5 Reasons Why CRM and Marketing Automation Are Better Together

When used together, your CRM and marketing automation platform can save time, boost efficiency, and align marketing and sales departments. But if you treat the two like separate entities, you really aren’t getting much value from your CRM.

Aligning marketing and sales teams is hard – and if you treat your CRM like nothing more than an address book, you are only making the job harder than it needs to be.

To fully align your marketing and sales teams, you need information that is updated in real time and a level of consistency that is best achieved through automation. In this blog post, I’ll show you why CRM and marketing automation are better together.

Why CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other

When your CRM and marketing automation platform work together, it creates a synergistic effect; a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Imagine contact properties being updated automatically in real time. Imagine nurture emails going out on time without extra human effort. Imagine having a smoother handoff from marketing to sales.

Well you can stop imagining now. Using CRM and marketing automation together makes it all real! Here are some of the main ways it can benefit your business:

It saves time
It creates a single source of truth
It promotes marketing and sales alignment
It shortens the sales cycle
It makes closed-loop reporting easier

Save time

Let’s face it: every job has those annoying, tedious parts that eat up precious time. You probably wish you could spend that time doing more impactful and more enjoyable things.

CRM and marketing automation make that dream a reality. By setting up some basic CRM automations, you and your team can save oceans of time and put more focus on strategic, creative thinking. Some examples of tasks you can automate include:

Updating contact information – build automations that update contact properties such as lifecycle stage, lead status, deal stage, and more without manual intervention.
Lead nurturing – automatically send emails such as welcome emails or blog updates that need to go out on a regular basis.
Lead scoring – sales teams work more efficiently by focusing on the highest qualified leads.

Create a single source of truth

Understanding the customer journey and where to optimize your marketing funnel is difficult when you have data spread out across multiple platforms. By using CRM and marketing automation together, you can create a single place to store all your customer data and contact history so it’s easier to track the step-by-step progression of a contact into a customer.

Align marketing and sales teams

Combining CRM and marketing automation makes it easier to get marketing and sales teams on the same page. It gives both teams access to the same data so everyone can see where leads are in the funnel, what actions have been taken, and what actions need to be taken next.

By using your CRM and marketing automation together, you can smooth out the handoff from marketing to sales and ultimately close more deals faster.

Reduce your sales cycle

Most CRM tools are able to send out a notification when a lead is ready to be contacted so the sales team can take immediate action. Marketing automation can take it one step further by automating follow up emails, updating contact properties, and performing other tasks that remove friction from the sales process.

Provide closed-loop reporting

Do you even work in marketing if you aren’t pulling reports on a weekly or monthly basis? Using CRM and marketing automation together makes it easier to track the performance of your lead nurturing campaigns and get an accurate picture of how efficiently they are turning leads into customers.

Getting Started With CRM and Marketing Automation

The combination of CRM and marketing automation is a necessity for any modern business that wants to remain competitive in today’s world. The benefits of time savings, data accuracy, and marketing and sales alignment makes this approach a no-brainer.

As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, WEBITMD has helped dozens of small and medium-sized businesses get more value from the CRM. Download your free Growth Stack guide and contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.