There’s a lot of anxiety around the idea of integration. Many businesses fear the worst – losing their data, breaking user interfaces, paying out the nose for the implementation.

But many businesses don’t fully realize the benefits of integration – especially when it comes to CRM and marketing automation, two of the most powerful tools in any business’s arsenal. Combined, these two tools are a super tool! Here are the main benefits of integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform.

Better Business Intelligence

You will gain more insight into your company’s performance

You can more effectively measure results of performance to improve your processes. While CRM software can measure sales performance, it can’t measure the impact of marketing performance on sales performance – and vice versa. When you integrate your CRM and marketing automation platforms, you can analyze combined sales and marketing data to hone in on which strategies are effective, which need improvement, and which are hurting your business.

If you can’t draw lines between sales and marketing, you won’t have an accurate understanding of your business processes. Teams that don’t take an interdepartmental approach to analyzing their performance data will have a harder time growing their businesses. Integrating CRM with marketing automation will help you cast a wide net and identify the successes and failures in everyone’s actions. No more fragmented data or misleading performance reports.

You can pool together data from separate platforms

If your CRM and marketing automation platforms aren’t integrated, you’re likely toggling between two different data sets on a similar list of contacts, accounts, and opportunities. This can make data management time-consuming and frustrating and new data can easily be misplaced or mismatched.

With integration, your CRM and marketing automation platforms can share data so that information is consistent throughout all your teams and systems. This will make important information more organized, easier to track or manage, and faster to update or analyze.

You can also use unified data from marketing automation to help salespeople better tailor their interactions with leads and prospects. The data that comes from analyzing marketing lead behaviors through their web browsing habits, email click-throughs, and content downloads can be translated into marketing reports inside your CRM platform. Then, your sales team can use the information in these marketing reports to appeal to a prospect’s motivations, interests, and pain points during sales conversations.

Better Customer Experience

You will improve customer interactions

CRM and marketing automation platforms aim to accomplish the same goal: to build better relationships with prospects and customers by improving interactions between you and them. But CRM and marketing automation platforms facilitate different kinds of interactions with people and at very different stages in the sales cycle. If your platforms aren’t integrated, it’s hard to know what interactions a person has already experienced with another team member. This can lead to redundant conversations, misinformation or miscommunication, and overall feelings of frustration.

Integration optimizes customer relationships by democratizing customer data for all your team members. Then you can easily track prospects during the sales cycle to ensure that the correct people provide the best service at the best times. This will help team members personalize their interactions and make people feel valued and understood.

Prospects will be happier with their customer journey  

Integrating CRM with marketing automation will allow marketing teams to automatically send people the most relevant content or information at the optimal time in their customer journey. This can shorten the sales cycle and significantly improve the experience of the sale process for prospects.

The cliché that time is money has some truth to it. A long sales cycle that takes months or even years can lead prospects to lose interest in your business and abandon ship. Long sales cycles can lead to inefficient communication and poorly timed interpersonal interactions. Prospects may feel like you’re wasting their time or that you aren’t prioritizing them. Automated marketing outreach can minimize long periods of no interaction with prospects in the sales stages of their customer journey.

Better Team Relations

You can track cross-departmental workflows

Your marketing, sales, and service teams all need to work together to keep your business running smoothly and continue to bring in revenue. If your software platforms aren’t integrated and there’s no central hub for collaboration, it’s difficult to maintain cross-departmental workflows.

Find out why growing marketing is important and how growing marketing impacts your business.

Similarly, it’s important for all departments to have regular conversations with each other about strategies to turn prospects into customers and continue to fuel the sales cycle. Integrating your CRM and marketing automaton platforms will allow for a balance in participation and input and hold departments accountable to their duties. This will also keep everyone updated on each other’s recent activity and make to easier for team members to help each other when in need.

Your Marketing Team Will Hand Off Better Sales Leads

Not all leads are good leads. And not all good leads are good sales leads.

One of the most common sources of tension between sales and marketing teams is transferring bad – or more specifically, premature – sales leads. A bad sales lead is a prospect who is unprepared to talk to a salesperson or isn’t at a decision point in the customer journey yet. This can make those leads feel overwhelmed and want to cut ties with your business. This can also make good leads take their business elsewhere as they wait for your attention.

Leads typically make their way through a little over half of the customer journey before they talk to a salesperson. On top of this, only about a quarter of all leads volunteer information about their interest during the early stages of this journey. That means it’s your marketing team’s job to grab attention of shy leads who don’t communicate their feelings or intentions. Yikes!

Marketing automation does this for you, bringing an average 451% increase in marketing-qualified leads. Lightening the burden of responsibilities on your marketing team will allow them to focus more on nurturing leads and weeding out good sales leads. Not only does this make your leads feel more at ease and trust your business, this also makes your sales team’s job much easier. Both teams can continue to work together and achieve higher success rates.

Still not convinced? Check out the 10 ways sales can benefit from marketing automation.

Thinking of integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms? Let’s chat! We’d love to help.