I recently came across a great piece on DemandGen Reports called Marketers Seek To Improve Buyer Engagement With Tighter Marketing And CRM Integration. This piece stressed that as marketers are increasingly held accountable for revenue contributions that it is more important than ever to have visibility into pipeline and be able to bridge the information gap between CRM systems like Salesforce and the marketing automation tools they are employing.
The article mentions two main benefits to integrating marketing automation and CRM systems – an increase in customer retention and more productive sales conversations. The first piece is best summed up by a quote from this article by Karl Wirth, CEO of Evergage – “By unifying the marketing automation and CRM system, everyone in the organization has complete visibility into the data and content that they need to touch and influence customers at each stage of the buying journey.”
This is so true, having full visibility across the entire buying cycle and understanding how your customers interact with your programs and content helps you understand which assets are most effective during the different buying stages. It also shows you which campaigns influence revenue and pipeline across all your different market segments, allowing marketers to truly optimize their marketing mix.
I want to address the second point in a little more detail (I also completely agree with it by the way). Tracking and measuring marketing data inside of a CRM system like Salesforce is key to aligning sales and marketing. Not only does it enable sales to see the true value of every marketing campaign, but it also provides both departments complete visibility across every single stage in a lead lifecycle. Companies can start tracking important funnel metrics such as volume, conversion rates, and velocity across the entire demand generation funnel and fix any potential bottlenecks or other process issues. Marketing can also show sales the top campaigns that contribute to pipeline and revenue by providing campaign influence and attribution reports. But most importantly if CRM and marketing automation are integrated properly sales and marketing can work with the same data which builds much trust and efficiency between the two departments.
So check out some of the top reports sales wants from marketing that you can generate in Salesforce or learn how you can align sales and marketing with funnel metrics to make these productive conversations with sales a reality.
