing costs, thus making your business more profitable.

Increased productivity at work
The single most common point our clients highlight over and over again is the increased productivity of their teams. Integrating CRM and marketing automation tools reduced non-core actions for the sales team. It also brings down the time it takes for the staff to provide customers with real-time information. And as I mentioned earlier, it brings down the time between a lead getting entered in the system and the first contact. But this is not all. An integrated set of tools also empowers business leaders to track the status of follow-ups and engagement with prospects, the turnaround times for issue resolutions, and so on. Thus they can make their teams take productive action and hold them accountable for the same through clear tracking methods.

Accurate analysis of data
All the data account for null unless it’s analysed and used to improve systems and processes. And this is exactly what a CRM does. A CRM is not just a data-storage tool. It also analyses that data to present reports and intelligent insights. It lets business leaders identify what works and what doesn’t. For instance, a CRM tool can provide insights into profitable customer segments, the effectiveness of marketing platforms and campaigns, the most common issues that customers complain about, and so on. It can also provide insights into trigger points that lead to maximum sales. Our clients have used such data to focus on 20 per cent activities that yield 80 per cent results. Thus, they’ve leveraged data and insights to streamline processes.