Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 22, The transcript stresses the significance of uniting CRM and marketing automation for expeditious data exchange amid sales and marketing teams. It stresses the importance of establishing a source of truth, personalized customer journeys, consolidated customer data, closed-loop reporting, and the advantages of early implementation to preempt potential difficulties. Integration allows for targeted campaigns, refined lead management, enhanced insight into the sales pipeline, personalized interactions based on customer preferences across platforms, and comprehensive analysis connecting marketing endeavors to revenue. **Ryan** advocates for the implementation of proper system integration preemptively to streamline processes effectively. The amalgamation fosters targeted campaigns, improved lead management, heightened visibility into the sales pipeline, tailored interactions based on customer preferences system-wide, and informed analysis that correlates marketing initiatives with revenue generation. Early integration not only polishes operations but also fortifies the symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing departments, equipping them with the tools to operate seamlessly and enhance performance synergistically. In conclusion, prioritizing the integration of CRM and marketing automation sets the foundation for a harmonized workflow between sales and marketing units. By embracing this symbiotic approach early on, companies can optimize processes, drive targeted campaigns, nurture leads efficiently, and gain valuable insights that bridge marketing activities with revenue outcomes. **Ryan**’s emphasis on the significance of seamless system integration underscores the pivotal role it plays in unlocking operational efficiencies and maximizing the impact of marketing strategies on revenue growth.
Summary notes from Episode 22:
???? **CRM and Marketing Automation Integration** **Lead management:**
Identifying a source of truth, utilizing platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot,
and others for integration. **Personalized customer journeys:** Customizing
sales customer journeys, automating touchpoints for sales and marketing
alignment. **Consolidating customer data:** Centralizing customer data for
insights, demographics, purchase history, and behavioral patterns. **Closed
loop reporting:** Linking marketing efforts to revenue for insights on
campaign effectiveness. **Automation:** Syncing CRM and marketing automation
for streamlined processes and enhanced customer interactions.
Full Transcript:
00:00
Welcome to the demand gen pod. My name is Ryan. Today we are talking about CRM and marketing automation integration. And you know, I think that this is pretty obvious why it matters. I mean, it allows you to send sales data to marketing and marketing data to sales just at its absolute core. But there are lots of other benefits too. So lead management, personalized customer journeys, consolidated customer data, and closed loop reporting. So let’s break each of those down, okay? Lead management. Simply knowing that there is a source of truth when you have multiple teams potentially working one person is really important. It’s very handy because it means that, you know that I’m just going to use Salesforce for the sake of the conversation.
00:48
There are lots of tools that you can use, but Salesforce is certainly the one that I’m probably the most familiar with. But you also have like HubSpot, CRM, Activecampaign, Microsoft Dynamics. There are loads of different CRM tools that you could use and that worst case scenario with some integration work can connect to your marketing automation platform. But with that said, let’s just stick with Salesforce. So one of the things that we like to do when we’re talking about connecting two platforms together is identifying a source of truth. And really all that means is that if there is a disagreement about one record and there is different data in each platform, what happens? Generally speaking, Salesforce becomes the source of truth.
01:36
But then obviously you have things like marketing data as well that’s coming from the marketing automation tool and that needs to be sent over to Salesforce. But once it’s there, all part of the source of truth, you can kind of build the integration out in a couple of different ways. If you look at an integration, particularly like Pardot and Salesforce, for example, Salesforce owns Pardot, but Pardot is not Salesforce. It’s kind of funny, they actually require a custom integration that is easy enough to do, but it’s not like it just molds into it because they were really two different platforms and pardot is something that Salesforce purchased and is kind of working it toward where they wanted to go. I mean, it’s a great platform though. But with that said, you have lead management to get you from one platform to the next.
02:26
And who owns what and when. I say when because you can also set it up where you have a focus on the most recently updated field. So you can have it compare each field value and when it was most recently updated and then make sure that they match based on the most recent update. So that’s generally a pretty good idea too. So source of truth isn’t necessarily always 100% salesforce. Sometimes you can make it both depending on when those updates occurred. What about personalized customer journeys? So we talk about this a lot, but we talk about it from a marketing perspective. You can customize sales customer journeys as well, or the sales journey for a lead too, and you can do that over in your marketing automation platform.
03:08
So one of the ways that I really enjoy building out campaigns is to have touch points from both sales and marketing. And marketing can control both of those touch points as far as the send is concerned. And you can do a lot of that through things like lead status. So if you have a lead status and it’s like a new lead, you could have a series of sales emails that triggered based on new leads. Okay? And if it’s converted or if it’s working or whatever your lead statuses are, you could be triggering emails from sales based on that. If a phone call is completed and that’s a task that gets completed, you could trigger an email based on that task firing.
03:48
So there are all these different things that you could do that are aligned to sales and the sales journey, not the marketing journey for the lead. Consolidating customer journey, customer data. Sorry. I think that’s pretty straightforward and closed loop reporting. So closed for loop reporting means that you kind of have a touch point on everything that’s happening within a campaign. And obviously we design campaigns to drive revenue, right? So we wanted to make sure that we can track the revenue driven from that campaign. Closed loop reporting really allows you to say, here is a campaign, here are the assets within the campaign, and here are the contacts who have engaged with those assets. And then here is the revenue that’s been driven from those contacts.
04:28
And once you’re able to do that, you can really easily say this revenue was driven from this campaign, these assets drove this particular group set of revenue, and these assets drove this. And that is really handy. Before I forget, if you do enjoy this podcast, I would really appreciate you to subscribe to it. You can do so on YouTube, TikTok, and we’re on anywhere that you listen to your podcast, we’re there too, so please take a moment to subscribe. Thank you, I appreciate that. So what about automation? Big automation fan. So CRM stands for customer relationship management and it’s a system that helps businesses manage customer interactions and relationships and marketing automation. Obviously this focuses on the automating and streamlining marketing processes like lead generation, email marketing, campaign management.
