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Integrating CRM and Marketing Automation software allows for end-to-end accountability and promotes many sales and marketing efficiency advantages. But oftentimes, organizations fail to prioritize integrating their systems in favor of short-term objectives. They focus on executing immediate deliverables and kick the can down the road on connecting their systems.
This narrow focus often costs companies dearly. Systems are often the root cause of friction in your organization. Team members need to fill the gaps created by unconnected software, spending hours of manual work to maintain the business instead of growing it.
Along with product strategy, KPI measurement, and effective team processes, your ability to integrate your systems into a comprehensive revenue architecture platform is a key piece in the puzzle to achieving revenue traction.
Here are the top 3 reasons why you must integrate your marketing automation and CRM systems:
To create the best customer experience for your prospects, marketing and sales teams need to be tightly aligned in their messaging strategy. With fragmented systems, you risk engaging the wrong contacts at the wrong time in their customer journey. Nothing turns off prospects than a tone deaf automated email while they are in an active sales cycle with your sales team.
With integrated systems, the sales team will have better visibility into a prospect’s customer journey. They can easily see the white papers a prospect has viewed, the areas of the site they visited, and their engagement with marketing’s nurture campaigns. This transparency enables sales teams to personalize their outreach, yielding a better customer experience and higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles.
Integrated systems also enable better cross-selling and cross-marketing. If marketing can identify your top customers, they could nurture and educate them about additional products you offer well ahead of an upcoming renewal.
Last but certainly not least, integrated marketing and sales systems mean hot leads get assigned to the sales team faster, and fewer slip through the cracks. Prospects are 8X more likely to convert if they are engaged within the first 5 minutes of a demo request. Any gaps between your systems will require manual work to manage these leads, which is a formula for slower sales engagement and missed opportunities.
“Prospects are 8X more likely to convert if they are engaged within the first 5 minutes of a demo request”
Marketing and Sales are both trying to solve the same puzzle, and each of them have half of the pieces. Tracking conversion across the entire buying journey is critical for both teams, and the only way to do this effectively is by integrating your systems.
With integrated systems, Marketing can easily identify which marketing channels are yielding the biggest closes, and which channels fail to generate leads that become opportunities.
Sales benefits from integrated systems by seeing the “true” duration of the customer journey. Depending on your product, prospects may require a significant amount of time to educate themselves on how your product solves their problem.
When systems are integrated, the sales team has much greater visibility into which marketing channels generate faster close rates and larger deal sizes. Prospects who attend your informational webinars may be more prepared to make a decision vs those who you are cold prospecting. Knowing where leads come from empowers the sales team to focus their time on the leads most likely to convert quickly.
Strong alignment and performance measurement between sales and marketing means both teams can work faster and better take advantage of opportunities that arise to increase revenue traction. If the marketing team knows there is additional inventory of a specific product, they can cross-market to current customers with a track record of being upsold.
Any inefficiencies between the marketing and sales team introduces friction in your growth engine. Friction translates to more manual work, longer sales cycles, and missed opportunities when prospects fall through the cracks. As you reduce friction, the team can use the time formerly spent on manual tasks to find new ways to increase revenue traction. Agile sales and marketing teams are better able to take advantage of timely opportunities to grow compared to teams burdened by manual processes and siloed systems.
Traction AI can help you understand the current points of friction in your revenue architecture, and partner with you to integrate your Marketing Automation and CRM systems. Feel free to contact us to discuss how we can help you get revenue traction faster and more efficiently.
