A recent survey from Denis Pombriant’s Beagle Research group shows that marketers use CRM systems more than other software tools to measure their marketing results. This makes a lot of sense to us at Full Circle Insights for several reasons (not just because we measure our own marketing efforts in salesforce.com). Here’s why you should use CRM systems to help your marketing performance:
1) Improves the ability to work with sales. When marketing meets with its counterparts in sales to explore the data measuring marketing’s impact on revenue from, say, a marketing automation system, more often than not, that information is very different from what the sales team is looking at in the CRM. Since sales teams live in their CRM system to track their opportunities and forecasts, measuring both the sales and marketing results in the CRM system gives everyone access to the same information. Instead of trying to figure out why the data doesn’t match, sales and marketing teams can focus on more efficiently driving additional revenue.
2) Marketing teams can more accurately tie their results to pipeline and revenue. Pipeline data is core information inside a CRM system. Sales and telesales personnel often create new opportunities in the CRM system that don’t get tied to any marketing program, even though the contact may have been responding to marketing programs in the early stages of the sales cycle. When this opportunity data is tied to contacts and campaign responses in the CRM system, marketing teams can more accurately tie campaign influence to opportunities and understand the true amount their programs contributed to revenue.
3) Executive teams can compare their results with other sources of revenue. Since the CRM system can track revenue sourced by channels, telesales, sales, or marketing programs, marketing can see how they compare with other investments. A common scenario is that marketing programs are strongest at bringing in higher volumes of prospects but sales velocity is often slower with marketing sourced leads as the prospects may require longer time to mature.
And now for the shameless plug . . . these are some of the reasons we built Full Circle Insights on Salesforce. Using our enhanced data model and software code we allow accurate tracking of marketing campaign influence and campaign results and also do it in the context of sales pipelines and additional sources of revenue.
For more information, check out our white paper Turbocharge Your Marketing Analytics in Salesforce.com.
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