05:18
So we can have them work together by syncing that data source of truth and providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions and marketing efforts. So again, from sales and marketing, group them together and then leverage that for automation. Super powerful stuff, because when it comes down to timing, you can be timing marketing sends based on live sales interactions. That is good stuff. This integration improves marketing and sales processes by enabling targeted and personalized campaigns, tracking customer interactions and enhancing lead management. And these are all the things that we want to be doing early on. All right? Early on, if you get funding for this stuff, this is what you want to be doing. Because as you grow, you do not want to be dealing with working and cleaning up thousands of records.
06:06
You want to be working and cleaning up tens and hundreds of records. And that’s where you want to be getting started on this because it’s definitely a bigger task. Definitely a bigger task. Just one other note that I think that I want to say about this is if you do not have these systems integrated or you don’t have marketing automation or you don’t have sales and you’re working out of Excel, I mean, I’ve talked to companies that literally run companies for ten years working out Excel. It’s actually kind of impressive to be honest. Do it right. Okay. And really what I mean by that is buy into the marketing automation platform. That will give you kind of matches two criteria. One is affordable for you right now. Also that you’re paying attention to what happens when you grow five x?
06:55
What happens when you have to have 50,000 contacts when you only have 1000 now, I guess that’s 50 x, but that doesn’t matter. Okay. Or even still what happens when you grow to 5000 contacts and you have 1000 now how is that pricing going to change? How does it change at 1020, 30, 40, 50 now 50,000 contacts? That may be five years down the line for you depending on what you’re doing and how you’re gaining contacts. But just something to keep in mind because when you buy into a platform, it’s not impossible to move. It definitely is. We do migrations all the time, but it’s hard and it’s a lot of work and it’s really expensive. So there are so many things that you have to think about when you are migrating from one platform to another.
07:38
And then the integration with something like a CRM tool. If you’re migrating your marketing automation tool, or if you’re migrating your CRM tool to something different, then you have to think about it going the other way back, right? So all of that data has to sync. And we have to make sure that all the data syncs safely and accurately. That is some tricky stuff, certainly at times more than others. But I say this because when you’re looking at HubSpot, when you’re looking at Salesforce, when you’re looking at Activecampaign, when you’re looking at pardot, when you’re looking at Eliqua, marketo, whatever tools you are looking at, if budget is important for some companies, it is. For some, believe it or not, it’s not. Take a look at the growth trajectory of that cost. Right. So how is your cost going to go up?
08:31
And is that what you want to continue to use when you are building 100 campaigns a year versus doing four right now, one every quarter? Okay. Regardless, though, when you do integrate your CRM and marketing automation systems, it consolidates that customer data kind of into that centralized database. Again, source of truth. And we can really get some solid customer insights from that integration. Demographics, purchase history, engagement levels, behavioral patterns, things that marketing wants, sales can now give us, things that sales once marketing can now give them. And these insights can go on to help you to build those really personalized campaigns for either leads or for customers. It allows you to better segment your customers and also improve customer targeting.
09:21
And one other thing that I’ll mention about this, because we just ran into it with a client, is that the other thing that it can help you do is to take some of the onus off of a data team. So some of our clients have like data science teams and their jobs, they do lots of things, but one of their responsibilities might be pulling lists. And with this particular client, pulling lists was really difficult. It took a long time. There was a big process to go through. Working on an integration that gets approved by everybody can mean that data can come over. It either can actively come over and be there in real time into your marketing automation tool, or as long as there’s that API connection, you can write queries to bring data over.
10:04
So for example, we have a client who uses Eliqua and they’ll go and they’ll say, we need all of this data. Here’s all the data that we need. We need customers for this product who have purchased within this time frame, whose warranty is going out of date in this time frame, who have not purchased within this many days, or who have these certain serial numbers or whatever, okay? And we can take that data and we can write a SQL query to actually bring that data over and put it into a dedicated object and then use that for sends so you can be really targeted in that regard as well. Now, integrating your CRM and marketing automation tools enhance lead management as well by automating lead capturing, scoring and nurturing processes. And that again allows you to be really personalized with your sends.
10:52
You can expect improved lead conversion rates and enhanced visibility into the sales pipeline through the integration as well. And that is a bit of an asteroid too, because it does depend on which tools you’re using to have kind of that visibility in the sales pipeline. But certainly you can leverage, I would say like API visibility, right? So you have digital visibility, the platform can see it and leverage it for campaigns that you can then build. But that data synchronization really ensures that your interactions and preferences are actively reflected as well across CRM and marketing automation systems. So for example, another really good way to leverage this is that if you have an unsubscribe in an email, you have your unsubscribe and somebody could click that and unsubscribe.
11:45
They could also call sales or they could call the company, which usually will maybe land you in sales, depending on the company. And they could say, I don’t want to hear from you anymore. Well, they might go into Salesforce and mark you as unsubscribed. We need to make sure that data comes back over into email. So that is also an important part of the integration that integrating these tools can take care of. And then just kind of one more touch on closed reporting. When you are able to connect all those marketing efforts to revenue and sales data, it can really be insightful because we can look back on it and see what worked, what didn’t. Why do we think that this worked? Why do we think that it didn’t work? So all of these things really come into play.
12:31
With that said, thank you for joining me this week and next week we are going to be talking about building trust and credibility with demand Gen. Until then, my name is Ryan. Take care.